When Labour wins a general election by centrist means, some on the left of the party always have mixed feelings. They welcome the crushing of the Conservatives. It’s sometimes forgotten by centrists that the Labour left hates the Tories with a particular intensity. The left’s optimists also often hope, despite evidence to the contrary, that a Labour victory will open up new socialist possibilities – or at least provide some emotional catharsis. When Tony Blair won his 1997 landslide, Diane Abbott went to the Labour celebrations at the South Bank, she told her biographers Robin Bunce and Samara Linton. “And it was just the most amazing feeling … It felt like I had waited my whole life for this.”
Yet, mixed in with such elation can be a sinking feeling that the left’s enemies inside the party have been vindicated. What Keir Starmer always pointedly describes as his “changed Labour party” – others would call it a purged Labour party – has almost doubled its number of parliamentary seats, after ditching most of its leftwing policies and conducting an election campaign that prioritised winning over Tory voters with promised restrictions on public spending and with traditional patriotic themes. In the huge new parliamentary Labour party, the few dozen MPs considered leftwingers – the label can be hard to apply precisely – will be even more outnumbered than before. In the strange new world of British politics, likely to be dominated by both Starmer’s stern realism and the rightwing fantasies of Reform, does the Labour left, and the left more generally, still have a future?
