Losing Members is Bad, Actually

The collapse of Labour's membership from 523,000 to 432,000 between the end of 2020 and end of 2021 is good news. Our helpfully blunt friend Luke Akehurst said he was very happy with this state of affairs. With the party's cash deficit slumping from £1m to £5m over this period and with £3.1m of that loss explained by falling subscriptions, this apparently is a price worth paying for seeing the back end of "100,000 Corbynites". Their contributions "didn't balance out the political damage they were doing." Akehurst knows a thing or two about political damage. He predicted Jeremy Corbyn would lead the Labour Party into electoral disaster - and his faction did everything in their power to make sure it happened.

But I'm not interested in debating with cynics. They've demonstrated their priorities enough times. What I will take issue with is their celebration of a shrinking membership. Through a rightist factional prism, seeing their opposition leave the party makes it easier to win those internal elections and get their people selected for the right seats. Branch and constituency meetings are becalmed oases where the CLP bores can hold forth on bin bags and dog shit, while the careerists and wannabes blow smoke up the MP's arse. Politics proper is exiled to the pub afterwards. Having got their hearts' desires, is this worth it from a Starmer-loyal point of view?

There's the obvious consequence of losing money. The party went through a painful shredding of full-time jobs over the last year, including the junking of the community unit because a) they were "lefties" and b) don't understand (nor want to understand) how consistent campaigning on local issues now reaps electoral benefits later. With fewer people, long-term work becomes harder. It also means Labour has less money for by-election campaigns, and publicity drives for big policy announcements. Such as the recent bill freeze. What does this matter if Starmer can attract wealthy backers? There's little evidence of doing so, and even then their "gifts" (which invariably come with understandings attached) are not as regularised and predictable as members' subscriptions. There's a reason why the last time Labour did this it was perpetually broke. This also leaves the party open to an obvious political attack. For all the bowing and scraping to big business, the fact Labour is running a huge deficit can and will be used by the Tories and the press to attack Starmer as fiscally imprudent and an unsafe pair of hands.

And there is voting. 100,000 is a not inconsiderable number of people. Not because of their weight set against an electorate of 30 million or thereabouts, but because of their experience and networks. One of the main reasons why Labour did better than anyone expected in 2017, and why 2019 could have been much worse is because the huge party membership was an electoral factor in and of itself. Scores of thousands were making the case for Labour every day at work, down the retirement home, at the school gates, in the coffee shop. The party reached the point where virtually every family or social circle in the country had a member, or knew a supporter first hand. That level of embeddedness is what knits together seemingly spontaneous (and unexpected) support. Starmer could have chosen to cultivate these networks simply by not witch-hunting members and publicly dumping his pledges.

The polls report Labour ahead with healthy leads in the so-called red wall. What's the problem? Doesn't this show no one cares about their grievances and their reach is negligible - especially when the Tories are doing a good job of making Labour look better with every passing day? No one should pretend the next election is going to be a cakewalk. For all the times glassy-eyed shadcab members go on telly to say the party has a mountain to climb before winning office, Starmer and his helpers are acting as if it's in the bag. The electoral strategy the Tories are likely to pursue will be an attempted repeat of 2017 and 2019: get together the older, the retired, and the propertied on a culture war campaign reminiscent of Brexit and hope it's going to be enough. It's not a "centre ground" strategy, but one feeding off the polarisation the Tories have done more than anyone to bring about. To win, Labour has no choice but to mobilise and politically monopolise the other side of this equation instead of focusing its energies on Tory supporting pensioners. Every vote counts, especially under the new voter ID system and the new boundaries the Tories have gerrymandered.

Even with the stark polarisation of the cost of living crisis, there's no sign Starmer understands this. Chances are the Tories will move further to shield their base from the worst of it, and with a new face in Number 10 there's the opportunity for reinvention. By driving out the left, Starmer and the Labour right are decomposing the coalition they need to win. A hundred thousand actively using their networks to urge votes for alternatives, like the Greens, or suggesting people should stay at home instead. This could easily be enough to lose tight marginals, and with Boris Johnson gone there's no guarantee the effects of antipathy would be overridden by tactical voting.

Losing so many left wing members isn't a boon for Starmer, but entirely avoidable and potentially a disaster in the making.

Image Credit