As the Labour Party surveys the wreckage of the national elections in Scotland and Wales and the local elections in England, it seems an appropriate time to examine just where Labour has gone wrong following their general election victory less than two years ago.
Back to 2019
The origins of the problems can be traced back to the heavy Labour defeat in the general election of December 2019, and possibly even further back to the victory of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership election four years earlier.
It was those two events that probably did more than anything to prompt the establishment of the faction of Labour ironically known as Labour Together to take over the party and lead it on what has turned out to be the road to destruction.
The origins of Labour Together
The roots of Labour Together go back to the summer of 2015. That summer was a traumatic time for many MPs and others on the centre and right of the Labour Party. In May the Labour Party had fallen to something of a surprise defeat to David Cameron’s Tories in the general election and then Jeremy Corbyn had swept to power as the leader of the Labour Party during the summer.
It was during this time that Labour Together began its long march towards power. Those on the right of the Labour Party felt that they had three choices in the second-half of the 2010s faced with what was seen as the left-wing takeover of their party. They could support Corbyn, they could split from the Labour Party as the SDP had done 35 years earlier, or they could quietly build an organisation within the Labour Party to take power back. The third option was chosen and Morgan McSweeney who had run Liz Kendall’s leadership campaign in 2015 took over the leadership of Labour Together.
Gaining a figurehead
Shortly after the disastrous 2019 general election, Jeremy Corbyn resigned as leader, and it was then that Labour Together seized its opportunity. It has been noted by both The Guardian and The Times that Labour Together became very prominent in Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign, with Morgan McSweeney taking on the role of campaign director, while Labour Together’s infrastructure was able to provide messaging, polling and networks of support.
As has been documented widely, Stamer made ‘Ten Pledges’ during his leadership campaign, which were very much in line with Corbyn’s programme, such as free tuition and meaningful investment in public services. I remember hearing Starmer speak at a Labour Party meeting in Newcastle in early 2020 and it seemed to me that he was trying to come across as something of a ‘Continuity Corbyn’ candidate. The membership of the party was still predominantly left-wing and supported such policies.
However, at the same time Starmer is reported to have assured centrist MPs and wealthy donors that the party would pivot right once the leadership election was over.
So it was that in the sunny but dark Covid April of 2020, Starmer gained 56% of the vote, to win the leadership, defeating Lisa Nandy and Corbyn’s preferred candidate, Rebecca Long-Bailey.
It has also been noted that “McSweeney later joined Starmer’s staff as chief of operations, before becoming chief of staff in Downing Street. Labour Together itself shifted into a more conventional think tank role, publishing papers on ‘securonomics,’ green investment, and digital IDs. According to Companies House, its board expanded to include Baroness Sally Morgan, Lord Jonathan Kestenbaum, lobbyist Michael Craven, philanthropist Francesca Perrin, and migration policy specialist Will Somerville”.
‘Grabbing any passing life raft’
Having dispatched with Corbyn’s policies and rowed back on policies such as advocating £28 billion of green investment, Starmer and the small clique around him then failed to replace it with any clear vision, coherent policy platform and plan or sense of direction.
Commenting on the Labour government’s lack of purpose and direction, Neal Lawson, the co-founder and chair of the progressive organisation Compass, described the party as being in the habit of “grabbing any passing life raft”. Lawson similarly noted the “lack of intellectual framework “within the government and its policymaking and that it is not interested in big thinking.
So lacking in purpose has the government been that it is even been claimed that the only reason why Starmer wanted the job of Prime Minister was simply that he was “ambitious”.
McSweeney, Mandelson and Starmer
Following on from this, it has been argued that the purpose of the McSweeney-Mandelson partnership was to simply crush the left in the Labour party and win the 2024 election. No thought was given to what Labour would do with victory, as that didn’t seem to matter. Consequently, Labour had no plan for government when it came to power in July 2024.
Then came the story of how Morgan McSweeney had failed to disclose a donation of £730 000 to Standing Together and how when two journalists started investigating the story, they were smeared in a devious dirty tricks campaign. As Peter Geoghegan has noted: “When Starmer came to power promising to clean up politics, he wrote in the Guardian that journalism is ‘the lifeblood of democracy’. But we now know that the vehicle that powered his rise, populated by his key people, ran an orchestrated campaign to smear journalists. Simons – the person who commissioned APCO – is still a minister in Starmer’s government”. Josh Simons did step down as a minister, shortly after the piece by Geoghegan was published, due to his connection to the scandal.
Other ‘leading lights’ of Labour Together and the influence of Blue Labour
Meanwhile other Labour cabinet ministers, connected to the right of the party have been promoted due to the support of Labour Together. Steve Reed, a key member of Labour Together is presently the Housing Minister.
In July 2025, it was argued that Reed, who was then the Environment Secretary was ““swimming against the tide of public opinion” by ruling out any moves towards the Labour government bringing the water industry back into public control, despite strong public support for such a move.
Meanwhile Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, another leading light of Labour Together, announced drastic and in many respects brutal changes to asylum policies in March, in a blatant and unsuccessful attempt to woo Reform voters. Then in April, Mahmood used crude and profane language in an attempt to deal with a heckler at a meeting.
Other leading figures in Labour Together include Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Health Secretary Wes Streeting.
How can Labour recover?
Polling at about 18% in opinion polls, way below the level of support during the end days of Corbyn’s leadership, or for that matter the time of Michael Foot’s leadership in the early 1980s and in the wake of the disastrous elections on 7 May, Labour is facing an existential crisis.
It seems clear that the Labour Party will never recover as a potential governing party in this country until there is a true cleansing of the stables and every last vestige of the toxic Labour Together faction, which has done so much harm, is removed from the leadership of the party.
That would mean not only the removal of Keir Starmer as leader, but also the sacking from the cabinet of Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, Lisa Nandy, Steve Reed, Wes Streeting, Liz Kendall and Shabana Mahmood.
Not only are they not trusted by the electorate, but they also represent a terrible paralysis at the heart of the Labour Party in terms of policy. The country faces grave and serious problems. We need serious politicians to help us solve those problems, but an important part of that seriousness must include having a clear plan for how we can recover and build a good society. The present cabinet members who are from a Labour Together background have ably demonstrated that they simply don’t have that.
Labour needs leadership that is not only trustworthy, but also has vision, ideas and is not in hock to wealthy donors. Only then can Labour hope to stem the Reform tide.
