Labour’s Crisis and the Search for Hope

The overused expression that “a week is a long time in politics” certainly applies to the current crisis engulfing the Labour Party.

Just days after Labour suffered disastrous local election results in England, lost control of the Senedd in Wales for the first time since devolution, and finished level with Reform in the Scottish parliamentary elections, the party is in meltdown.

Wes Streeting’s resignation, reports of cabinet fractures, growing discontent within the parliamentary party, and the future of Keir Starmer’s leadership now dominate political discussion. Against this backdrop, attention is focused on Andy Burnham as the saviour and a possible successor.

The irony is that this crisis comes only two years after Labour won a landslide general election victory, securing 411 seats. Yet beneath that majority there were always warning signs. Labour’s victory was broad, but shallow. The party won power with only 33.7 per cent of the national vote,  lower than the 40% vote share achieved under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and not much better than Jeremy Corbyn’s share of the vote in the post Brexit 2019 election at 32.2%.

Joe Dromey argues in Tribune this month that “much of Labour’s electoral strategy focused on winning back so-called “hero voters” – traditionally Labour voters in post-industrial and socially conservative areas who had backed Brexit and later supported Boris Johnson in 2019. These voters were seen as essential to rebuilding the “Red Wall” under Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system.”

Defenders of the strategy argue that it delivered power and that, in electoral terms, nothing else matters. But Joe Dromey points out that it is “ increasingly clear that this victory owed more to the split on the right, rather than to large-scale switching to Labour. The majority it delivered was broad, but it has proven to be both shallow and fragile.”

Labour also increasingly alienated large sections of its activist base and younger progressive supporters. Party membership, which exceeded 550,000 under Jeremy Corbyn, has fallen dramatically under Keir Starmer’s leadership.

This matters because political parties cannot survive indefinitely as purely electoral machines. They need a set of core beliefs capable of being communicated and defended that translate into policies. This is how trust and credibility is built.

That, perhaps, is Starmer’s central problem. Many voters simply do not know what he believes in beyond the pursuit and maintenance of power itself.

The result has been a government that often appears reactive rather than principled. Labour’s attempts to neutralise Reform by echoing tougher rhetoric on immigration is unlikely to have even reassured those socially conservative voters. It has though alienated others who once saw Labour as a movement rooted in social justice.

This is not the first time Labour has faced such a rupture. The party has repeatedly lost sections of its traditional working-class base during periods of economic or cultural upheaval. The collapse of Ramsay MacDonald’s government during the Great Depression devastated Labour in 1931. Margaret Thatcher successfully attracted skilled working-class voters in the 1980s through home ownership and aspirational politics. More recently, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives shattered parts of the “Red Wall” in 2019.

The question now is whether Labour faces another historic realignment, this time with Nigel Farage and Reform positioned to capitalise on disillusionment from both the left and right.

There is though many a slip, and It is not even certain that Andy Burnham will win the seat vacated by Josh Simons in Makerfield. Reform won all eight of the council seats in the local elections. Even if he is successful, there will still need to be a leadership election and Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer will put up a hard fight.

But for some inside Labour, Andy Burnham represents the party’s last realistic chance to halt that decline. Unlike Starmer, Burnham is seen as having emotional connection, communication skills, and a recognisable political identity.

Yet Andy Burnham is hardly a straightforward radical alternative. He supported the Iraq War under Tony Blair, backed aspects of NHS market reform while Health Secretary, and his stance on Palestine is questionable. He is also said to be in support of allowing the private sector to fund Defence and we all know the risks of that. Portraying him as a transformative figure risks repeating the same cycle of disappointment and despair.

But maybe the serious and inherent risks of a potential Reform government mean that we need pragmatism over political purity. The real question may not be whether Burnham can offer an exciting left-wing vision for the party but whether he can do just enough to stop the country’s decline into a right-wing dystopian nightmare.