A Labour MP returning to parliament after a period out, becoming Labour Leader within a very short time, seen by many as a leftward move in the parliamentary party?

Not just 2026, but also November 1922 – when Ramsey MacDonald was elected as Labour leader, deposing the incumbent JR Clynes. MacDonald gained 52% of the vote to Clynes’ 48%.

This was actually the first election to a post called ‘Leader’. (Previous incumbents has been simply called the chair of the parliamentary party. Changing the name was part of a process of the Labour Party gradually adopting more of the ways of ‘normal’ – bourgeois – political parties).

MacDonald was a fair bit faster than Burnham – he became leader just six days after returning to parliament (though it was 14 months before he became Prime Minister). MacDonald had resigned as parliamentary chair eight years earlier, opposing Labour’s support for the First World War.

MacDonald’s 52% was actually just 61 votes though; the electorate at the time was the MPs alone – which is actually how it stayed for almost the next six decades. Every subsequent Labour leadership election from Arthur Henderson in 1931 to Michael Foot in 1980 was solely the preserve of the MPs, with no involvement of any membership. (Though the fact that MPs were mostly drawn from the trades union movement in those days did create structural links with the movement beyond parliament, but at a very bureaucratic level).

The election of leader became an a formal item of business for Labour MPs at the beginning of each parliamentary session, and challenges to leaders were rare. Attlee was challenged in 1935, but he had been interim leader for just a month before that election.

The exception was the right wing leader since 1955, Hugh Gaitskill, who was challenged two years running, in both 1960 and 1961, with the challengers (Wilson, then Greenwood) gaining a third, then a quarter of the votes. With the fights in the party over nuclear weapons taking place at that time, and Gaitskill’s moves to remove Clause Four from Labour Party rules, there is little doubt that involvement of the wider party could have led to a different outcome.

The only time that there has been a contested leadership election while Labour has been in office was in 1976, when Callaghan narrowly beat Michael Foot. Again, wider involvement of the party could well have changed that result.

Those facts, and the experience of the Wilson and Callaghan governments, led to that wider involvement eventually being agreed. The 1980 Labour Party conference approved a proposal – moved by Eric Heffer on behalf of the NEC – for a widening of the franchise. A special conference in January 1981 agreed the new rules for an ‘electoral college’, with party members having for the first time a vote for the leadership (collectively through their CLPs until 1993) alongside MPs and the affiliated unions. This was part of a programme of democratisation of the party, along with CLPs’ rights to select their parliamentary candidates even when they had a sitting MP (won at conference) and democratic control of the manifesto (not won).

The deputy leader contest later that year between Healy and Benn was the first in which anyone but MPs had a vote.

Nominations were a matter for MPs alone still – with a threshold initially of 5% of the parliamentary party. (It has gone up and down several times since then, and we have four times that now).

In 2014, under Miliband, the electoral collage was amended to individual voting in all parts of the electrical college, with a votes also for ‘registered supporters’ – meaning that members of non-affiliated unions could vote too, and even members of none.

The right of trades unions and CLPs to nominate too came in 2018, as a result of a comprehensive Democracy Review under Corbyn. The proposal from the review was was equal (10%) thresholds for trades union, CLP and MP nominations, with the 10% from any of the three being sufficient to get a candidate onto the ballot paper (subject to a 5% minimum PLP nomination).

The rules eventually adopted in 2018 reduced the CLP and trades union threshold to 5%, but increased the PLP minimum to 10%. Three years later, under Starmer, it was doubled to 20%, and ‘registered supporters’ scrapped.

Something that was not anywhere in the 2018 report, or in the 2018 rules, and is not in the current rules, is the idea that any of the three nominating groups go first, limiting the nominating rights of others.

That is something that was invented by the NEC in 2020, more as a copy of the method used by the Tories. Without winning (or even proposing) a rule change to say it, the NEC turned the MP nominations into ‘first stage’ such that the trades unions and CLPs are only allowed to nominate candidates who have already passed the threshold of MP nominations. They repeated the same breach of party rules last year for the Deputy election, even though the rules explicitly say that CLPs can nominate anyone who is an MP.

An accurate – and democratic – implementation of the rules would be to open and close all nominations at the same time, allowing CLPs and unions to nominate and push for their own preferred candidate. Had that happened last year for the Deputy Leadership, Bell Ribiero-Addy would still not have been on the ballot paper, not meeting the MP threshold, but CLPs and unions wanting to express their preference for her would have been allowed to do so, and those numbers known – rather that this being a privilege for MPs alone.

And that is how nominations for leadership would be being managed now, if the NEC stuck to the rules.

From the point of view of that rule book, Labour’s leadership elections are actually vastly more democratic now than before 2018, when only MPs could nominate, and before 1981 when only MPs could vote – even though the manipulation by the right-controlled NEC and party machinery seeks to gut those rules. (Those who suggest that Labour has a past ‘golden age’ and is an entirely different thing now neglect those democratic changes and the struggles that took place to achieve them).

But the 1980 conference vote was just one part of a wider struggle for accountability and democracy – of which NEC control of the manifesto was never won, and mandatory reselection of MPs has been rolled back to a ‘trigger ballot’.

The aim was not to win accountability of the PLP just through a wider franchise for a leadership election, but by also giving CLPs rights to select their own candidates and the elected NEC control of the manifesto. Even the two steps that were won presented such a change to the power balance in the Labour Party that the right organised to reverse and undermine them, bit by bit. Whilst leadership elections are on paper more democratic, we also have vastly more NEC interference in CLPs’ selections of candidates, and a vastly weakened conference – undermined by the existence of the NPF as well as manipulation by the Conference Arrangements Committee

As one comparison put it, you can’t make a half a revolution, or half a democratisation of Labour, any more than you can jump half way across a ravine. Gains won are gains to defend, use, and build on, or they are gains lost.

The same was true in the famous ‘Scarborough 1960’ case when nuclear disarmament was won at conference, only to be fought against by the right over the next 12 months in a battle where the Tribune-led left looked for compromise, and lost. Before then no-one would have dreamed of saying that conference policy wasn’t pretty much binding on the PLP. After 1961 conference increasingly lost its power.

We should protest the NEC’s complete removal of CLPs from this leadership process, but more importantly we should build for a thorough democratisation of Labour – including a sovereign conference – so that the PLP is accountable to the movement. One of the most fundamental tasks of socialists in the Labour Party is the fight for that democracy.

Every time party members are pushed away from engagement in policy (though manipulation of conference or the mystery that is the NPF) or from engagement in internal elections (whether for candidate for GM Mayor, party leader, or even their own candidates for parliament) more and more are pushed away from membership.

If party members have no say in policy, or in who their candidate it, or who the leadership is, then they are effectively just passive ‘supporters, not members. So what would be the point? It would lead to swathes of people leaving if they don’t like the particular policy or leadership of the day – only staying as a supporter when that leadership is entirely aligned with their own views. We have seen that happen both from right (people leaving now because they think Starmer has been badly treated) and the left (leaving because they Starmer had abandoned the pledges he got elected on). The battle for democracy is a necessary battle against the slow decline forced on the party by a factional autocratic right.

That is why we are encouraging discussion on our draft democracy charter.