The byelection win has strengthened the hand of Keir Starmer: now he’ll be under pressure to marginalise dissenting voices
After an ill-tempered, hard-fought byelection campaign and what seems to have been a frantic last-minute get-out-the-vote operation, Labour clung on to Batley and Spen by the narrowest of margins – a mere 323 votes, down from 3,525 in 2019. At the very least, Labour’s victory was a (perhaps inadvertent) triumph of expectations management: with the Tories having been widely expected to take it, a tight win in a seat the party had held for the preceding 24 years is now presented as a personal vindication of Keir Starmer.
In truth, however, Starmer was largely absent from the campaign – an indication, in all likelihood, that the party leadership genuinely wasn’t expecting to win – while local election literature kept references to the Labour party itself to a minimum, instead playing up Kim Leadbeater’s local credentials. Nevertheless, the Tories’ failure to dislodge Labour from the seat will be bitterly disappointing for them; their unsubtle hints that pork-barrel goodies would flow if Batley and Spen returned a Tory MP seem to have made little headway with voters.
For Starmer, meanwhile, his position as Labour leader now appears to be secure for the time being. It was strongly rumoured in the days leading up to the byelection that in the event of a Labour defeat, deputy leader Angela Rayner – seemingly antagonised by Starmer’s botched reshuffle in May – would launch a leadership challenge with the backing of a section of the Socialist Campaign Group. Instead, with Leadbeater hanging on to Batley and Spen, Starmer too appears likely to hang on through this year’s party conference and beyond.
Those hoping that this byelection result will pour oil on troubled waters and bring an end to Labour’s factional infighting are likely to be sorely disappointed, however. On the contrary, the party’s right wing will most likely take the win in Batley and Spen as a green light to step up its factional war on the left. Sources close to Starmer have already started issuing thinly veiled threats of vengeance against Rayner, as well.
Just last week, some of Starmer’s allies were suggesting he should make do with being another Neil Kinnock; in other words, give up on any hopes he might have had of becoming prime minister and instead settle scores with the Labour left on their behalf. In particular, this means ensuring that the left is never again in a position to win the party leadership, specifically by changing the rules for future leadership elections.
There will therefore be pressure on Starmer to capitalise on the win in Batley and Spen by further marginalising the Labour left, deterring future leadership challenges from this quarter and possibly clearing the way for a shift in policy direction. Starmer won the Labour leadership promising to bring about unity and a decisive end to its years of exhausting internecine strife, precisely what party members wanted to hear. But just over a year on, it remains as divided as ever.
To this end, there is speculation that Starmer and his backers are planning to return to the old electoral college system. This would give the parliamentary Labour party – where the left accounts for only a fairly small minority – a disproportionate share of the vote, presumably making it all but impossible for the Labour left to win again. This is despite the fact that it was actually the Blairite right that successfully badgered Ed Miliband into introducing “one member, one vote” in the first place, in what transpired to be a calamitous miscalculation.
This is why some members of the Socialist Campaign Group were ready to back Rayner. Lacking sufficient nominees to launch their own challenge to Starmer, the pro-Rayner Campaign Group MPs had swung behind her in the hope that she’d be prepared to work in good faith with the left, and that she’d kill off any attempt to revive the electoral college. With the race to replace Len McCluskey as Unite general secretary on a knife-edge – rightwinger Gerard Coyne has a real chance of winning – there has been a palpable sense of urgency.
While the tendency in recent years to reduce union elections solely to their implications for the Labour party is lamentable, a great deal does indeed hinge on this summer’s Unite election. The left-of-centre vote in the union is split between Steve Turner, endorsed by the United Left faction, and executive officer Sharon Graham. This could be enough to let Coyne, who came within 6,000 votes of beating McCluskey last time, snatch the win. If that happens, the potential consequences for the Labour left are likely to be seismic, setting the stage for a confrontation that could tear the whole party asunder.
Starmer and his backers on the Labour right will be praying that a Coyne win materialises, as it would almost certainly allow them to make sweeping changes to the party constitution. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership delivered only modest improvements to Labour’s often byzantine internal party democracy, but with the right – which, after all, was briefly given the fright of its life by Corbyn’s grassroots insurgency – in a wrathful mood, determined never to let anything of the sort happen again, even these incremental gains are under threat.
Within the Labour party, Starmer may well be getting the rub of the green. But control of the machinery is not a substitute for an inspiring vision, and this is still entirely lacking, as it has been throughout the pandemic. Voters remain in the dark about how a Starmer-led government would avert climate disaster, address the housing crisis, or tackle social inequality. Even Starmer’s own advisers complain that it’s unclear what his leadership stands for. Labour’s right wing may dream of a cliched clause IV moment, but without transformative policy, lasting renewal will evade the party.
- Tom Blackburn is a founding editor of New Socialist
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