After electoral collapse, UK Labour risks political oblivion

After last week’s elections in England, Scotland and Wales, it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that the UK Labour Party faces an existential crisis. 

The party lost nearly 1,500 of its councillors in England, as well as control of the Senedd in Cardiff, which it had held since 1999; this development was especially devastating, given Labour’s historic dominance in Wales. 

It retreated further in Scotland, too, where Labour’s long decline continues despite periodic claims of revival.

Attempts to write these results off as a mere midterm protest vote won’t wash. Nor, in fairness to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, are they just a rejection of him personally - though they are also that.

They are further evidence of a fundamental structural crisis, which is fracturing Labour’s coalition, both left and right. Labour has experienced heavy defeats before, but they occurred when the party had far deeper roots in working-class life than it does today.

Nevertheless, discussion has rapidly shifted from the elections themselves to the question of Starmer’s survival as Labour leader and prime minister. Labour MPs and insiders are openly speculating about a potential leadership challenge, reflecting the fragility of Starmer’s position just two years after entering government. 

With scores of Labour MPs now calling on him to go, Starmer insists he has no intention of resigning. But the problem for him is that, if he were to be challenged for the leadership, he could draw on very little political capital, or personal loyalty, inside or outside the Labour Party.

Jockeying for position

The leading contenders for Starmer’s position seem to be getting their ducks in a row, and likely have been for a long time. Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, is the prince over the water for Labour’s soft left, though he would need to find a way back into the House of Commons. 

MP Angela Rayner, meanwhile, retains support among sections of the Labour membership and trade union leaders. Ed Miliband has also been floated as a potential challenger, though his previous failure as Labour leader surely makes another run improbable. 

The nakedly ambitious MP Wes Streeting would almost certainly be the main standard bearer of the Labour right. His potential path to victory, however, would be a narrow one. 

Although Streeting would have strong support from parts of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the media, plus lavish backing from corporate donors, Labour members - even after the departure, voluntary or otherwise, of so many erstwhile supporters of former leader Jeremy Corbyn - seem unlikely to stomach such a stridently Blairite figure. 

The decline of organised labour and its associated institutions since the 1980s means that voters now find it far easier to abandon the Labour Party than they might have in previous eras

If it were left to Labour MPs alone to decide, Streeting would have a strong chance, but a ballot of the wider membership is a very different proposition. Even now, there is a disconnect between the parliamentary party and the Labour grassroots.

Burnham, meanwhile, has been relatively successful as mayor of Greater Manchester, a role that has kept him in the public eye. His confrontations with the then-Conservative government of Boris Johnson during the Covid-19 pandemic earned him credibility, as did his call for a ceasefire in Gaza as early as October 2023. 

But Burnham has a long history of tacking with the prevailing political winds, having been associated with the Blairite right as a minister under Gordon Brown, then tacking more to the soft left in opposition under Miliband. The fact that so many Labour members are projecting their hopes onto him is perhaps more a sign of desperation than that he might represent any clear political alternative.

There is also a major structural obstacle facing any post-Starmer, soft-left leadership: the Parliamentary Labour Party, which has been heavily reshaped by Starmer and Morgan McSweeney, with candidate selections tightly controlled from the centre (despite Starmer’s previous professions of support for local party democracy), and any remaining left-wingers marginalised. 

Even if they were sincere in their intentions to lead a progressive government, Burnham or Rayner would inherit a parliamentary party deeply hostile to meaningful change. Both Miliband and, to a far greater extent, Corbyn were subjected to relentless internal sabotage, sniping and smears from the parliamentary party’s right wing during their respective leaderships.

Withering loyalties

For decades, Labour’s relationship with its social base has grown ever more transactional and contingent. Where once, the party formed part of what sociologist Ralph Miliband termed a “world of labour” - solidly grounded in working-class communities, alongside trade unions and other local labour movement institutions - today, it is probably less rooted in any collective, communal identity than it has been for a century. 

The party’s membership has fallen dramatically since its Corbyn-era peak of around 530,000. Both cultural and emotional loyalties to Labour have disintegrated.

We now see the electoral consequences of that long-term erosion. Labour is being squeezed from both directions. Its base in its former industrial heartlands across England’s north and Midlands - where memories of trade union loyalty and collective struggle, once vivid and tangible, are increasingly remote - has all but collapsed, allowing Reform UK to mop up the ensuing alienation and discontent there. 

Having already been displaced by the Scottish National Party in Scotland, it now finds itself outflanked in Wales by Plaid Cymru. At the same time, it is bleeding support to the Greens in England’s major cities. 

The genocide in Gaza, and Labour’s complicity in it, has been a major accelerant of the party’s crisis. Starmer’s support for Israel - including the supply of British weaponry and intelligence as Palestinians were annihilated en masse - ignited genuine moral outrage among many longtime Labour supporters, including British Muslims and younger, left-leaning voters. This rupture may yet prove to be a permanent one. 

But it is not clear how far the potential successors to Starmer appreciate the depth and severity of this anger. Burnham’s early ceasefire call differentiated him from Starmer, but his relative silence since illustrates the limits of permissible dissent within the upper ranks of the Labour Party. Rayner and Ed Miliband have had even less of significance to say on the matter.

It may be that Labour’s problems are no longer solvable by changing the figure at the party’s helm. The decline of organised labour and its associated institutions since the 1980s means that voters now find it far easier to abandon the Labour Party than they might have in previous eras. 

The party no longer has the luxury of falling back on those deep-seated loyalties to see it through tough times. A new leader may therefore dislodge Starmer, only to discover that the social foundations underpinning the party machinery - which sustained Labour for a century - have crumbled away for good.