Ahead of our conference on the centre-left this Thursday, Colm Murphy maps out the formidable challenges that the Labour Party - and its potential governing partners - must overcome to prevail in the next election and successfully govern a divided country in a disorderly world.
After a particularly difficult decade, the centre-left is once again seen as a plausible governing force across much of Europe and the Americas. Britain is no exception. Following 19 consecutive months of poll leads over the Conservatives, with the current average margin at 16 points, Keir Starmer's Labour Party is now taken deeply seriously across the spectrum as the likely governing party after 2024.
Of course, as any grizzled veteran of UK politics would say, nothing is guaranteed - particularly in an age of economic turmoil, cultural polarisation, and volatile electoral behaviour. Nonetheless, after a solid Labour performance in the local elections and a spectacular night for the Liberal Democrats and Greens, the smart money is currently on a Labour majority or Labour-led coalition after the next general election. The Conservative Party’s recent return to internecine warfare with Boris Johnson’s sudden resignation, and the arrest of the former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, do nothing to change that assessment.
However, political power brings with it considerable dangers for its wielders. Just ask Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Pedro Sanchez, and Lula da Silva – or, indeed, Sanna Marin and Magdalena Andersson. Whatever its partisan flavour, the next government will likely confront a dizzying array of formidable challenges. These include the climate emergency, the economic fall-out from Brexit, growing fiscal pressures, constitutional dysfunction, inequalities in wealth, generation, gender, and race, the fraught politics of migration, chronically underfunded public services, childcare and social care, and falling real wages.
In addition, any centre-left government would need to overcome its longstanding Achilles heel: entrenched negative perceptions of its economic and electoral ‘credibility’. It might well need to navigate the fraught dynamics of coalition government. Even a Labour majority government would have to manage internal dissent across a factionalised left without sparking a backlash in the party. Finally, in a moment of geopolitical transition and upheaval, it may be forced to grapple with new global shocks from Ukraine to Taiwan.
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party should treat charting a plausible course through these choppy waters as a matter of considerable urgency. It’s fair to say, though, that these charts are works in progress. It is striking that despite its growing list of policy agendas - enhancing workers’ rights, ‘securonomics’, NHS reform, constitutional reform, housebuilding, and tackling serious crime - the Labour Party is frequently criticised for lacking a transformative ‘vision’. This is not just because of Starmer’s (infamous) leadership election pledges from 2020, many of which have fallen by the wayside. There are still gaping holes in the party’s current prospectus. Its agenda is unclear or underdeveloped in critical areas such as public sector investment and wages, the social care crisis, and school-age, further and higher education.
It is also striking that the party has begun to trim its sails. Last week, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves watered down one of Labour’s flagship policies. Having pledged £28bn a year for a climate transition fund in 2021, Reeves and Ed Miliband now say that the sum will only be reached by the middle of the next parliament. Though pushed by some anonymous Labour briefers and prompted by concerns over the worsened gilt market context, electoral credibility, and state capacity, the change has clearly rankled with others in Labour, and not just longstanding critics of Starmer.
There has thus never been a better moment for sober, informed, and clear-eyed assessment of the challenges confronting the British centre left, and the resources and opportunities it has at its disposal. To this end, the Mile End Institute has organised a one-day conference on Thursday 15 June. Bringing together a host of influential politicians, policymakers, think-tank researchers and academics, this conference will assess the current state of thinking on the UK centre left and identify the key questions that it has yet to fully confront.
Speakers include the Labour politicians Nick Thomas-Symonds, Seema Malhotra, and Chris Bryant, alongside expert think tank researchers like Andrew Harrop, Hannah White, James Meadway, and Carys Roberts. In dialogue with these politicians and policymakers will be former senior civil servants Jonathan Slater and Robin Butler and leading academics, including Nick Pearce, Diane Coyle, Robert Saunders, Eunice Goes, Karl Pike, and Alan Finlayson.
Through six panels, the conference will assess centre-left plans to transform the productive capacity of the UK economy, to bring about the green transition, to revitalise public services, and to restore standards of propriety and accountability in public life. Each session will address how a future centre-left government could, or should, develop a strategy for governing in particularly hard times.
You can see the full conference programme and snag one of the last few tickets here. This conference is part of an ongoing, cross-partisan series of events on the main British political traditions in transition, which has featured a sold-out panel on the Labour Left after Corbyn and will include a conference on the future of Conservatism. To keep informed about our future events, subscribe to our mailing list.
Dr Colm Murphy is Lecturer in British Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, and the Deputy Director of the Mile End Institute. His new book, Futures of Socialism: 'Modernisation', the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973-1997, is out now.