The Labour party lists the Equality Act as one of the major achievements of its last spell in government. Passed in 2010, it provides everyone with robust legal protections against discrimination based on sex, disability, age, race, religion, sexual orientation and gender reassignment.
But just a decade later, the Labour party was itself found to have breached its own landmark law, when the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) declared that it had acted unlawfully in discriminating against Jewish members. Its lead investigator said that, as leader of the party during the period in question, Jeremy Corbyn was “ultimately accountable and responsible for what happened”.
Corbyn has never apologised for the role he played in the institutional antisemitism that characterised the party under his leadership, including interference in the complaints process by his own staff, presiding over a culture in which members including Ken Livingstone partook in the unlawful harassment of Jewish members, and a lack of support for Jewish MPs like Luciana Berger and Margaret Hodge, who faced the most appalling abuse. Instead he said that he did not accept all the findings made by the EHRC, and accused opponents and the media of “dramatically overstating” the extent of antisemitism in the party “for political reasons”. That led to his suspension from the party and, while Labour’s NEC reinstated him as a member three weeks later, Keir Starmer refused to readmit him to the parliamentary party, and he sits as an independent MP to this day.
Last week, Starmer announced that Corbyn would not be allowed to stand as a Labour MP at the next election. Speaking after the EHRC lifted Labour out of special measures as a result of its progress in expelling its antisemitic members and proscribing antisemitic organisations, he was unequivocal that “the Labour party has changed” and that Corbyn was not welcome.
Corbyn’s failure to accept responsibility and show any contrition for the antisemitism he presided over – he still maintains he was targeted because of his position on Palestine – means Starmer’s decision must first and foremost be evaluated on principled grounds. It was the only morally correct course of action, and – like his earlier decision to exclude Corbyn from Labour’s benches in the Commons – it is to Starmer’s credit that he has taken it.
But it also comes with significant political boons for Starmer. It creates a stark contrast with Rishi Sunak: a leader of integrity, set against a prime minister who appointed two cabinet ministers who have already had to resign because of alleged bullying and alleged financial impropriety, with another departure potentially on the horizon. And it sends a clear signal to voters that the Labour party is no longer home to Corbyn, whose deep unpopularity in 2019 was a significant factor in Boris Johnson’s resounding victory and Labour’s worst defeat since 1935. That unpopularity was partly a product of Labour’s issues with antisemitism, and partly of Corbyn’s cranky foreign policy positions, which he espouses to this day; just a couple of weeks ago he was reiterating his belief that the west should not be arming Ukraine because it could pave the way for the territorial invasion of Russia, an offensively absurd sentiment.
It also positions Starmer in the right place in relation to an existential debate that has long raged within Labour’s ranks about what political parties are actually for. “We’ve got our party back,” former Labour leader Neil Kinnock recounted a trade unionist saying to him just after Ed Miliband was elected leader (his response was: “we never lost it”). It’s a statement that immediately raises the question – who does a party belong to, anyway? Its activist base, or its voters?
The key objective of Labour’s moderates has always been to attract enough support in order to win power to achieve change in government. Democracy is first and foremost about winning votes. For Labour’s left flank, those votes are not to be achieved at the expense of sacrificing their principles – if voters reject them, that’s on them – and democracy is achieved through the prism of privileging members’ role in charting the party’s course, even if that makes it less electable.
Starmer’s edict on Corbyn is just the latest signal that he is firmly in the former camp. His duty is to voters, not to indulge Labour party members supporting a man who presided over unlawful discrimination to be their MP. But Corbyn and his backers have framed this as an “attack on democracy”. The controversy follows criticisms that Starmer has acted in an anti-democratic fashion by changing the party rulebook to give MPs more say in picking the leader and making it harder for members to deselect their local MP, and for influencing local selections of parliamentary candidates.
The truth is that these are simply signs of a party that is serious about winning the kind of democratic legitimacy that matters much more than internal rulebooks. In an age when members are unrepresentative of a party’s wider electoral base, there is a trade-off between internal democracy and the ability of a political party to respond to voters.
It is fundamentally undemocratic to give the small, unrepresentative sliver of voters that constitutes the Labour party membership too much power to impose a leader that neither the party’s MPs, nor the country at large, think is decent and competent, or to impose an idiosyncratic choice of individual as a likely local MP on tens of thousands of voters. Liz Truss’s success in winning the votes of Conservative members in her party’s contest sharply illustrates how this extends beyond Labour: giving party memberships too much power gums up parliamentary democracy.
There are fair critiques to be made of Starmer, including that his domestic agenda lacks the vision needed to solidify Labour’s existing poll lead into the big majority he will require to really change the country for the better. But he is certainly not the anti-democrat that the left of his party claim him to be. Far from it: he has shown he understands that democracy is ultimately about voters, not members.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
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• This article was amended on 21 February 2023. An earlier version said Jeremy Corbyn “accused the EHRC of dramatically overstating the extent of antisemitism in the party”; it has been clarified that he did not accept all the report’s findings and accused opponents and the media of dramatically overstating the problem. It also said Neil Kinnock told Labour’s 2010 conference, “We’ve got our party back.” These were the words of a trade unionist he recounted in that speech; Kinnock’s response (“we never lost it”) has been added.
