To rebuild trust among voters, Labour must unify behind Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer has made an excellent start in his first six months as Labour leader. The vast majority of party members are very happy that Labour has a credible leader and that we are neck and neck with the Tories in opinion polls. But the real test is next year’s elections that will take place across the country. Keir knows better than anyone how important it is that the party performs well in those first electoral tests.

This makes the recent attacks on him from the hard left of the Labour Party frustrating and annoying. Sadly, this aggression is predictable. The truth is that the hard left have always defined themselves by their hatred of the rest of the labour movement, who they consider to be sell-outs lacking in purity. For them, it’s the internal struggle that matters above all else.

The growing dislike for the Tories can be felt across the country, and people are crying out for change. But that is not enough on its own to restore the electorate’s trust in Labour. Voters were angry with us at the last election because we failed to offer them an alternative they could trust. They wanted change but thought we lacked the competence to deliver it.

The writing has been on the red wall for a long time. It came first in seats in the South East, where working-class communities stopped believing Labour represented their best interests. This was followed by our seaside towns and then, in 2019, the fall of seats in the Labour heartland. Voting Tory for them was seismic. Things had consistently gotten worse in their communities for decades, even under Labour governments, so how could it get any worse if they voted Tory? It has become a cliché to say that Labour needs to reconnect with these people but there are signs that we are now beginning to move in the right direction.

Keir’s popularity alone will not be enough for Labour to win, however. The Labour Party has to win back support among a range of voters, including those we lost in 2019. As Keir’s new head of policy Claire Ainsley concludes in her book The New Working Class, winning back voters is not primarily about detailed policies. It is more about whether our general philosophy connects with people and how our message is articulated and by whom.

Labour’s first task is to be credible. That means we must look like a party that voters can trust, whether it’s in their town hall, or in regional and national governments. Constant attacks from within our own party make this task much harder. When attacks come from high ranking people in our movement such as members of our party’s ruling national executive committee (NEC) they are all the more self-defeating.

Throughout my 43 years as a Labour Party activist, I have defined myself as being on the Tribunite left of the party. In my early days, I followed Michael Foot and revered Nye Bevan. Bevan’s influence led a group of left-of-centre MPs to form the Tribune group in parliament in the 1960s. Sadly, the group was disbanded in the early 1990s.

I resurrected the Tribune group out of frustration because I felt the mainstream left of the party had been sidelined for too long. We needed a forum to debate policy and influence the direction of our party, where left-of-centre MPs could interact with like-minded members at all levels of the party. I also refuse to have my position on the left defined by a minority who make a disproportionate degree of noise while being prepared to scupper the party’s chances of regaining its credibility.

In just a few years, the Tribune group has become extremely influential in parliament. Keir quickly joined our group after he became an MP and has actively engaged in our discussions. Keir, along with many Tribune group members on the frontbench, helped write the 2017 manifesto. Our group believes that this manifesto is a solid foundation on which future policies can be built.

To win the next general election, the Labour Party needs to win a landslide victory. This can only happen if we unite now to rebuild trust among our natural supporters. None of us need to abandon our core beliefs and principles to achieve that aim. We can debate policy and discuss the future of our party without self-defeating public attacks and social media bullying.

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