Wednesday 17 August 2022

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

8 comments:

Chevin said...

Labour returned to 2015, barely solvent, propped up by a few businessmen. Totally emasculated, no more than a token opposition. A brand name to give voters an illusion of choice.
The final aim is to stamp out any last trace of democratic socialism leaving this country as just another one party puppet dictatorship on the fringe of Europe much like Turkey under Erdogan or Hungary under Orban.
The Tories are only interested in the City of London and offshore money.. For them the rest of the country is an awkward nuisance much as Thatcher regarded Liverpool. Having neutralised the opposing Labour Party they now have Britain in managed decline

dermot said...

Not just 100,000, the latest mid 2022 figures show another 50K, in other words yet another 100K out the door. By the time Starmer & his motely crew reach the next GE, it'll be higher still.

Blissex said...

«this apparently is a price worth paying for seeing the back end of "100,000 Corbynites" [...] 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. [...] By driving out the left, Starmer and the Labour right are decomposing the coalition they need to win.»

That can be explained by realizing that the New Labour Party is a different entity from and a political rival to the Labour Party, and does not welcome Labour Party "entrysts". The only interest the New Labour Party has is keeping the ballot-paper name and symbol of the Labour Party, because around 25-30% of voters are low-information and keep voting for that name and symbol just because traditionally they were associated with pro-labour policies.

That is the recipe for PASOKification, because slowly that 25-30% evaporates as even low-information voters eventually realize that the policies have become neoliberal instead of pro-labour, thus the 4 million fewer votes achieved by Tony Blair's electoral toxicity between 1997 and 2007 (the further 1 million fewer votes achieve by Gordon Brown 2008-2010 were from tory and whig voters who had been supporting New Labour and were outraged by the property crash).

David Lindsay said...

There are going to be bread riots this winter, recalling France on the eve of the Revolution, and the Prime Minister is going to be someone who had gone into politics due to having failed as a common or garden graduate accountant. Rishi Sunak did stick it out for 14 years, but he ended up being employed by his father-in-law. Liz Truss managed all of nine years before being unemployed for three, and then spent two as Deputy Director of some Westminster Village think tank while she slept her way into a safe seat.

Between these two and Keir Starmer, there has never been a weaker field for the Premiership. It is no wonder that the Labour Party is haemorrhaging members, and that the financially healthy organisation bequeathed by Jeremy Corbyn is now effectively bankrupt. Labour is barely, if at all, ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, and Starmer is behind Truss, making him objectively a drag on his party, a dead weight, a liability. People have realised that there is a world elsewhere, with unions winning very favourable pay deals all over the place, and with huge majorities for strike action. On a turnout of more than 72 per cent, the vote to strike in the Royal Mail was 98.7 per cent. The Conservatives are choosing their new Leader by means of online voting, but they have banned the unions from using it. Yet these are the figures. How are the unions winning, if strikes or threatened strikes do not work? How are the unions winning, if there is no money to meet their "demands"?

The Conservative Party will go into the next General Election with a huge psephological advantage, but if it did not win outright, then the next Parliament would be hung, and the balance of power could and should be held by 20 or 30 Left MPs, if even that many were necessary, with absolutely no sense of affinity with the Labour Party in particular. Point this out if you really and rightly wanted to annoy Starmer's dwindling band of increasingly aggressive and abusive supporters.

Blissex said...

«the older, the retired, and the propertied on a culture war campaign reminiscent of Brexit»

It is not a culture war, it is an economic campaign, for rentierism. Brexit was in part cultural, but it accounted only for a fraction (even if an important one) of Conservative votes in 2017 and 2019.

The obvious hint that economic interests matter more than culture wars is that most of the 30-40% of "Remain" Conservative voters continued to vote for May and Johnson despite their programme being focused on the hardest brexit possible, and did not by and large they did not switch to the LibDems or ChangeUK as Blair and Swinson and Umunna were so sure, and did not switch to Starmer's "People's Vote" proposal either in 2019.

«To win, Labour has no choice but to mobilise and politically monopolise the other side of this equation»

Indeed and the other side really means "lower rents and prices in the south", that is, moving many jobs out of the south-east into the "pushed behind" areas; it also means better wages, but better wages by themselves don't help because they would largely get hoovered up by higher housing costs, if the south-east remained congested.

Unfortunately the majority of New Labour MPs and local officials are devoted property speculators. On the downside a Conservative victory means no ministerial careers for them, but on the upside it means that their wealth keeps growing rapidly (at the expense of their Labour voters...).

Therefore the change can only happen via something as a mass movement, leading to a slow but wholesale replacement of New Labour's MPs and local officials with people with class interests similar to those of Labour voters, or after an economic catastrophe that leads to a collapse of the southern property markets.

Robert said...

Frankly the Left members were stupid to resign from the party considering how they apparently resent the right’s grip of the party so much as all they have done is cutting their nose off to spite their face and helped ensure the right of the party is in complete control. Did Luke Akehurst and those who think like him resign when Corbyn became leader? No, they stayed to fight. As someone who doesn’t care who is the next PM every election as long as they are Labour I am not concerned with the factional struggles but the Left have thrown it all away.

Blissex said...

«Frankly the Left members were stupid to resign from the party»

Indeed, they in effect auto-expelled themselves for being "trots".

«As someone who doesn’t care who is the next PM every election as long as they are Labour I am not concerned with the factional struggles but the Left have thrown it all away.»

But the factional struggles are between two parties, thatcherite New Labour (and arguably most of the Cooperative) Party and anti-thatcherite Labour (and a minority of the Cooperative) Party, for control of the name "Labour" and of the ballot paper symbol, for those still are believed by 25-30% of voters.

So I don't care about which party is in power as long as they are anti-thatcherite (and they avoid riling up our USA overlords, without obeying every their whim). It is not the party that matters, but the interests that they pursue.

Phil said...

"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. "

I'd make the case for Corbyn(ism) any day of the week, but I don't think I was (or am) very visible as a Labour member. I think a lot of us weren't, in fact.

There should have been a badge. Sure, the Labour Party sells badges, although they're pretty horrible - that Kinnock-era "red flag made up of the words 'Labour' and 'Party'" emblem and an enamel badge showing a clump of what look like agricultural implements - but anyone can buy those. You joined the Puffin Club, you got a Puffin Club badge; there should have been a Labour Party badge that was for members, that was supplied to members when they joined, and that (consequently) was worn by members.

Visibility would have shot up; many more people would have associated people they know with Labour; quite a few people would have had the good taste to keep shtum rather than spreading the latest smear about Labour. It might even have been worth a few votes in 2017 and/or 2019.

(Memo to Labour Party: sorry it's taken me so long to come up with this idea. Can we give it a try now anyway?)