Strikes mean a summer of discontent for Labour leader Starmer faces rebellion from union donors and his own MPs over the party’s cautious stance, writes Patrick Maguire
Strikes mean a summer of discontent for Labour leader Starmer faces rebellion from union donors and his own MPs over the party’s cautious stance, writes Patrick Maguire
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This, rueful left-wingers say, was the moment that Sir Keir Starmer won the Labour leadership. In early January 2020 the then shadow Brexit secretary launched his campaign to succeed Jeremy Corbyn with a video containing nostalgic imagery and language of class struggle which are decidedly at odds with the statesmanlike tone he now strains to perfect.
“In the struggles of the 1980s,” it began, the voice of a retired miner booming over archive footage of strikers, “the Labour movement stood in solidarity against Thatcher.” So too, anxious Corbynites were told, had Starmer: with print workers, seafarers, and Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers. “Keir stood in solidarity with workers and trade unions.”
Only one inference was to be drawn. Starmer, a champion of unions in the courts when their cause was neither fashionable nor lucrative, would lead a party prepared to celebrate its link to organised labour. Yet now at least one partner in this increasingly unhappy marriage is contemplating divorce.
As Britain faces a summer of discontent reminiscent of the dog days of the 1970s, with inflation soaring and strike action crippling public services, it is the opposition, not the government, that finds itself under pressure to clarify its position on industrial unrest.
Trade union sources predict that Unite, the second-biggest of Labour’s affiliates, could sever its links with the party as early as next summer. It would be a moment of seismic significance. Amid disagreements over the party’s commitment to renationalising the railways, Aslef, the rail drivers’ union, is widely expected to follow suit.
Unite insiders play such speculation down — but admit that at the grassroots, disaffiliation is an increasingly popular proposition. However, nobody denies that unions are reconsidering their relationship with Starmer, who as recently as 2020 was joining striking university lecturers on picket lines. “Will the leader’s office be watching Unite disaffiliate next summer?” one official at the union said. “Probably not. But will they be watching a Unite conference of the likes they’ve never seen before? Quite possibly.”
One question casts a long shadow over an autumn that will define Starmer’s leadership and with it his chances of becoming prime minister: will Labour stand shoulder to shoulder with its union affiliates, still far and away its biggest donors, as they demand pay rises in line with inflation – or even above them?
Lisa Nandy at the Communication Workers Union picket line on Monday
The official answer, handed down to frontbenchers in an edict from Starmer’s office in June, is no. That has not stopped them defying him. Last week Starmer sacked one shadow minister, Sam Tarry – who is in a relationship with Angela Rayner, Starmer’s deputy — after he not only joined rail workers on a picket line but rewrote Labour policy on public sector pay in a series of media interviews as he did so.
It was the kind of swift retribution that Starmer’s supporters cite as evidence of his inner steel. But as so often, the aftermath has left his shadow cabinet with uncomfortable questions about the calibre of his political operation. Earlier this summer shadow cabinet ministers told The Times that Starmer was “boring voters to death”, but Durham Police’s decision to take no further action over his lockdown curry stayed the hand of potential leadership challengers and few if any bear a personal animus against the leader. It is instead his advisers, and specifically Deborah Mattinson, his head of strategy, and Helene Reardon-Bond, his deputy chief of staff, who are subject to persistent grumbling.
Mere days after Tarry had been sacked — and a red line apparently drawn — Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling-up secretary, was photographed with striking BT workers picketing in her Wigan constituency.
Navendu Mishra, a whip, and Imran Hussain, another shadow minister, were also seen on pickets. Meanwhile Rayner and Lucy Powell, shadow culture secretary, raised eyebrows with a letter urging the chief executive of BT to negotiate with striking staff from the Communications Workers Union.
Starmer’s key lieutenants are accused of presiding over a political vacuum. “Nobody knows what our line to take is,” a shadow cabinet source said. “Comms can’t make up for a lack of political direction or strategy.”
Nandy had, sources close to her insisted, informed Starmer’s office of the visit in advance. Yet shadow cabinet colleagues already concerned about the party’s inability to forge a clear message on Britain’s summer of discontent were alarmed that she had received any answer but a firm no. It was taken as further evidence that some of the leader’s most influential aides — notably Mattinson and White — are inhibited by an excess of caution.
Labour is failing to capitalise in the polls on the turmoil in the Conservative Party. The latest YouGov polling on voting intentions, carried out at the end of July, gave Labour a wafer-thin 1 per cent lead over the Tories.
For some, the issue is even more fundamental. The diktat banning shadow cabinet ministers from the first round of rail strikes in June is, exasperated shadow cabinet ministers now believe, a rod for the leadership’s own back. “He was never going to be able to sack anyone, and he can’t sack Lisa,” one source said. “He can’t. And she knows it. Largely because we don’t have enough people to fill the positions of other people that they’ve threatened to sack. The issue now is that we’re getting no strategic advice about what our position should be.”
Would be peak British politics if months of strikes and general unrest somehow caused the opposition Labour Party more trouble than the actual party of government.
While Starmer lieutenants like Rachel Reeves are moronically pleased at having turned off tens of thousands of former members from the party, one has to wonder how many of those lost are hard left, Trotskyists, tankies, antisemites or other fringe weirdos and undesirables. Based purely on demographic likelihood, I would imagine ‘probably not very many’.
The vast majority of people who joined Labour during the Corbyn years were, in all likelihood, just ordinary working people, public and private sector, fed up with frozen wages, rising costs, overwhelming stress, and an endless austerity program that somehow never seemed to apply to the people who actually had all the money.
When Corbyn came along, deeply imperfect though he was, finally for many people there was someone saying “working people have had to put up with a lot of unfair shit in these last years, and it can’t go on”. Corbyn had his fans and his diehards, but I’m sure for many it was the message and not the man that got them into the party.
While Starmer’s team dither and prevaricate over optics and messaging, the ground that Labour should be occupying has been neatly claimed by people like Mick Lynch and Eddie Dempsey, who have managed simply and relatably to articulate where the workers are coming from, and in the process have managed to sway many of the public to their side. It’s not about trots, the 1970s, communism, or really much about politics at all: it’s about putting food on the table and clothes on your kids.
I don’t expect or want Labour to start calling for the workers to be given control of the means of production, but the fact that they’ve dithered themselves into playing centrist dad to people who are just trying to keep the lights on is a pointless and worrying own goal. If Starmer’s strategists couldn’t see this coming, he should think about getting some new ones.
The Times with their “look over their tactic” to help the Tories.
12 years of Tory Government, no amount of “look over there” is going to hide the mess the Tories have done.
Even Truss and Sunak are talking about cleaning up the mess. They were both a part of it, but that kind of detail goes over the Tory faithfuls blue rinse
> Corbyn, who friends say is mulling a run as an independent candidate against Labour at the next election having given up on returning to the party, is among those backing a slate of opponents to the leadership.
Just when you thought Corbyn couldn’t do any more damage…
Wedge tactics don’t work on a party that isn’t divided. Labour is divided. With effectively dead opposition the Tories will become more Thatcherite by the day.
Unions need to unionise and form a new political party.