It is 2022, not 1978, and yet the dominant story about Labour in the last few days has revolved around picket lines and the party’s union links. As one slightly bemused internal observer put it: “It does seem like an odd battle to pick.”
So why have Keir Starmer and his team decided to bar shadow ministers from formally supporting strikers on picket lines, even if action taken against them if they do is, at best, haphazard? As ever with such tussles, it depends where you start.
One useful beginning point is to note that the dismissal that catapulted the issue back into the news, that of the junior shadow transport minister Sam Tarry, was not officially because he joined a rail strike picket line.
Tarry lost his frontbench role, Starmer said on Friday, because he booked himself on to a morning round of TV interviews without checking with Labour HQ, and then “made up policy on the hoof” by saying workers could not accept below-inflation pay rises.
Behind this is the fact that Tarry was, before entering parliament, an officer for the TSSA transport union, and that he is engaged in a brutal battle with sections of his local Labour party, who are seemingly seeking to deselect him as an MP.
Another point to stress is that while shadow ministers are still requested to not join picket lines, doing so will not see them automatically shunted from the frontbench. As Starmer said on Wednesday, the party will take “each case as it comes”, and several MPs with junior roles have remained in their posts despite infractions.
So why bother? The broad answer is that last month, when the UK’s biggest rail strikes in 30 years took place, Labour hoped to blunt attacks from Boris Johnson, then firmly in power, that the party was somehow complicit in the disruption.
Johnson and the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, repeatedly labelled the stoppages “Labour’s strikes” because of the party’s traditional union links, also rehashing the slightly anachronistic notion of “union barons” who supposedly control its policy via their financial might.
While a rash of shadow ministers on picket lines would have arguably augmented such a narrative, it was an attack that never properly took hold, with some in Labour now worrying that the ban actually drew more attention to those who did attend.
Similarly, there is some confusion as to why vocally supporting a strike is deemed acceptable, but not if done so from a picket line. People of Starmer’s and Shapps’s generation have vivid memories of the robust mass picketing of the 1980s, but they are notably tamer affairs now. As one shadow frontbencher put it: “We liaise with unions in all sort of ways, and physically being on a picket line is a very small part of that, if it happens at all.”
The policy is part of Starmer’s effort to very firmly shove Labour away from what he and his team see as the overly traditionalist approach taken under Jeremy Corbyn, but must also be seen in the broader context of leftwing parties that emerged from union links having to reinvent themselves in an era of evolved class and work distinctions.
Perhaps the most important reason for the policy is unity. Polling might be mixed on whether voters support strikers or bosses, but they tend to be consistent in showing people are put off by parties seen as riven by splits, as is happening now with the Conservatives.
Starmer cited the idea of collective responsibility in his decision to remove Tarry, and he has repeatedly sought to enforce his authority, a pattern dating to his first months as Labour leader when he sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey, a key Corbyn ally, as shadow education secretary in a row linked to antisemitism.
With a wave of potential strikes in a series of industries and public services looming over the autumn and winter, the arguably niche battle about picket lines is not about to go away. But now Starmer has imposed his rule, the best he can hope for is that if shadow ministers do ignore it, so too do most of the public.
