Extracted from Richard Price’s article on Labour Hub

Seven months ago, Morgan McSweeney was hailed as an electoral genius. The Party is currently polling lower than it has at any general election since 1918.

Depending on the source, the Starmer government’s loss in popularity in its first six months is the steepest or second steepest of any incoming government since the Second World War. What’s worse, this doesn’t feel like a temporary blip of the kind that previous Labour governments bounced back from, but already a long-term trend.

While the leadership might think of councillors as its soldiers, there are 6,500 of them and, outside of the small number of identifiable left councillors, there is a much larger group with centrist politics but who aren’t joined at the hip with McSweeney’s project. Councillors have been at the sharp end of public anger not only over the Party’s lamentable performance on Gaza but also with winter fuel payments, the two-child limit, ‘trousergate’, retreats on green policies and recent Reform-chasing announcements on asylum and immigration.

Since October 7th 2024, something like 150 councillors have resigned from the party, some in ones and twos, others in groups. Nor has it been wholly about Gaza. In January this year, 20 councillors in Broxtowe, Nottinghamshire, resigned the Labour whip, citing not only Gaza but also the two-child limit, winter fuel payments and the treatment of WASPI women.

On top of that, many Labour councillors are staring down the barrel of losing their seats in May’s local elections. Councils face a huge funding gap – £2.3bn in English councils alone. Large-scale cuts will inevitably rebound on Labour councils, no matter how much their problems are blamed on the Tories. If the present trend of opinion polls continues, splits are bound to open up within the ruling bloc, and that will include a significant body of councillor opinion, in the same way that elected mayors and the Scottish leadership have put some distance between themselves and High Command.

Other leaders facing sharp polling reversals would circle the wagons and appeal for Party unity. But Morgan McSweeney is determined to root out not only genuine opponents but even potential opposition. This is demonstrably destroying the Party on the ground. The vast majority of members won’t campaign for candidates that they have not been able to choose democratically. Silencing opposition won’t alter that fundamental truth. On the contrary, it will compound it.

The right to choose local government candidates from an adequately-sized panel isn’t a left issue as such, but one shared by many members in other wings of the party and in affiliated unions. The hour is already late, but what we need is a genuinely broad-based campaign to restore local Labour democracy.

Download LLI bulletin for Yorkshire and Humber Labour regional conference, 1-2 March 2025, here.

Labour had pledged to raise overseas aid from 0.5% of GDP (to which it was cut by the Tories) to 0.7%. Instead, Keir Starmer says, it will cut it to 0.3%, in a “lite” version of Donald Trump’s axing of USAid.

Starmer says this is to pay for increased military spending. In the first place, we want arms sent to Ukraine, but that does not necessarily mean more military spending.

In the second place, the government cannot in fact estimate future budget figures so accurately as within 0.2%.

In the third place, taking the money from aid is arbitrary. Large increases in tax on wealth and capital gains are needed anyway, for the NHS, for local councils, and for schools.

As John McDonnell says: “to cut spending on tackling famine & poverty in the poorest areas of the world will cost lives”.

According to Labour List, a JL Partners poll, conducted last September for the British Foreign Policy Group, found that only nine percent of Labour voters backed further cuts to the aid budget.

Islington North Labour Party has been reconstituted, seven months after the general election and much longer after it was suspended in effect, but not officially, by cutting off its access to party membership data and systems. It met on 19 February 2025, after much discontent about the Region being slow to restore the CLP’s ability to function.

According to Labour List, right-winger Alex Gardiner was elected secretary but said: “There’s been understandable strong feeling in the local Party as so many had long-standing loyalty to the former Labour MP, so we want all the factions within the Party to unite from now on”.

A few members of Islington North were expelled for signing Jeremy Corbyn’s nomination papers and similar before the July 2024 general election. Some 70 more Corbyn-supporting members quit just before general election day. There are now four ex-Labour “independents” (three of them from Islington South, not North), in a joint group with the Greens on the council.

The “independents” have run candidates in two council by-elections in Islington North, without success. They have an office in the constituency, in the shape of Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency office. Corbyn’s office has organised two public meetings (“People’s Forums”) in the constituency since July 2024, but as we understand it those who have quit in Islington North have no regular “party”-type meetings. Or if they do, they are not publicised.

Let’s hope the “official” welcome to “all factions” to join the reconstituted Islington North proves good.

The number of disciplinary allegations looked at by members of Labour’s National Executive Committee rose from 125 in 2023 to 138 last year.

That is still a significant decrease from 2019-2022, when cases were above 300 a year, let alone on 2015-6. The proportion of allegations involving antisemitism was 28% in 2024, 37% in 2023, and 70% in 2022.

In 2024, around a third of cases resulted in expulsion, suspension, or a referral to the Independent Complaints Board or National Constitutional Committee. Another third resulted in a formal warning or a reminder of conduct.

Just under a third resulted in a “reminder of values” or no further action.

Of 105 members currently suspended, 19 had been suspended for more than 18 months.

Much more information at: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/202501-Disciplinary-Report.pdf

See also https://www.annblack.co.uk/nec-update-january-2025/

https://labourlist.org/2025/01/labour-antisemitism-disciplinary-cases-nec-2024/

The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy AGM is 9 March 2025, online. Register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/clpd-agm-registration-1145481950349. Labour Left Internationalists supports CLPD’s efforts for a more democratic Labour Party, and hopes to be able to work with CLPD at Labour conference 2025 particularly on the priorities ballot for conference motions.

Labour Party supporters were shocked and angered at reports in the Guardian of 6 February about a Facebook group called UK Migration Updates that claims it is run by Yorkshire and Humber Labour Party but was using Reform colours and linking to right-wing content from GB News and the Telegraph.

On the other side, we have new pressure from Lord Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour”. Glasman accepted a personal invite from Donald Trump for Trump’s inauguration, and was the only Labour figure there. In an interview with currently-out-of-favour Trumpist Steve Bannon Glasman hailed the inauguration as ‘an incredibly important day”, called “progressive” thinking “woke capitalism, and denounced it as a cancer in the Labour Party. Glasman says that “the only place to build a house now is on the left side of MAGA square”.

Glasman is not in Starmer’s inner circle – he denounces Rachel Reeves – but he claims that Starmer’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney “is one of ours, we love him”. Dan Carden, a formerly Corbynite Labour MP who resigned from the front bench to back a ceasefire in Gaza, has started a Blue Labour group of MPs.

Glasman started Blue Labour in 2009, but retreated after outcry over his 2011 call for English Defence League people to be drawn into the Labour Party.
Only through inactivity by the “progressive” majority can screwball racists take hold of sections of the Labour Party.

We need to campaign for democracy in the labour movement. For the removal of the Labour whip from Glasman (he sits in the House of Lords). And for unions to campaign on the policies of supporting refugees which most of them have.

Islington South CLP passed this motion on 19 February 2025.

We call on Wes Streeting as Health Secretary to withdraw his support for the ban on puberty blockers for trans young people.

As on many medical questions, randomised controlled trials are impractical and unethical here. But puberty blockers have been in use for many years now, and international evidence shows that puberty suppressing hormones are a safe and effective way to temporarily pause a young person’s puberty, giving them time to consider their options for transition.

Rather than honouring Labour’s manifesto commitment to “remove indignities for trans people who deserve recognition and acceptance”, the ban strips trans young people of their bodily autonomy, undermining important medical principles, such as Gillick Competence, in favour of upholding the Conservative approach of politicising the lives of trans people.

The Cass Review did not go so far as to recommend a ban on puberty blockers for trans young people.

Also, the CLP’s LGBT Forum invited Pride in Labour to speak at a Forum meeting on 26/2/25.

Resources at https://transcend.org.au/resources/evidence/ may be useful for debate in other CLPs, especially https://transcend.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Transcend_AusPATH_Pubert-blockers-evidence-brief_2024.pdf