A dreadful way to run both a country and a party, and it will end badly

Martin Shipton

There’s a huge paradox at the heart of how the Labour Party works.

The party bureaucracy is riddled with control freakery, complete with Stalinist-style purges and a lack of authentic democratic accountability.

Meanwhile the UK Government, which the party runs, is marked by a strategy-free chaos, currently characterised by U-turns on U-turns that haven’t even been announced.

How on earth has it got to this point, which in a worst case scenario will end with Nigel Farage in Downing Street, governing Britain at the behest of billionaires with a mania for deregulation?

For anyone wanting to understand what has happened to Labour, I can recommend a book that was officially published this week. The Fraud by Paul Holden is 540 pages long, but there are no dull moments as he lays out the documentary evidence he has assembled with a meticulous attention to detail in order to demonstrate that the Labour Party under Keir Starmer has been captured by a right-wing faction preoccupied with stitching up its internal opponents.

Before reading the book I wasn’t aware of the extent to which Morgan McSweeney, now the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, and the group he was a director of called Labour Together had been involved in undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party by setting up “astroturf” organisations to push the line that the party had a massive problem with antisemitism. Again, I hadn’t previously been aware of this metaphorical use of the word “astroturf”, to denote a group that is set up to give the impression that it has sprung organically from the grassroots, when in fact it has been created artificially by people with a concealed agenda.

Many of the complaints made against left wing party members accused of antisemitism were concocted by an online astroturf group called Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS), which trawled the social media accounts of party members it wanted to purge in search of any statements that could be construed as antisemitic. In doing so, and in what has become a common practice, they conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, regarding criticism of the state of Israel as inherently antisemitic.

In his book, Holden writes: “When the party [under Corbyn] failed to expel and suspend LAAS’s targets, LAAS would inform the media that it had made thousands of complaints that had been ignored. This, in turn, would drive the key narratives that the party was both overwhelmed with antisemites and that it was failing meaningfully to deal with complaints.”

Having stirred up a frenzy that was eagerly seized upon by right-wing news outlets, the next step was to turn denial of the supposed extent of antisemitism within the Labour Party into an offence as grievous as antisemitism itself. It’s for that offence, of course, that Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from the party and told he could never stand for it again.

Left wing

The book also chronicles how Starmer won the leadership election after Corbyn’s resignation by a campaign that deliberately portrayed him as more left wing than he in fact was. By doing so, and sending disingenuous placatory messages to left wingers that he would continue Corbyn’s policy agenda, Starmer stole the Labour Party for a strident right-wing faction. Once in charge, and even more so after he won the general election in July 2024, he jettisoned the left wing policies, as had always been the plan.

Many left the party voluntarily, disgusted by the lurch to the right and the dishonest tactics that were used to suspend and expel people from the party or deprive them of the opportunity to stand as candidates in public elections. Such decisions were taken arbitrarily by party bureaucrats with no right of appeal.

Stitch-ups are not, of course, without precedent in the Labour Party. The way in which Rhodri Morgan was deprived of the Welsh Labour leadership in 1999 is now part of Wales’ political folklore. It didn’t do Alun Michael, the “victor” of the contest, much good: he was ousted nine months after the National Assembly was inaugurated – but no lessons were learnt and the stitch-ups have continued, right up to the selection of candidates for next May’s Senedd election.

The decision to deprive the talented Owain Williams of the opportunity to put himself forward to party members in Cardiff is an example, as was the botched attempt by the general secretary of Welsh Labour to install a mate as the by-election candidate in Caerphilly by removing the popular deputy council leader from the candidates’ shortlist.

For all the talk of a Red Welsh Way, Eluned Morgan has no control over the party apparatchiks who run Welsh Labour from their offices in Cardiff. They are loyal to Keir Starmer, not to her, and their control freakery in Wales replicates the control freakery deployed by McSweeney and his crew in UK Labour.

Control

And yet there is a huge contrast between the merciless control exerted within the party and the sheer chaos apparent in the UK Government’s approach to decision-making. With the Budget looming, there is undoubtedly panic within the Cabinet about Labour’s low poll ratings and the threat from Reform UK. Before the general election, Rachel Reeves was very clear as Shadow Chancellor that there would be no increase to major taxes like Income Tax and VAT. After being elected, she at first stuck to her promise by raising employers’ National Insurance contributions instead. In recent months there has been speculation that she would be increasing Income Tax to deal with the problems besetting the public finances, and briefings have taken place indicating that’s what would happen. Now, however, the briefings have changed, and it seems the planned increases have been shelved.

At one time, Budget leaks were a sackable offence, as Labour Chancellor Hugh Dalton discovered after briefing a journalist in advance of the 1947 Budget with details of tax changes he intended to announce. These days such leaks are de rigeur, leading to today’s situation where a U-turn has been confidently predicted and then reversed after a negative public reaction.

We’ve seen it from Labour before over the issue of Brexit, and we’re seeing it again now. Decisions are being taken not on the basis of principle but on the basis of perceived political expediency. Instead of decisive leadership we have no sense of direction and a hesitancy that will damage the UK’s international reputation further.

If this is the outcome, what was the point of all the control freakery in the party?

It’s a dreadful way to run both a party and a country, and it will end badly.