Over the past decade, three Conservative prime ministers have been forced from office by their own colleagues. In contrast, in the post-war period, no Labour leader has been ejected. Tony Blair did step down in 2007, but by that time he had been leader for 13 years and prime minister for 10 of them. He himself admitted people “get tired of the same face” after a decade. “It’s long enough,” he conceded.

Certainly, no one was talking about getting rid of Tony Blair after just one year in office. On the first anniversary of his premiership, in 1998, Blair’s approval rating was an astonishing 72%. And his party had a 29-point lead over the Tories. The mood in the parliamentary party was understandably euphoric. Reading West MP Martin Slater said, “Tony Blair has told us we must not gloat, but we can’t let [the anniversary of the election] go uncelebrated”.

There was little gloating going on last week in Westminster — at least not among Labour MPs — as Keir Starmer marked his one-year anniversary with an approval rating of 23%. For a prime minister who kicked off at 60%, this is cataclysmic. It’s unlikely his leadership will end in quietly dignified retirement.

One year in, seven-in-10 voters think the Labour government is at least as chaotic as its Conservative predecessor. The welfare debacle didn’t disabuse them of this notion, as Starmer’s complete lack of authority was exposed. And we’ve never watched a Chancellor weeping beside their PM at PMQs before.

The Prime Minister dismissed the welfare rebels as “noises off”, but these noises are now turning into talk of a leadership challenge. As ever, the usual suspects have put their head above the parapet. John McDonnell, whom Keir Starmer kicked out of the party last year for opposing the two-child benefit cap, immediately popped up to call outright for the Labour movement to “take back control” of the party. But, behind the scenes, speculation over Starmer’s future is mounting. Last week, he was asked by Kemi Badenoch whether Rachel Reeves would be Chancellor by the next election. But perhaps the more pertinent question is: will he be Prime Minister?

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What Starmer could learn from Blair

By Richard Johnson

It’s not as easy as it used to be to topple a Labour leader. Until 1981, the leader was elected annually by the Parliamentary Labour Party. It would take just two MPs — a proposer and a seconder — to force a leadership election. In spite of the technical ease in forcing a leadership challenge, they almost never happened. In the post-war period, just one leader — Hugh Gaitskell — was challenged, and he saw off his opponents with ease.

The stability of the party leadership was partly due to Labour leaders understanding the fragility of their own position, and the fractious nature of their party. They had come up through the Labour movement, and they knew that the party was really a coalition of diverse interests and perspectives. They had to work hard to ensure that they could sustain wide support. Cabinets and Shadow Cabinets included members from across the wide spectrum of the political Left. As Harold Wilson remarked, he came from the Left of the party, but he recognised that it also needed a Right-wing to fly.

Even after the rules were changed in the Eighties to transfer part of the decision to party conference and then again in the Nineties to ordinary members, leaders recognised that they were holding together a coalition. They needed to show love — or at least respect — to the different elements of the party. Otherwise, resentment would grow into something potentially explosive. That is why even Tony Blair made a point of meeting with members of the Left-wing socialist Campaign Group when he was party leader.

Keir Starmer, though, has a different approach. He has adopted perhaps the most presidential style of any Labour leader. All authority flows down from the leader, not up from the party. Labour has never quite had a leader like him, one so aloof from the party’s internal apparatus, contemptuous of its pluralism, and singularly unpopular with the public.

After first using the votes of the Left and soft Left to elect him leader in 2020, Starmer then turned his back on them and handed control of the party to the Right, the old Blairite wing now itching for revenge after what they regarded as the ignominy of the five-year Corbyn leadership.

With Starmer’s blessing, the Right took control of the National Executive Committee, and were exceptionally successful in controlling parliamentary selections, with a disregard for internal party democracy unseen even in the heyday of New Labour. Potential candidates deemed to be Corbyn-curious were sifted out, even if it cost Labour seats, as it clearly did in Islington North and Chingford. Left-wing incumbents were deselected. Some Right-leaning NEC members then parachuted themselves into safe seats ahead of the election. Then, after the election, Starmer expelled remaining Left-wing MPs within weeks of taking office.

This “presidential” governing style isn’t without risks. As Juan Linz laid out in his seminal essay, “Perils of Presidentialism”, such systems tended to be less stable than a parliamentary one because they entail a “winner takes all” politics, or, to put it more bluntly, a “loser gets nothing” dynamic — something which ultimately encourages revolution.

Starmer, more than any other Labour leader, has taken this “winner takes all” approach to his leadership. He set out to bury all the remnants of the ancien régime both in policy and personality, abandoning the old manifesto’s promises and expelling his predecessor from the party. Worse, Starmer had no mandate to conduct this purge. He wasn’t elected leader to hammer the Left: on the contrary, he had promised continuity with the policies of the Corbyn years, but then spent his time as leader repudiating them.

Initially, this didn’t seem to matter. Once the Conservatives ditched Boris Johnson in a staggering act of political self-harm, Labour’s poll lead was unassailable. Starmer’s leadership, insipid and uninspiring as it was, became self-justified merely by dint of the fact that Labour was winning. But now Labour is in the mid-20s in the polls, Reform is in first place and Nigel Farage is on the verge of measuring up the curtains in No. 10. Most Labour MPs could be wiped out. The debacle of the 2019 result, so trumpeted by the Right of the party as evidence of the Left’s electoral toxicity, could seem like a happy memory.

Now, the carrot of strong poll numbers and the stick of fierce discipline have rotted away. Backbench MPs no longer see Starmer as a vote winner. And after U-turns on winter fuel, grooming gangs, and disability benefits, he clearly doesn’t frighten them either.

But Starmer has made it harder for them to get rid of him. As leader of the opposition, he quietly made a couple of modifications to the rules of succession. There is no vote of confidence, like there is with the Tories. Instead, an MP merely needs to put up a challenge. Starmer, though, raised the threshold for nominations from 10% to 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He has also limited the franchise to party members and members in affiliated trade unions. Non-members who were given a vote under Ed Miliband, on condition of paying a nominal fee, have been taken out of the process. Additionally, the Labour rule book now specifies that challenges are permissible only “prior to the annual session of Party conference”.

These rule changes may be beneficial to Starmer, but they are by no means bulletproof. It seems likely to me that if Starmer is forced to defend his leadership before ordinary party members, he is toast. As someone who speaks to many fellow party members from across Labour, it’s hard to find cheerleaders for the PM.

As a result, the Left of the party hates him, and the soft Left — where the bulk of the membership is — feel deeply disappointed. Those on the Right of the party have regarded Starmer as a useful vehicle for their path to power, but they have never seen him as one of their own. There are, simply put, no Starmerites in Labour.

All it might take to remove Starmer, then, is one Labour MP to gather nominations from 20% of their colleagues. And every wing of the party has a reason to want him gone.

From the Right, the motives are a mix of ambition (Starmer was useful for them; they have no core loyalty to him; he is now dispensable) and self-preservation (he’s dragging the party down and threatening its electoral prospects). From the soft Left, the reasons are a combination of ambition, self-preservation, and policy disappointment. From the Left (such as it is), it is hatred for his betrayal. The question is, who would dare make the first move?

Moving too early isn’t without risk. If a Cabinet minister tried and failed to unseat Starmer, there would be repercussions: banishment, surely, to the backbenches.

Yet for some ambitious MPs, there are good reasons to move early. Wes Streeting is one of the Cabinet’s most effective communicators. He is the darling of the party “Blairites” and is clearly very ambitious. Moreover, he holds his Ilford North seat with a tiny majority and might lose it at the next election. It could be now or never. He equally hamstrung, though, by this association with the “Blairites”, which puts him ideologically out-of-step with the membership. They have rejected Right-leaning candidates in every leadership election for the past decade.

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But, if Streeting managed to force a challenge, the element of surprise might enhance his chances in a members’ ballot. Fortune favors the brave. And such is the level of despair currently that even Left-wing members have told me they’d vote for Streeting if it meant getting rid of Starmer.

Then there’s the quietly ambitious Angela Rayner, sitting demurely on the other side of the PM as his Chancellor wept. She is in a unique position as Deputy Leader, because if she tried and failed to remove Starmer, he still could not strip her of her position. He would probably sack her from the Cabinet in the case of a botched coup, but freed from the constraints of collective responsibility, Rayner on the backbenches could be a very dangerous thing for the Starmer premiership. She could be the voice of authentic Labour for which the membership is so clearly hungry.

Historically, there have been candidates in similar cases who were willing to sacrifice themselves as the “stalking horse”: candidates with no chance of winning, but announce their candidacy simply to kick off proceedings. The idea is that this MP would bounce other, more plausible candidates, into challenging Starmer. Are things so bad someone would be willing to fire the gun? Might an éminence grise like Ed Miliband, for example, or a vocal backbencher, be tempted? The risk of this approach, of course, is that it could produce the opposite effect, whereby the frontbench rallies behind their Prime Minister in his hour of need.

But how brave is this Labour cohort? How much more are they willing to take? British history is littered with the names of individuals who probably could have taken on their leaders but missed their chance. Michael Portillo regrets not standing against John Major in his 1995 “back me or sack me” challenge. David Miliband could probably have become prime minister in 2009, had he announced he was challenging Gordon Brown for the leadership. The lesson is don’t wait for the perfect moment, as it might never come. The first test of leadership is showing you have the guts to seek it in the first place.

In Blair’s case, the issue was the Lone Parent Premium, an additional payment to single parents that had been introduced under the Callaghan government in 1977. In his budget, the Conservative chancellor Ken Clarke had announced that it would be abolished by 1998.

In opposition, Labour had decried the cut. Single parents, mostly mothers, would be £6 worse off per week. Shadow Social Security Secretary Harriet Harman denounced the policy in the Commons: “The way to get lone mothers out of poverty and cut spending on benefits for them is not by cutting the amount on which they have to live year by year and plunging them further into poverty.” Yet, after the 1997 election, Harman became the social security minister tasked with implementing the very cuts she had passionately opposed only one year earlier. Blair had vowed during the election campaign to commit to Conservative spending plans for two years — and that meant seeing through Clarke’s cut. The credibility of New Labour’s economic programme was at stake.

Blair anticipated that welfare reform would be one of the biggest fights of his premiership. Behind the scenes, bitter rows erupted among senior ministers, with the foreign secretary, Robin Cook, arguing that the policy went against Labour’s core values. The international development secretary, Clare Short, warned it might destroy trust in the government.

Labour MPs worried that their constituents had not voted Labour to cut benefits for single mums. Spin doctor Alastair Campbell wrote in his diary: “The trouble we were having was explaining it as something that fitted the kind of issues on which people elected us.” Blair disagreed. He didn’t simply want to frame the issue as a fiscal necessity; instead, he believed the cuts could be justified as an anti-poverty strategy. Women who stayed on benefits would never become more prosperous. They would eke out a meagre living, at the mercy of government beneficence from budget to budget. In work, women could earn more, develop new skills, and progress in their careers, ultimately raising the standard of living for their children.

Blair persuaded Clive Soley, chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, to defend the cuts on feminist and socialist grounds. Soley audaciously claimed they were “a genuine attempt to rebuild a new welfare state fit for an economy that recognises the importance of women. That has always been part of the socialist vision.”

In spite of a petition from 120 Labour MPs pleading him to abandon the policy, Blair would not back down. He told Campbell: “All we can get out of this is strength.” He said he wanted to send the signal that “the bloke is not for turning.”

The government was heading towards a showdown. Blair, backed by his chancellor Gordon Brown, would not make any concessions. He was convinced he didn’t need to. The education secretary, David Blunkett, recorded in his own diary: “Aggravation is rising; although, in the end people will no doubt capitulate.”

The Conservatives had offered their support to the policy, so there was no risk of a defeat for the Government. At stake was Blair’s leadership over his party. In this respect, William Hague hoped that the prospect of an inevitable victory would encourage more Labour MPs to rebel. He predicted that welfare reform would be “New Labour’s Vietnam.”

Yet Blair did not demand loyalty for loyalty’s sake. He defended the policy in terms of principle. He met with rebels, spoke to the media, and later even toured the country to defend the cuts. He wrote in The Sun: “We warned you that New Labour would be different… I said we would not flinch… These were not fancy phrases to please the crowds.” His lines were delivered with such vigour that it was plausible that he really believed what he was saying.

The same cannot be said for Harman. It was obvious that she didn’t believe what she was saying. She later admitted in her memoirs: “There was no argument in favor of it.” She blamed Brown for pressuring her to support the policy on pain of contributing to a run on the pound. “I didn’t feel able to second-guess him on what the money markets would do,” she wrote.

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In one speech defending the cut, Harman’s performance was so unconvincing that a handful of Labour MPs who were planning to abstain, but were open to being persuaded to support the cuts, instead decided to vote against them. Backbench MP Chris Mullin called Harman “shameless”.

Yet many felt pressure to fall in line. While collecting signatures for a letter of protest to Blair, backbencher Jean Corston overheard another Labour MP describing the cut as wicked. When Corsten asked her colleague if she would put her name to the letter, her fellow MP made excuses and scarpered.

On 10 December 1997, the vast majority of Labour MPs marched through the “Aye” lobby to abolish the Lone Parent Payment. Some female MPs were reported to have been in tears. Even MPs on the party’s Right felt uncomfortable about their vote. Labour Right-winger Giles Radice wondered: “What have things come to when I find myself more in agreement with [left-winger] Audrey Wise and Ken Livingstone than I do with the government?”

In the end, Blair’s resolve paid off. He made no concessions to the rebels, yet only 47 voted against the proposals. A further 13 Labour MPs abstained. The whips decided not to take formal action against most of the rebels, though each one was sent a waspish ticking-off letter. Four, including Livingstone, were singled out for further punishment as they had made particularly critical comments. If they rebelled again, they were told, they would lose the whip.

This past fortnight, Starmer has demonstrated no such authority over his Party. The Prime Minister hopes that by reviving the New Labour model, he can reprise Blair’s electoral miracle. Last year, it seemed as if he had pulled it off. Starmer won 411 seats, just seven MPs shy of Blair’s record in 1997.

Yet his victory was superficial. The limits of this New Labour tribute act can be glimpsed in Blair’s and Starmer’s contrasting approaches to welfare reform. On the surface, Blair’s attempt to cut the Lone Parent Premium in 1997 bears a strong resemblance to Starmer’s attempt to cut the Personal Independence Payment (PIP). The policies are both deeply unpopular with the Labour Party’s rank and file; though they have more support in the wider electorate. They are both examples of fiscal prudence, often not considered a Labour attribute, achieved by attacking Labour-inclined groups. Politically, they show a government that is willing to make “hard choices” in the supposed “national interest”, against the wishes of idealistic Labour members.

Yet Blair and Starmer couldn’t have taken more different approaches. Blair faced down his MPs, made no concessions to them, and survived the rebellion unscathed. After the vote, Labour polled 55%, a 29-point lead over the Conservatives. In comparison, Starmer tried to face down his MPs, made some concessions to them, failed to placate many, and now faces genuine questions about the future of his leadership. Labour is currently polling at about 25%, about five points behind Reform. Although Tuesday’s vote won’t bring down his leadership, Starmer’s authority has perhaps been irrevocably shaken. Labour MPs now have a greater permission structure to challenge the leader going forward.

It goes to show that Blair was a far more astute politician: he was a fighter, but also a capable intellectual advocate of his policies. He invited the debate, and encouraged MPs to make their cases to him, only for him to come out on top.

By contrast, Starmer has failed to make a strong argument for his policies — perhaps because he lacks any real political vision. He is a manager, obsessed with rules and procedures. His political life has been a dizzying metamorphosis from soft-Left to Corbynite to Blairite. As a result, we don’t really know who he is.

Blair would never have claimed, as Starmer has recently done, that he doesn’t read all of his speeches before delivering them; or that he says things he doesn’t mean because his speechwriters tell him to do so.

It holds true that in politics, as in life, you are more likely to respect someone, even when you disagree with them, if you believe them to be motivated by genuine conviction. Blair had conviction and, even if his policy prescription was deeply flawed, his success was partly due to his ability to defend his political vision. It was clear what he thought Britain’s problems were, and how he meant to fix them.

That can hardly be said for our current Prime Minister. Starmer once said: “There is no Starmerism and there never will be.” That has turned out to be a problem, not a point of pride.

It is strange, then, to remember that it is Starmer, not his furious critics, who is keeping with Labour’s traditional positioning on Israel. Labour had been the political home for British Jews since the first Labour MPs in 1905 voted against the Conservative government’s efforts to restrict Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. And Labour called for a Jewish state even before the Balfour Declaration. The party’s 1917 War Aims Memorandum called for “a free state, under international guarantee, to which such of the Jewish People as desired to do so may return”. The statement was endorsed by Labour Party conference, the Parliamentary Labour Party and the National Executive Committee.

Over the next three decades, 11 Labour Party conferences voted to affirm support for a Jewish national home in Palestine before the state of Israel was finally established in 1948. And Labour MPs regularly defended the idea of a Jewish state in public. The former coal miner Tom Williams, who would serve in Attlee’s Cabinet, told the House of Commons in 1938: “When a national home was promised to the Jews, I presume it was not intended to be a home of shifting sands, a home under canvas that could be blown away by any and every large gust of wind… It was to be a home really worthy of a great people.” In a complete reversal of the current political landscape, Labour was confronting a pervasive scepticism towards the Jewish cause that existed on the Right of British politics.

The Conservative governments of the interwar period had become increasingly opposed to Jewish immigration to what is now Israel during the British management of the region, which began in 1919 under a mandate from the League of Nations. In 1939, the Conservative Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald announced that the UK government would cap the number of Jewish migrants at 1,500 per month, with Jewish rights to land ownership also severely restricted. Labour MPs erupted in horror at the proposal. As Left-wingers Michael Foot and Dick Crossman argued: “To limit Jewish immigration just at the moment when Palestine was the sole available refuge from Hitler would be a crime against humanity.” Philip Noel-Baker, a Labour MP who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize, denounced the immigration caps as unworkable and immoral, adding that Conservative opposition to a Jewish state “will fail because in the most tragic hour of Jewish history, the British people will not deny them their Promised Land”.

After coming to power in 1945, however, the new Labour government was similarly reluctant to remove immigration controls immediately. As Prime Minister, Attlee was concerned about the backlash from Muslims, especially in India, the independence of which was a key foreign policy priority. With US President Harry Truman, he agreed to an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to decide the next steps. When it reported in May 1946, the committee recommended ending restrictions on Jewish migration and proposed that 100,000 Jews be allowed into Palestine immediately. Attlee’s Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin opposed the recommendations, saying Americans supported the report because they didn’t want “to have too many of them [Jews] in New York”. This notorious comment would lead to Bevin being pelted with eggs and tomatoes by activists when he visited New York.

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Bevin has gained a posthumous reputation for antisemitism, but his biographers are insistent that his reluctance to support the creation of Israel had more to do with what Tony Benn would later call “the traditional anti-Israel bias in the Foreign Office” rather than hatred of Jews. In keeping with the broader attitude of the Left, as a trade union leader Bevin had championed Jewish organised labour, including those in Palestine. In 1936, he even told the TUC conference: “It seems to me that the new star of Bethlehem now shining over Jerusalem is the star of socialism… We must give these people [Jews] the opportunity of developing socialism… extending to them our blessing and helping them to build a new Jerusalem in Palestine.” Bevin’s later scepticism seems a reflection of the broader opinion of the British elite and Foreign Office, which for decades was pro-Arab.

And from the perspective of realpolitik, support for the Arabs made more sense for Britain, with Zionism seeming the Romantic, utopian cause. Britain’s main interests in the Middle East were tied to oil and trade routes that were controlled by Arab nations and, in a Cold War context, there was little to be gained from offending the Arabs and pushing them closer towards the Soviet Union. The two figures who best personified this division in the British political elite were Michael Foot and his brother Hugh, a distinguished career diplomat. Michael made his first visit to Palestine in 1934 to visit his brother, who was serving there in the British Colonial Service, and witnessed his reactionary sentiments first-hand. Hugh, like most of the Colonial Service, sympathised with the Arabs so much that the Palestinian flag was draped over his coffin at his funeral in 1990.

Michael, on the other hand, took up the cause for a Jewish homeland. As editor of Tribune, he employed staunch Zionists, including Jon Kimche, Evelyn Anderson, and Tosco Fyvel. In response to Bevin’s intransigence in 1946, he and Richard Crossman composed a pamphlet called A Palestine Munich? which argued that Labour was at risk of adopting a policy of appeasement, as the Conservatives had done, which would again abandon the Jews for the sake of geopolitics. They insisted that “survivors of Hitler’s gas chambers now herded into the displaced persons’ centres should be permitted to join their friends and relatives in the National Home”. They were referring to the unprecedented displacement of Jewish refugees in Europe following the Holocaust, which was compounded by increasing Arab animosity to Jews in the Middle East, with thousands forced to flee their homes in Yemen, Iraq, and elsewhere.

For the immediate post-war decades, it was Michael Foot’s idealism which won out. And Zionism was not just associated with the Labour Party but with the most radical wing of the Labour Left. Nye Bevan, perhaps its most celebrated figure, wrote as poetically as anyone of the cause for a Jewish homeland following a visit in 1954:

“When… the Arab says the Jew should find a home anywhere except in Palestine he asks something the Jew cannot concede without mutilating his racial personality beyond endurance. It is no answer to say that many centuries have passed into history since the Jew was at home in Palestine. If he had been permitted the security of a safe home elsewhere, the answer might do. But, as we know, it was not so.”

Tony Benn expressed similar emotions. He had been at the Sha’ar HaGolam kibbutz by the Golan Heights on VE Day when he was serving in the RAF. And he would return in 1956 for Israeli Independence Day, writing in his diary that he was doubly amazed by the social and economic progress of the Israelis because “underneath it all was the tragedy of 6 million dead in the gas chambers and the miracle of a home for Jews after 1,900 years of pogrom and ghetto”. Benn was a greater admirer of the Jewish socialist movement and concluded that “perhaps the kibbutzim have the answer — stay rooted to the soil and pass it on more richly fertile than before to your sons and grandsons”. This was representative of many on the Left who regarded Israel as a great socialist experiment, sowing the desert with the seeds of a genuine egalitarianism.

Such proud and conscious identification with the Israeli state is very rare on the Left today. And the roots of its modern position date to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza following the Six-Day War. The New Left, the strain of identitarian socialist politics then emerging across the West, took the view that Israelis had come not as refugees but as conquerors, anticipating the contemporary framing of the country as a “settler colony”. But the PLP was still decidedly Zionist. In the Sixties and Seventies, over 10% of Labour MPs were Jews; in 1966, 38 Jews were elected as Labour MPs, compared to five in 2019.

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This remained the dominant attitude at the top of the party. During the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, Harold Wilson wanted to impose a three-line whip on a motion demanding the Conservative government send arms to Israel. Roy Jenkins, Wilson’s erstwhile deputy who had resigned to support joining the European Economic Community, cautioned that it was a bad idea. The Labour leader shot him down: “Look, Roy, I’ve accommodated your fucking conscience for years. Now you’re going to have to take account of mine.” Wilson explained to Jenkins that he cared just as much about Israel as Jenkins did Europe.

Wilson’s leadership, however, was the high point of Labour Zionism. Although the party has retained a sturdy pro-Israel flank, the breadth and depth of the Labour Party’s commitment to Israel has waned in recent decades, while the New Left’s interpretation of Israel has grown in strength. There are multifarious reasons for this: the severity of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (until 2005); the hardline governments of Sharon and Netanyahu; the fading of Jewish influence within Labour and the rise of a Muslim-Labour constituency; and the successful advocacy of groups like the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

Among activists, an ambient anti-Israel attitude has become gradually predominant, as the scenes in London over the past three weekends have demonstrated. Israel is now regarded as a powerful and authoritarian military state rather than a refuge for a victimised people. The result is a fascinating sea change in political allegiances. Today, Labour’s historic Zionist instincts have faded. The group which had been so long championed by the British Right — Arabs in Palestine — have become the primary concern of the British Left. Even if Starmer’s beliefs on Israel are as strongly-held as Harold Wilson’s, it seems unlikely he can win his party round to the same position.

But it’s not unusual for a Labour leader to attempt to define himself against a predecessor and make a decisive break with the past. Sometimes the differentiation is gained through dint of personality, as with the war-hero Clement Attlee who contrasted starkly with his pacifist predecessor George Lansbury. And the grammar-school boy Harold Wilson, who was a clean break from his aloof public-school predecessor, Hugh Gaitskell. Sometimes it is a deliberate political ploy: Tony Blair conjured Michael Foot to condemn the lack of professionalism that characterised “Old Labour”. Corbyn, himself, was elected leader in part as a repudiation of the kind of political triangulation that defined the New Labour years.

No post-war Labour leader has gone so far as Starmer, though, and attempted to block his predecessor from standing for election. Plenty of big-hitters have been expelled from the party – in circumstances which may have resonance for Corbyn. In 2000, for example, Ken Livingstone, who served as the legendary leader of the Greater London Council in the Eighties and then as a Labour MP for 13 years, was explosively ejected from the party when he dared to stand for Mayor of London against the wishes of Tony Blair. This backfired when Livingstone then stood as an independent and decisively defeated Blair’s handpicked candidate, Frank Dobson, who secured just 13% of the vote. Might Corbyn seek to follow Livingstone’s example as he considers his own options in his Islington North constituency?

Michael Foot, too, provides a blueprint of sorts. Twenty years before he became Labour party leader, he and three other Labour MPs lost the whip, though, like Corbyn, maintained party membership.

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“Even if they expel me,” Foot declared on the eve of the decision, “I shall still go on supporting the Labour Party”. In this, Corbyn has followed Foot’s example, loyally supporting Labour candidates and canvassing with his local party in Islington. When it was proposed that losing the whip meant that Foot should also be stripped of his party membership, Foot’s ally Harold Wilson declared that such a suggestion was “plain daft”. When the Right-wing leader, Hugh Gaitskell, was replaced by Wilson two years later, the whip was restored and Foot’s political career resurrected.

Such temporary purges are not unusual. In 1939, Nye Bevan and Stafford Cripps were among those booted out of the party for advocating a Popular Front to combat fascism. These expulsions were generally unpopular, with many local Labour constituency parties issuing statements of support for the condemned. Nine months later, they were readmitted to the fold. Cripps would go on to serve as Chancellor in the Attlee Labour government, and Bevan founded the National Health Service.

But in the cases of Foot, Bevan, and Cripps, these expulsions came relatively early in their careers, as a kind of rite of passage, burnishing Left-wing credentials before entering the party establishment. To find an example of a Labour leader being expelled after rising to the top of the party, we must travel back to the interwar period and the travails of Labour’s first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald.

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In August 1931, there was a run on the pound. MacDonald told his Cabinet that severe public spending cuts would be required in order to restore confidence in the markets. These cuts were highly controversial within the Labour Party. Many Labour MPs felt that the poor had suffered enough during the depths of the Great Depression. On Sunday, 23 August 1931, the Labour Cabinet clashed for four hours over the proposals, with MacDonald ultimately failing to win over his colleagues.

That evening, a melancholy MacDonald met with King George V to keep him informed of the situation, anticipating the end of his premiership. He returned to the palace the next morning, to convey his resignation and those of his ministers. Given that Parliament was “hung”, it was expected that the King would ask Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin to try to form a new government. Yet, to almost universal astonishment, MacDonald returned to announce that George V had asked him to stay on as prime minister to form a National Government with the support of the Conservatives and Liberals.

A month later, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) voted to expel MacDonald and all those MPs who collaborated with him in the formation of the National Government, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden. Their names became bywords for treachery in the lore of the Labour Party. The historian John Shepherd reflected: “No 20th-century party leader has been more hated than Ramsay MacDonald.”

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Yet, it is worth noting that MacDonald’s successor, Arthur Henderson, felt enormous heartache over what had happened. Henderson had no love for MacDonald personally: the two barely on speaking terms even when he served as MacDonald’s Foreign Secretary. Yet, the act of expelling someone who had devoted decades of service to the party did not give Henderson any joy. Indeed, Henderson couldn’t bring himself to sign the notice of expulsion, using a rubber stamp instead. If Starmer is required to sign a similar form deciding the fate of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, we can guess that his hand will waver less than Henderson’s did.

The Labour Party is a “broad church”, a necessity for the party under a First Past the Post Electoral system. While it contains, as Peter Shore once said, the title deeds to parliamentary socialism in Britain, there have always been different interpretations and traditions of Left-wing thought within the party. Historically, its leaders recognised this diversity of thought as one of Labour’s great strengths. Harold Wilson said that the Labour Party needed both its Left and Right wings to fly.

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Keir Starmer appears to be less ecumenical. For him, the Labour Party requires strict orthodoxy, where dissenting traditions are not allowed. He has used the longlisting powers of the NEC, which has a pro-Starmer majority, to block any parliamentary candidates who show a whiff of disloyalty to the leader.

The Labour Party may have the wind at its sails in the polls now, but the Starmer project has left it without a very deep keel. The party will be weaker if his legacy in the Parliamentary Labour Party is to produce a cadre of similarly (and, therefore, narrowly) minded MPs, whose defining feature is their loyalty to him. In the short-term, blocking Jeremy Corbyn’s re-selection enables Starmer to achieve a decisive break with the recent past, but the longer-term ramifications could be less salutary.

In historical terms, this is a striking shift. For four decades, the Labour Party was the chief Eurosceptic party in British politics — far more so than the Conservative Party. Every Labour leader between Clement Attlee and Neil Kinnock had expressed opposition to joining (or support for leaving) the European Economic Community (EEC) at some point as a frontbench Labour MP. The first truly pro-European Labour leader was John Smith, who defied a three-line whip in 1972 to vote for the Conservatives’ European Communities Act. Pro-Europeanism was viewed as a Right-wing project — an attempt to constitutionalise capitalist principles in ways that would curtail the power of socialist governments to plan their national economies as they saw fit.

In the late Eighties, Labour finally abandoned its opposition to EEC membership, though the change was driven more by a response to repeated domestic defeats than a principled embrace of the European project. The promise of a “social Europe” was regarded by many Labour MPs as a chimera, but it at least offered some alternative to Thatcherism. So the party came to accept supranational legal limits on British governments, hoping the EU could mitigate the excesses of Conservative rule. Yet this Mephistophelian deal meant placing limits on future Labour governments, too. Policy tools which had once been fundamental to previous governments’ socialist programmes — trade policy, currency management, state aid and nationalisation, and capital and labour controls — were all sacrificed in exchange for the promise of minimum labour standards and regional development funds delivered through European institutions, rather than Whitehall.

Over time, more stridently pro-EU voices grew within the Labour ranks, but there was a sizeable contingent of Labour MPs even during the New Labour years who were sceptical of EU membership. Few outwardly advocated leaving the bloc, believing it to be too difficult or simply not politically feasible, but many argued against deeper integration, opposed the single currency, and raised concerns about European judges limiting labour rights. One of them, of course, was Jeremy Corbyn.

Even during the 2016 referendum itself, there was more openness to the Labour Leave argument. It’s not a coincidence that a third of people who voted for Ed Miliband to be prime minister then voted to leave the EU. For the most part, it was only after the Brexit vote that Remain voters started reacting with varying levels of horror and disgust to the idea that someone on the Left could vote for Leave. I have always found this viewpoint rather perplexing. My own arguments for leaving the EU were rooted in three core principles: democracy, socialism, and internationalism. They are both the reason I am a Labour supporter and why I was — and continue to be — a Brexit supporter.

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Joining the EEC in 1972, for instance, took a variety of national powers out of the hands of the UK Government and, by extension, parliament. EU countries are constitutionally transformed from nation-states to member-states, as the Cambridge academic Chris Bickerton has explained. This means that a variety of policy instruments are removed from national governments altogether, or their implementation becomes contingent on the wishes of the European Commission or interpretations of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Perhaps more obviously, EU membership is simply not compatible with a belief in socialist planning. At its core, the Single Market is designed to limit the power of national electorates to plan their own economies. Of course, a certain degree of national economic planning is permitted within EU membership, but it is conditional. Any time a national government takes a decision that is viewed as distorting the hallowed Single Market — which must be prioritised above all else — those policies are blocked.

Additionally, EU membership sits uneasily with genuine internationalism. Some of the most vocal Labour MPs to campaign against racism, colonialism, and global inequality — including Barbara Castle, Judith Hart, Joan Lestor, and Anne Kerr — were all staunch Eurosceptics. They condemned the EEC as a “neo-colonial” project, which created “a circle of privilege” for the “white tribes of Europe”. They believed it morally reprehensible that some of the richest, most privileged countries in the world should club together and create a superior form of citizenship in order to further enrich themselves.

Finally, the EU’s governing institutions remain mostly obscure and untransparent. We still don’t actually know which MEPs voted to make the Right-wing German politician Ursula von der Leyen President of the European Commission. Even worse, from a socialist perspective, European judges have struck down labour practices that they claim impose onerous restrictions on business, as in the infamous cases Laval and Viking. The former limited Swedish trade unions insisting on higher working conditions for construction workers from Latvia who operated in Sweden. The latter prevented a Finnish transport union from taking action against Viking Line for reclassifying their workers under the flag of a lower-wage EU country to ignore Finnish collective bargaining. Because these judgements are based on judicial interpretation of fundamental EU treaty rights, no legislation, either at a national level or from MEPs, can overturn them.

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So, if the EU has all these obviously egregious impacts on the goals of the Left, then why have so many Labour Leavers seemingly given up on Brexit? Part of the reason, it seems to me, is that the Labour Party has totally and catastrophically vacated the post-Brexit policy space to the Right. Initially, there did seem to be some interest from members of the Corbyn Shadow Cabinet to think about the opportunities Brexit might provide for a Labour government. Corbyn himself spoke passionately about forming trade agreements with countries in the Global South that would benefit and support their economic development, rather than exploit them. Given his uniquely strong connection with the grassroots party membership and his own history of opposition to EU integration, Corbyn ultimately failed to “sell” Brexit to the Labour Party.

Indeed, there are so many areas of policy where Labour ought to have spent the last few years seriously thinking about the post-Brexit opportunities. How can we use procurement better now that we are out of the Single Market? How can we follow the example of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Act to provide economic stimulus through publicly supported domestic manufacturing? Can we use the increased income from no longer subsidising European university students to support students from poorer countries instead? What would a socialist trade policy look like, once protection of continental European industries and agriculture is removed from the equation?

Instead, Labour has wasted the years since Brexit almost as much as the Tories have. Labour had stood on a manifesto in the 2017 election which promised to take the UK out of the EU, Single Market, and Customs Union. That election saw the biggest increase in its vote since the 1945 General Election and the only net gain in Labour seats since 1997. A majority of the seats Labour won in England were Leave-voting seats off the Tories.

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But then the surprise hung Parliament gave hope to certain Remainers. It didn’t matter that every household in the country had been told that the outcome of the referendum would be honoured. Facilitated by Labour’s Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer, Labour MPs — with a few honourable exceptions — did everything they could to stop the implementation of the Leave vote. As a party member my entire adult life, it was the closest I have ever been to quitting.

Today, though, the Labour Party has apparently embraced Brexit thanks to Starmer’s post-2019 Damascene conversion. But the reality is that Labour is still not making the case for Brexit on Labour terms. Virtually every time a Labour politician speaks about Brexit, it is framed as an attempt to mitigate the damage. Labour’s underlying assumption is that Brexit has failed because the UK has diverged too much from the EU. A better Brexit is one closer to the EU. But, the reality is that the UK has not diverged enough from the limitations which EU membership placed on national economic planning.

There is much to cheer about Brexit from a Left-wing perspective, but very few are brave enough to express that view. My regret is not Brexit — but that Labour has failed to rediscover its historic love for it.

Recollections of an earlier Conservative government’s failed effort to take on the unions are a bit foggier, however. Yet the failure of Edward Heath’s Industrial Relations Act 1971 might provide some caution to the Conservative’s anti-union bullishness. They might also set out an alternative path to Keir Starmer’s non-committal timidity towards industrial action.

On 14 June 1970, the reigning World Cup champions England squandered a 2-0 lead over West Germany to lose 3-2 in extra time. Four days later, the Labour Party saw its 98-seat majority vanish before its eyes. For both England and Labour, the glow of their 1966 victories had finally been extinguished.

The Labour prime minister Harold Wilson spent the following day packing away his personal belongings in 10 Downing Street. His wife Mary described the exit as “barbarous”. Crowds had gathered outside Downing Street shouting “Out! Out! Out!”, but Wilson could not go immediately to Buckingham Palace to resign because the Queen was enjoying a day at Ascot. To drown out the jeers, Wilson played The Seekers’ “The Carnival Is Over” again and again on his record player.

When the new Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, entered Downing Street, he had two overriding missions. One was to bring Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC); the other was to crush the trade unions. The picture of trade union strength in 1970 was quite different from today. About half of British workers were in unions, compared to under a quarter now. In 1970, nearly 11 million working days in Britain were lost to strikes, more than any time since the General Strike of 1926. In contrast, less than a quarter of a million days were lost to strikes in 2019, the final full year of data before the pandemic.

Nor were those in the past solely aimed at Conservative government; strike action plagued. The final years of Wilson’s reign. The vast majority of these strikes were “unofficial” — that is to say, they were called without a ballot of members. Instead, a show of hands at a union meeting or the branch executive committee would be used as the mandate for a walk out.

The Employment Secretary Barbara Castle had tried to curb these actions. A trade unionist herself, Castle also wanted to update trade union rights, which were still relying on legal protections passed in 1906. Castle’s White Paper, In Place of Strife, was intended to provide a charter of rights for unions, while also imposing certain legal responsibilities. When she presented the proposals in a secret meeting to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), however, she was met with stony silence. She later compared her efforts to win support for her reforms as “like trying to win the votes of undertakers for a recipe for immortality”.

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Once in office, Edward Heath was convinced that he could achieve what Labour failed to do. He would not only propose many of the punitive provisions outlined in In Place of Strife, but he would go further. He would establish a National Industrial Relations Court, which would have the power to grant injunctions to block strikes deemed to be injurious. It also banned the closed union shop, which had been a key Labour Party conviction (later abandoned by the Labour Party to align with European law, which forbids them).

When the Industrial Relations Bill was announced to the House of Commons in December 1970, Heath sat on the frontbenches grinning like “a Cheshire cat on a hot tin roof”, as Simon Jenkins put it. Heath thought he had forced the Labour Party into a corner. Labour would be forced either to repudiate its previous reforms and look hypocritical, or to oppose the legislation and look like it was in the pocket of the unions.

Heath’s clever scheme would backfire massively. The first thing Heath had not properly anticipated was both the skill and the scale of the opposition to the bill. It took seven months for the Government to push the bill through Parliament. In that time, it was met by ferocious resistance from Labour MPs, with the normally avuncular Willie Whitelaw being denounced as a “fascist” by Labour MPs in the House of Commons. Union activists took to the streets in enormous displays of solidarity.

To the surprise of many, Harold Wilson asked Barbara Castle to lead the charge against Heath’s trade union bill. While constantly subject to the charge of hypocrisy, Castle outlined the differences between her failed proposals and the Conservatives’. To add credibility to her arguments, Harold Wilson brought Michael Foot — doyen of the party’s Left — onto the frontbenches. Ever since his election in 1945, Foot had studiously avoided frontbench work, preferring to see himself as a principled outsider. When Foot first appeared at the despatch box, one journalist wrote in amazement: “It was as if Mary Whitehouse had turned up in the cast of Oh, Calcutta!”

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The second miscalculation Heath had made was about the Labour Party’s relationship with the unions. Rather than drive a wedge, the Industrial Relations Bill helped to reunify the Labour Party and the unions, as they vowed to work together to oppose the legislation. In February 1971, the Labour Liaison Committee was formed, with six members each from the Shadow Cabinet, Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), and the TUC. It would become a crucial policy arm for the Labour Party during those years in opposition.

Out of the Liaison Committee emerged the Social Contract — a “great compact”, as Wilson called it — between the Labour Party and the unions. Labour vowed that it would repeal the Industrial Relation Act in the first session of the new Parliament. It would accompany this repeal with a raft of social welfare legislation and redistribution. Unions, in turn, would work to keep down wage demands through voluntary wage restraint.

In contrast, Heath continued to promote the image that he was in a great battle against the unions. This was his third miscalculation. Once he finally passed the Industrial Relations Act in June 1971, Heath had in effect taken ownership for subsequent industrial strife. He had passed a bill which was meant to end strikes, yet strikes only increased after the bill’s passage. In 1972, there were nearly 24 million working days lost to strike action, unseen since the General Strike.

Heath’s National Industrial Relations Court began imprisoning trade unionists who had gone on strike, contrary to the court’s injunctions. These arrests, like the famous Pentonville Five case, only provoked a further storm of industrial fury and unrest. In December 1970, when the legislation was first proposed, Heath had anticipated some backlash. “It is the storm before the calm,” he warned. But, he vowed: “Your government will not bow before the storm.”

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Yet, as Heath’s government trundled on, the storm got worse. The oil price spike in 1973, combined with domestic industrial unrest in the energy sector, led to the government imposing a highly unpopular three-day week and the rationing of electricity usage. The Government was struggling to survive, and the whiff of an early election hung in the air.

In a December 1973 meeting of the Liaison Committee, it was agreed that even if the Government tried to frame an upcoming general election as a battle between Britain and the unions, Labour must stand by the unions. Labour’s January 1974 party political broadcast emphasised its productive relationship with the unions, where they would be “working together” in the “national interest”, not seeking to prolong the fight.

The Labour Party saw an opportunity to use its union connections for its own political benefit. The Social Contract, agreed by the Liaison Committee, became a clever political ploy for Wilson. He was able to promote the image that he and the unions were equals and on the kinds of terms that could forge an agreement. A vote for Labour in the February 1974 election became a vote to end the industrial strife by supporting the party that had a good working relationship with the unions. On 4 March 1974, Harold Wilson strolled through the steps of Downing Street once more.

While the strength of the trade union movement today is not what it was in the Seventies, there are important lessons for Sunak and Starmer. First, for Sunak: Heath overplayed his hand. He thought he could “take on” the unions and promised that his legislation would do just that. He was caught off-guard by the strength of the solidarity of the union movement and its ability to adapt. Rather than quell industrial strife, he only provoked more conflict.

The second lesson, for Starmer, is that Wilson refused to play into Tory hands. He knew that Labour’s relationship with the unions was a sensitive topic, particularly after In Place of Strife. Yet rather than think he could make political gains by bashing the unions and trying to “out-Heath Heath”, he opted for a co-operative relationship with the union leadership. The Liaison Committee between the party and unions proved to be a great success, helping to develop a set of policy proposals and a working relationship that would stabilise Wilson’s tenure. In the February 1974 election, Wilson could credibly argue he had the relationship with the unions that could settle the industrial dispute.

Rather than see unions as the embarrassing relative at the party, a proper working relationship of mutual respect, support, and solidarity might just be the winning formula for Labour — especially when contrasted with Tory division and disarray. There are already some signs that Labour is adopting this approach, with recent communications condemning the Conservatives for threatening to fire striking nurses.

Sunak, on the other hand, seems to be repeating Heath’s mistakes. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill will not end industrial disruption, but in claiming that it will, Sunak is setting himself up for failure. If Sunak repeats Heath’s famous question of 1974, “Who governs?”, the answer after the next general election may well not be him.

The year was 1976. The factory was the Grunwick film processing plant, and strike became a cause célèbre of the British trade union movement. Dozens of Labour MPs visited the picket line. One MP, Audrey Wise, was left “black and blue” after she spotted a young woman on the picket line being dragged away by police. Wise intervened to prevent her arrest; the police dropped the woman, turned on Wise, and said: “You’ll do.” The next day photographs of the Labour MP behind bars flashed across the national papers.

A month earlier, ministers in the Labour government visited the same picket line. “We came down to show our solidarity,” Education Secretary Shirley Williams explained. One of the picketers, Mahmood Ahmad, thanked the Cabinet ministers for their “great morale boost”.

It was inevitable that the then prime minister, Jim Callaghan, would face scrutiny over his Cabinet ministers’ appearance. During Prime Minister’s Questions, John Stokes, a Conservative MP and member of the Right-wing Monday Club, rose to level the charge. He asked if Callaghan would “rebuke” his ministers for the “most unfitting action” of joining a picket line. “No, Sir,” came the prime Minister’s defiant reply. “I should have thought that the honourable gentleman would go and do the same thing.”

Almost half a century later, it is difficult to imagine Keir Starmer uttering the same words. In the current standoff over railway workers’ pay and job security, he has declared that he is “against the strikes”, going so far as to sack Shadow Transport Minister Sam Tarry after appearing on an RMT picket line. Echoing his boss, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “a serious party of government does not join picket lines.”

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It was a remarkable display of historical illiteracy. Even the so-called Labour “modernisers” of the Eighties and Nineties did not punish their MPs for standing on the picket line. In 1988, Shadow Health Minister Harriet Harman joined nurses on a Unison picket line outside Maudsley Hospital in her constituency, and faced no rebuke from leader Neil Kinnock. A decade later, Gordon Brown’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, Don Touhig, visited a CWU picket line outside a factory in his constituency; no fuss was made. In 2006, a member of Tony Blair’s Cabinet, Hazel Blears, appeared on a Unison picket line outside a local hospital. She was criticised in the press for protesting the consequences of her own government’s health reforms, but there was no suggestion she should be sacked.

Lammy’s comment was indicative of a mindset common among Labour strategists today: that the party will lose elections if it is seen as too close to unions. Often they point to the Callaghan government’s fall in 1979, which they blame on the breakdown of industrial relations during the previous “Winter of Discontent”. Callaghan’s defence of his ministers on the Grunwick picket line is now regarded as an act of tremendous naivety.

In the following decades, modernising leaders Neil Kinnock and John Smith attempted to make some reforms to trade union power within the Labour Party, notably by reducing the unions’ voting strength in party conferences and in the selection process of parliamentary candidates and leader. Yet neither wished to challenge outright the Labour Party’s connections with the unions — they had, after all, founded the Labour Party. In his final party conference speech before his death, John Smith argued that British democracy itself “springs from…the trade union campaigns for the rights of people at work”.

When Tony Blair became leader the following year, this rhetoric quickly evaporated. Stan Greenberg, an American political consultant, told Blair that his “willingness to take on and master the unions” would be the defining feature of his leadership. Greenberg’s research found that although Labour was leading in the polls, “a third of Conservative defectors to Labour worry about excessive union influence”. What was needed was “relentless reassurance” that “the unions no longer seemed to control Labour”.

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Mindful of this, Blair went to great lengths to reassure the public that the unions had little sway over the New Labour project. As one union official memorably put it, under New Labour “unions were seen as a virility test; bashing the unions was seen as macho and a way of distancing yourself from the mad auntie in the attic”. And so in the 1997 election, Blair promised that “we will not be held to ransom by the unions”, rejecting the longstanding view that the Labour Party was the “political arm of the trade union movement”. Instead, he declared, Labour was the political arm of the “British people”. Tony Benn, still a Labour MP at the time, bitterly remarked that Tony Blair was the political arm of the Daily Mail.

In government, Blair was broadly able to resist trade union influence because he found alternative means of funding the party, relying on the wealthy. During the Kinnock leadership, there would have been none of the slick Walworth Road research and PR operation without trade union money. In the early Nineties, well over three-fifths of Labour’s funding came from the trade unions. But by 1998, Blair had shrunk union revenue to just 30%, with 20% of party funds coming from the newly created “High Value Donors Unit”.

Yet Labour’s divorce from the union movement was far from finalised. As recently as 2019, Starmer himself joined a BFAWU picket line of McDonald’s workers who were on strike over low pay. It’s only in the years since that, in spite of standing on a radical manifesto when he sought to replace Jeremy Corbyn in 2020, Keir Starmer has spent his leadership renouncing Labour’s once unashamedly supportive relationship with the unions.

This is a mistake. In a YouGov poll last month, just 31% of the public said they believe Labour should distance itself from the unions in part (18%) or completely (13%). While over 80% of the public in the Callaghan years thought the unions were too powerful, just 36% did during the Corbyn years. Today, 58% of the public say the rail strikes are justified, and 66% of the public blame the Government for them.

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None of which should come as a surprise. Britain, after all, is no longer living in the shadow of the Winter of Discontent and untrammelled trade-union power. Years of Thatcherite assault and New Labour neglect have seen to that. Today’s concerns are of a different order: Britain is now living in the shadow of the financial crisis and austerity; the public realm has been hollowed out; public services are not working; living standards are still below pre-financial crisis levels; the ongoing energy crisis could see households paying as much as £500 a month on their bills next winter.

There is, to put it simply, nothing like the relative prosperity and confidence of the Nineties. A failed economic model is not a bad memory; it is a living reality. Except, this time, the British public recognise that the culprit is not the power of working people but a vulture capitalism that has picked off the dying carcass of the British state. The Conservative leadership contest has descended into a Margaret Thatcher tribute act. Labour’s response to this crisis cannot be a Tony Blair tribute act. If New Labour was about meeting the politics of the moment, Starmer’s muffled response to the crisis of low pay is anything but.

But the answer is not so simple. Nuclear bombs have been dropped in conflict just once, in August 1945, by the United States. The horrific scenes of destruction and human suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and a death toll estimated to be about 200,000 civilians — provoked widespread condemnation. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in the New York Times that the bombings were “morally indefensible”. Even hardened military figures were aghast. “We had adopted the ethical stand common to the barbarians in the Dark Ages,” grieved Admiral William Leahy, the US’s highest-ranking military commander.

Years later, the former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower told Newsweek: “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”. It was a comment that alluded to the military tactics behind the decision, which are separate from the more emotive philosophical debate over the morality of dropping the bomb. What does it mean for it to be “necessary” to drop a nuclear weapon? If it wasn’t necessary, then why did the US government — indeed, why would any government — willingly inflict such pain and suffering on civilians if there was a legitimate alternative path to peace?

The man who made the decision, Harry Truman, gave a lecture in 1959 to Columbia University students about the powers of the presidency. The talk was described as “earnest, good-humoured, and sometimes salty”, and was well-received by the 1,200-strong audience. But during the question and answer session, things took a more serious turn. A student thought it was odd that Truman had skirted over the nuclear question. When confronted with it, the usually good-natured Truman became a touch defensive:

“It was used in the war, and for your information, there were more people killed by the fire bombs in Tokyo than dropping of the atomic bombs accounted for. It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness. The dropping of the bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives”.

This is the orthodox view: dropping nuclear bombs saved lives. In this telling, the Japanese were not prepared to surrender, meaning the US and Soviet Union had two choices. They could either launch a land invasion, something on the scale of the D-Day landings in France, in which an estimated million US soldiers alone would be lost. Or they could prevent such a bloody undertaking by shocking the Japanese leadership into capitulation.

Death was not enough. The fire bombings of Tokyo, in which 100,000 people died in one night, had not proved sufficient. Something beyond conventional warfare was needed. Nuclear warfare was, as Truman’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson put it, the “least abhorrent choice”; though the bombs killed hundreds of thousands, even more would have died had they not been dropped.

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The orthodox account depends on a number of key claims, including that the Japanese were unwilling to surrender in the summer of 1945. These claims have since been challenged by “revisionist” historians, who argue that Japan was in fact on the verge of surrender when the bombs were dropped.

The previous summer, Japan had lost Saipan, an island in the South Pacific, to America, meaning its mainland was within range of USAF B-29 bombers. This made Japan highly vulnerable to sustained US attacks from the air. On the night of 9 March 1945, over 300 B-29 bombers descended on Tokyo, inflicting the deadliest bombing raid in world history. After that, the revisionist account goes, the question was not whether Japan would surrender but on what terms.

The revisionists place heavy emphasis on contemporary reports that suggest the Emperor and some (but not all) of his advisers were inclined to surrender, so long as his position could be guaranteed. A month before Hiroshima, Navy Secretary James Forrestal wrote in his diary: “The first real evidence of a Japanese desire to get out of the war came today… [indicating] the Emperor’s strong desire to secure a termination of the war”. A 1946 report by the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded: “in all probability prior to 1 November 1945 [the planned invasion date], Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”

The revisionists believe that the US rushed to use nuclear weapons not because of Japanese intransigence, but because of the Soviet Union. Throughout the war, the USSR and Japan had honoured a neutrality pact. Stalin, however, assured Truman’s predecessor Franklin Roosevelt that three months after victory in Europe was achieved, the Soviet Union would turn its attention to the Pacific and declare war on Japan. Truman and his closest advisers believed that Roosevelt had already conceded far too much to Stalin at Yalta, effectively giving the USSR free rein to dominate eastern Europe. They were not keen for the same thing to happen in Japan.

The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. On August 8, exactly three months after the surrender of Germany, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The following day, the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The day after, the Japanese government offered its surrender. The revisionists look at this timeline and intuit that the nuclear bombs were dropped primarily for political rather than military reasons. The US wished to deny the USSR credit for ending the war, which would have given Stalin greater leverage in the post-war settlement.

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These two accounts — the orthodox and the revisionist — are the dominant explanations offered by historians, but they are not the only ones. Some scholars focus on the internal politics of Japan, arguing that the key figures who were ready for peace, not least the Emperor, were poor at communicating their wishes. They were, perhaps, drowned out by the powerful voices who wanted to continue the war. Many in the rank and file of the military were believed to be prepared to fight at all costs. US propaganda, which was racially inflected, tended to exploit the perception of Japan as a “warrior culture”, in which people would choose death over the shame of defeat. It was hard for Americans to discern Japan’s true intentions.

Other accounts suggest Truman was locked into decisions made by his predecessor. It was Roosevelt who had pushed for “unconditional surrender” at the Cairo conference in 1943. And the idea of dropping nuclear bombs on Japan was one Roosevelt had first dreamed up. In September 1944, he and Churchill met at FDR’s estate in Hyde Park, New York and agreed that “when a bomb is finally available, it might perhaps, after mutual consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender”. Once Truman became president after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, only one thing could apparently bring about “unconditional surrender”, and that was the bomb.

All of these interpretations offer important lessons to today’s leaders, but that last one is particularly chilling. If dropping the nuclear bomb was not militarily necessary to bring about an end to the war, then Truman opted for a decision that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in part to save face. Once the US was committed to demanding “unconditional surrender” — for which there was enormous public support — Truman could hardly change his mind and say he wanted a negotiated peace. The new president, who had no political mandate of his own, would risk tanking his own domestic popularity before his term had even begun.

In other words, leaders must avoid making dangerous commitments from which either they or their successors will struggle to back down. Fortunately, in today’s conflict, no one has rashly insisted on “unconditional surrender”. A negotiated settlement is still possible.

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With that in mind, it’s worth considering the vital role of intermediaries in such high-powered conflicts. With the help of a neutral party, could the Japanese peace camp have communicated its position more clearly, so as to assist those within the US administration who might have urged caution? The Japanese saw the Soviets as possible intermediaries, a view that was shattered when Stalin declared war on them. Today, Israel seems to be the go-between, though the nation has been criticised by Western commentators for not condemning Putin.

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At Columbia University, Truman was asked, “With the development of nuclear weapons, do you think the United States would be willing to risk entering a third world war if a small European country in the Nato pact were to be involved in an act of aggression?” His answer was tepid: “I don’t know”. On consideration, he explained that the circumstances were now different, because unlike in 1945, the US was no longer the sole possessor of nuclear weapons: “I don’t think there’s any possible chance of doing what I tried to begin with, when we had absolute control of them, of nuclear weapons”.

This, strangely enough, is cause for optimism. When the US dropped its bombs on Japan, there was no other nuclear power to retaliate. In the intervening years, the threat of mutually assured destruction has seemingly prevented any other country from using such dangerous force.

It’s also worth observing that, while Ukrainians have shown an admirable fighting spirit in defending their nation from Russia, in the eyes of their people the two nations have a lot more in common than the Japanese did with the Americans. There has been no real attempt to use racial differences to demonise the enemy.

There is still a chance, then, that this war can be resolved through conventional methods. Putin is not in the same place Truman found himself in. Putin does not view it as “necessary” to drop a nuclear bomb. It has not yet become Putin’s “least abhorrent choice”. Let us hope it never does.

Unsurprisingly, Lightfoot’s consequent identification of “systemic racism” as the cause of these disparities provoked derision among her critics. The city, after all, is governed by a black mayor with an almost entirely Democratic city council, where the majority of aldermen are black or Hispanic. At the state and federal level, Chicago is represented by a group of multi-racial, left-of-centre politicians. The city even has the longest, unbroken tradition of black political representation of anywhere in the United States.

This paradox is at the heart of the city’s problems with race, and demonstrates the limitations of a political agenda focused primarily on descriptive representation. Chicago has long had “black faces in high places”, but too often this did not translate into substantive change. Indeed, the health disparities identified in the CDPH report are the consequence of a complicated political history, which reveals not just the dilemma of black electoral politics in one city but the problem of using the city as the vehicle for social reform.

As Barack Obama — whose foundation boasts of his “deep Windy City roots” — once described, Chicago is regarded by many as “the capital of the African American community in the country”. Founded by an African-Caribbean explorer in the eighteenth century, black people have lived in the Chicago area longer than any group except for Native Americans. Their long history of residence and spatial concentration, due to residential segregation, made Chicago the epicentre of black political life in the United States. Given this backdrop, the historian Timuel Black insisted, the first African American president could only have come from Chicago.

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It was, as the authors of the classic 1945 work Black Metropolis describe, the “city of refuge” for African Americans; first, as the terminus of a line on the Underground Railroad and, later, as the place of settlement for hundreds of thousands fleeing the tyranny of the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration in the first half of the twentieth century.

But while life in Chicago was perceived as a better alternative to life in the South, formal and informal restrictions on black employment and housing, as well as racially motivated violence, ensured that African Americans operated separately and unequally from the city’s white population. When Martin Luther King came to protest the city’s residential racial segregation in 1966, he commented: “I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hateful as I’ve seen here in Chicago.”

And yet it was precisely this racial segregation that provided African Americans with electoral power. Their size and spatial concentration within the city due to severe racial segregation created powerful blocs of African American voters, who were the plurality in numerous city, state, and even federal districts. The First Congressional District (IL:01), anchored in the South Side, elected the first northern black member of Congress in 1928. It has been represented by African Americans ever since. Barack Obama, incidentally, unsuccessfully sought election to this seat in 2000; former Black Panther, Bobby Rush who defeated Barack Obama — the only candidate ever to do so — still represents the First District.

For decades, however, black politics in Chicago was dominated by white-led political machines. These were informal political organisations, usually dominated by a charismatic leader, engaged in patronage in exchange for votes.

The most notorious was the machine of Richard Daley, known euphemistically as the ‘Organization’. Daley père et fils governed Chicago for 43 of the years between 1955 to 2011. At his height, it was said that the elder Mayor Daley could appoint 45,000 patronage positions — roughly ten times the number appointed by the President of the United States. Daley’s primary constituency was the city’s Irish-American population, and he did little to alleviate the conditions of the city’s African American population.

In these years, many black leaders were complicit with the Organization, albeit always as junior members. During the elder Daley’s mayoralty, the six black aldermen on Chicago City Council were so total in their loyalty and quiet in their criticism that they were known as the ‘Silent Six’. They operated what became known as the black ‘sub-machine’, whereby the Organization devolved some degree of patronage power to black leadership in exchange for their loyalty. Such was Daley’s control of the city’s black leadership that the entertainer Dick Gregory once remarked: “You have to respect Daley. He has a big job being mayor, governor, prosecutor, and president of the Chicago Branch of the NAACP.”

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In response to the machine’s malevolence, from the Sixties, reformist black leaders stood as candidates independent from the Organization. The Black independent movement came out of the civil rights imperative, and the heart of the movement was in Chicago’s multi-racial enclave of Hyde Park on the South Side.

One of its leading figures was Richard Newhouse, who was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1967. Over the next quarter century, Newhouse operated independently of the machine, often threatening to abstain on key votes in the closely divided state senate until the machine conceded to his demands. Through this strategy, he was able to secure the passage of the Illinois Fair Housing Practices Act. In 1975, when Richard J Daley ran for a sixth term as mayor, Newhouse stood against him, making him the first African American candidate for mayor of Chicago.

Don Rose, who was active in Hyde Park politics during Newhouse’s tenure, remembers that in the 1960s and 1970s Newhouse ‘was often cited as [one day] our first black president’. Newhouse never achieved this accolade, but his state senate district did produce the first black president. In 1995, four years after Newhouse’s retirement, Barack Obama declared his intention to fill the seat. At his announcement event, the outgoing incumbent gushed: “Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district, a tradition that continued with me and most recently with Senator Newhouse.”

In the state legislature, Obama pushed for a reformist policy agenda while largely resisting the patronage of City Hall. He even asked his wife Michelle to quit her job in the Daley administration as he was preparing to run for the state senate. Michelle’s family had been supporters of the Organization, and her late father had been a precinct captain for the Daley machine in the 5^th Ward.

Obama, however, understood the importance of maintaining good terms with black machine ‘regulars’, such as the State Senate President Emil Jones. He was willing to work with the machine, who provided him with favours in return, not least the freedom to redraw his legislative district boundaries after the 2000 Census in his favour. Obama was a reformer but a tactical one.

In 1969, the Northwestern University political scientist Paul Friesema predicted that in the coming years, African Americans would win more mayoralties across the United States. Cities, which had once been overwhelmingly white, were becoming more diverse, and in some places African Americans could command a plurality of the vote. Friesema warned, however, that black political power at the city level would constitute a “hollow prize”.

Part of the reason why African Americans were becoming more numerically dominant was due to the departure of white, middle-class residents to the suburbs. As whites moved out, they took their wealth with them, and city property values declined. Local government is dependent on property tax for its funding: the fewer high value properties, the less revenue to spend on the city’s social priorities. It is a constant dilemma of urban politics. With tight borders and relative ease of transport in and out of the city, it is easy for a high wealth resident to relocate to a lower-tax jurisdiction yet still enjoy the benefits of proximity to the city. Zoning laws are then used to ensure that only high value properties can be built in these localities.

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As Friesema predicted, in the Eighties, Chicago elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington, who emerged from the Black independent movement around Hyde Park. Washington attempted to pursue policies which would benefit the city’s African American population, such as creating job centres in the South and West Sides. He even met a young community organiser named Barack Obama at one of them in 1987, shortly before his sudden death. Yet, for all of Washington’s charisma, courage, and vision, his efforts were stymied by an uncooperative council and constant lack of resources, as the Reagan administration asked cities to take on more responsibilities with less funding.

Mayor Lightfoot’s public health declaration, on the other hand, was unusual in that she was able to accompany it with substantive resources, but this was entirely a product of one-off $1.2 billion Covid-19 relief allocated to the city by the federal government. The vast majority of this money had to be used to plug operational funding gaps, including, controversially, $280 million to the Chicago Police Department.

To tackle the public health emergency of racism, Lightfoot announced $9.6 million to be allocated to the establishment of six Equity Zones across the city which are meant to “create community-based stakeholder coalitions to develop targeted strategies to improve community and individual wellness”. These may be warm words, but unless accompanied by wider reform and much greater resources, it is hard to see how such initiatives can be any more than a sticking plaster.

Black politics in Chicago, as in the rest of the United States, is not a monolith. Black nationalists, socialists, and reform-minded liberals contended with transactional black leaders, who too often accepted the status quo in exchange for political status.

Yet, even after more radical black leadership gained control of the city, change has been difficult to achieve due to the limited resources available to city governments. As Chicago has learnt, victory in municipal government is too often a hollow prize.

Far from the economic uplands promised by those who campaigned to remain, British industry was “bruised, lacerated, and bleeding to death because of the Common Market”. EEC membership meant British taxpayers were subsidising “fat cows” in Germany. “In future, all harvest festivals will be held in hangers at Heathrow”, he joked to thunderous applause. In even more vivid language, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Peter Shore, told delegates that EEC membership constituted “a rape of the British people and British power and the constitution”.

When the time came to vote on whether to leave or remain in the EEC, 71% of Labour delegates voted to leave. Brexit, as we now call it, was Labour Party policy.

The 1980 conference vote would have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with British Labour history. Two special party conferences on Europe had already voted against membership: one in 1971 against joining and one in 1975 against remaining. Indeed, Euroscepticism had been the mainstream view of the British Labour movement ever since Clement Attlee rejected French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman’s plan for European unity in 1950.

The Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC), with Attlee’s full support, declared: “No Socialist Party with the prospect of forming a government could accept a system by which important fields of national policy were surrendered to a supranational European representative authority.” It was intuitively understood by a vast majority in the Labour Party that entanglement in the European Economic Community ran contrary to three of the party’s core principles: democracy, socialism and internationalism.

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Following the 1980 conference vote, the Labour NEC began serious discussions to flesh out Labour’s Brexit policy. Labour’s MEPs were invited to London to help; it may seem rather unlikely now, but in the Eighties they were overwhelmingly Eurosceptic.

Then, at the 1981 Labour Party conference in Brighton, the NEC endorsed “withdrawal” as official Labour Party policy. By an even larger margin than the year before, 84% of delegates voted in favour of leaving the EEC. Hardly any activists could be described as “Remainers”.

In the following months, the NEC set about drawing up a “blueprint” for withdrawal. Unlike David Cameron, who blocked efforts to prepare for Brexit before the 2016 EU referendum, the Labour Party considered it vitally important to assess the future relationship between the UK and EEC before the withdrawal process began.

So in December, a delegation of Labour MPs went to Brussels to discuss Labour’s plan for withdrawal with the European Commission. A confidential memorandum of the meeting, prepared for the NEC and held in the Labour History Archive at the People’s History Museum, details how the Labour delegation was led by Judith Hart, a Left-wing Labour MP who had served in the Wilson government as Overseas Development Minister.

Hart and fellow Eurosceptic Barbara Castle, the leader of Labour’s MEPs, were the only two women in Wilson’s first cabinet. Undeterred by the sexism of the age — one Cabinet colleague dismissed her as “a prattling woman” — Hart was a passionate advocate for anti-colonial causes. She regarded the EEC as a “neo-colonial” project where the “white tribes of Europe” were teaming up together to create a circle of privilege. In Brussels, Hart was joined by three other Eurosceptic Labour MPs: Gwyneth Dunwoody, Denzil Davies and Doug Hoyle, father of the current Speaker of the House of Commons.

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Their initial reception from the EEC Commissioners was not encouraging. The notes record: “the original shape of the programme gave the impression that the delegation was to be taken on a ‘Cook’s tour’ of the Commission with much time to be spent on officials expounding the virtues of the EEC”. However, after a few phone calls and the intervention of British Labour MEPs, led by Barbara Castle, “the nature of the meetings changed completely and we were able to fulfil our original intentions” — namely, the technicalities of a Labour Brexit.

The Labour negotiators met with a dozen members of the Commission, including British Commissioner Christopher Tugendhat, a former Conservative MP and uncle of the current Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat. Curiously, the meetings went smoothly, with the exception of those with the British officials. “On the whole the discussions were both serious and fruitful and conducted in an atmosphere of considerable friendliness,” the Labour internal report reflected. “It was quite noticeable”, however, that the only “hostility that was shown came from the British officials”.

Predictably, many of Labour’s discussions with the EEC Commission — whether on trade, agriculture, Ireland or employment — presaged the kinds of wrangling which occurred after the 2016 referendum.

The Commission, for example, told the Labour negotiators that there were only two options available for a post-Brexit trade deal. The UK would either need to join the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), or it would have to trade with the EEC on GATT (WTO) rules – a “no deal” Brexit in post-2016 parlance. The Commissioners stated: “it would not be possible for the Community, if only for political reasons, to negotiate a better deal with the UK”.

Already, the EEC was playing hardball. A bespoke trade deal between the EEC and UK was ruled out before the starting gun had even fired. “The officials were keen to point out that we could expect no special considerations from the Community once we had withdrawn.” the Labour report reflected.

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The Labour team’s response equally mirrored the concerns of many Brexiteers in recent years. They ruled out joining EFTA because it would continue to subject the UK to EEC rules without having political influence to shape them. It meant that the only option before Labour was no deal. “The effect on the UK would,” said Labour’s negotiators, “be at worst highly marginal”; it would spur British manufacturing, while freeing the UK to form trade agreements with non-EEC countries on more favourable terms.

Ireland also proved a thorny topic. The Labour negotiators were comfortable with having an open border, but “Commission officials saw the problems in terms of the UK having to stop the ‘leakage’”. The Commission argued “certain controls on cross border commercial activity” would be necessary. A briefing note sent back to the Labour leader Michael Foot about the visit concluded: “It was agreed that the border with Ireland might create some problems and need further investigation.”

Finally, the two sides discussed the timeline for withdrawal. At that time, there was no provision similar to Article 50 that spelt out the specific way a member state could leave the EEC. It was agreed that 18 months to two years would be sufficient to draw up a withdrawal agreement initiating the formal process of leaving.

But there was a catch. The EEC negotiators said the agreement of all member states would be required for Britain to leave the organisation; the UK Labour representatives were not convinced. What would happen if a Labour government just unilaterally left the EEC without an agreement, they asked?

Thirty years on, the EEC’s response sounds eerily familiar. According to Labour’s internal report: “The officials stated at this point that ‘there had to be an agreement otherwise it would be terrible!’. They declined to speculate further.”