Kmflett's Blog

Can Starmer’s Narrow Church bring Labour an Election victory

Labour has excluded the current North Tyneside Mayor Jamie Driscoll from a list of candidates for a new Mayoral Election in the North-East. Driscoll appears to be an effective and popular Mayor and someone who is upfront about Labour’s links with the unions.

Of course no reasons are given as to why people don’t make candidate lists, although you can read plenty of thoughts on social media.

It appears to be another example of factionalism in the Labour Party where the controlling group are more interested in settling scores with those they don’t like then they are in winning elections. This latter point btw is meant to be what Labour as a Parliamentary Socialist Party is all about. Hence in this example excluding a popular incumbent Mayor from standing as a Labour candidate does rather undermine that

In reality Starmer who often talks of ‘My Labour Party’ is constructing not a broad church party but a narrow one. The question being whether in a first past the post electoral system that can actually win an election.

The late Ralph Miliband wrote one of the best books about the history of the Labour Party, Parliamentary Socialism,1961, albeit of course it doesn’t cover the last 60 years.

Miliband, the father of David and Ed, opens the book by making the statement that as a democratic socialist party Labour had always been amongst the most dogmatic. Not about socialism but about the use of Parliamentary as opposed to extra-Parliamentary forms of struggle.

His view at that time was that Labour under Hugh Gaitskell was not a vehicle for socialist advance and the leadership of the rather more ‘left-wing’ Harold Wilson did nothing to change his mind.

He did however keep the matter under review and sometimes returned to the subject, for example in the Socialist Register 1983:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/1983/xx/advance.htm

Here he saw the rise of the Bennite left from the early 1980s as a sign that maybe Labour could be claimed for socialism. Significantly perhaps it appeared in the year that a, then young, Jeremy Corbyn first became an MP.

Tom Watson before he stepped down as an MP described an effort to abolish his then Deputy Leader position as going against the idea of Labour as a ‘broad church’. Harold Wilson was probably right that Labour owes more to Methodism than Marx but as Miliband noted the ‘broad’ part of the description is harder to justify historically.

Miliband wrote

Pious references to the Labour Party being a ‘broad church’ which has always incorporated many different strands of thought fail to take account of a crucial fact, namely that the ‘broad church’ of Labour only functioned effectively in the past because one side – the Right and Centre – determined the nature of the services that were to be held, and excluded or threatened with exclusion any clergy too deviant in its dissent.

The Guardian by contrast argued in an Editorial on 22nd September 2019

The Labour party is nothing if not a broad church, encompassing different traditions working with – not against – each other. In a post-industrial world everything is some kind of coalition. If not, the party is simply a religion of true believers in a multi-faith polity. Over decades, Labour activists, interests and voters have broadly agreed on a common purpose – to elect Labour governments that can redress the imbalance of economic, social and political power in Britain. That broad-church approach has served Labour well and has served Britain well too

Starmer is someone with limited political experience and while things can always change also someone who shows little political flair.

The point is that in practice for the vast majority of its existence Labour has been a narrow church. Those running the Party understanding that this is not an election winning strategy were able to promote on most occasions as a broad churc