British politics has left an era of consequence and entered a period of consensus. For the past decade Britain has wrestled with immense constitutional questions, which are now largely settled. Under Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss, both Labour and the Conservatives experimented with and abandoned radical economic ideas. The parties’ fiscal policies have merged. In an era of low interest rates, spending was limited by political imagination; in an era of high interest rates, spending is dictated by the market. Politics is becoming a narrower contest but a no less nasty one.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Labour Party. Barely five years ago, the party was at war with itself. Moderate mps were in open rebellion against Mr Corbyn, a left-winger who wanted to hand 10% of every big British firm to workers. A splinter group of centrist mps left the party to form their own. Divisions were wide.
Now Labour is remarkably coherent. Hardly any mps demand that the party seize the commanding heights of the economy. Instead, under Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, Labour’s leader and shadow chancellor respectively, the party proposes moderate reforms to workers’ rights and planning rules. Once mps were selected from across the left, from hard to soft. Now the typical member of the prospective 2024 parliamentary intake is a clean-shirted, half-marathon-running centrist, full of the dead-eyed cynicism required to win selection battles for miserable towns they once could not wait to leave. In short, divisions are slim.
Yet still Labour fights itself. Almost every policy area is beset by feuds over what are fundamentally narrow policy gaps. There is no schism of the sorts which divided the party in the 1980s, when liberal mps formed their own party and Trotskyites attempted to undermine Labour from within, or during Mr Corbyn’s tenure. But there are ideological hairline fractures everywhere, which will become only more painful in government.
Skim through Labour’s policy programme and everywhere there are fights over detail, like those between monks arguing over the Nicene Creed. On workers’ rights, the trade unions that bankroll the party screech “betrayal” about proposed reforms that represent their biggest policy win for the best part of two decades. An irrelevant scrap over whether the bill arrives within 100 days of winning power trumps analysis of what is in it. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, enjoys triggering social democrats by arguing that the National Health Service (nhs) needs to make use of the private sector, something it has done without much hoo-hah for decades. A row is simmering about Gaza in part because the leadership initially supported a “humanitarian pause” (when fighting stops) rather than a “ceasefire” (when fighting stops).
Often, fights boil down to money. Strict spending rules insisted upon by Ms Reeves in the name of electoral credibility limit the party. It is easy to refuse spending for a bad idea. It is much harder to maintain, say, the two-child benefit cap, which restricts some welfare schemes to the first two children in a household, simply because of fiscal rules. A 30-something Labour mp did not spend every weekend for three years handing out leaflets in the rain only for Ms Reeves to pat her pockets and tell them there is no money. And so a minor topic—the benefit cap accounts for about 1% of Britain’s £300bn ($380bn) welfare bill—becomes a totemic one.
Policy differences, no matter how small, become matters of principle in the Labour Party. The Conservative Party has few such qualms. mps followed David Cameron as he pursued austere liberalism. They lined up behind Theresa May’s communitarian Conservatism, and then became big-spending Conservatives under Boris Johnson. It took a colossal failure for each to be removed.
By contrast, Labour ends up in internal scraps even when it is on the up. The decision by Natalie Elphicke, a once rather right-wing Tory mp, to join the party is taken as a moral affront, rather than an indication the party is on track for a thumping victory. The party suffers from a variation of Robert Conquest’s rule, runs one joke: the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies—namely, other members of the Labour Party.
Small differences can undo even the firmest Labour alliances. Sir Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were once political soulmates. Somehow the duo spent their decade in power feuding about what were, with the benefit of hindsight, pretty arcane policy matters. At one point Sir Tony’s team set about shredding a paper from Mr Brown attacking “foundation hospitals”—a scheme to give good hospitals more independence—to ensure that cabinet ministers did not read the criticism of this flagship policy.
What should have been a golden era of centre-left dominance became an almost teenaged era of politics, more “Mean Girls” than “The Thick of It” (“I love you, but I’ll break you! If you do that, I can destroy you!” shouted Peter Mandelson, another New Labour giant, down the phone to Mr Brown, according to one account). In 2021 a documentary brought together the leading men and women from this era. Beneath all the contributions was a shamefaced realisation that they had wasted two gigantic majorities and a booming economy on petty fighting over policy differences that were often tiny.
Go back to your constituencies and prepare for bickering
Sir Keir’s party will have less of an opportunity to waste when it takes office. Its majority may yet be as large as Sir Tony’s, but the economic backdrop will be grimmer. Placating those disappointed by the reality of power will be Sir Keir’s first job; dealing with rivals keen to harness that disappointment will be the second. The thought of winning can discipline the rowdiest party; actually doing so can unhinge the most well-behaved. In Labour, the smallest divisions can quickly become the most toxic.
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