Labour Together and the lost political art of bridge building

Labour Together was founded after the Brexit referendum when divisions in our country, and party, seemed insurmountable. At the time, the tougher questions surrounding Labour’s future were sidelined. Labour Together’s role was therefore to create a space for reflection within our movement where people from all sides could come together to engage with each other, think and explore the left’s deeper challenges, outside the rough and tumble of day-to-day political manoeuvring. This common space was a rare opportunity to experiment, do things differently and work with people in new ways to figure out how Labour could move forward.

We began by trying to work out how to get people across Labour around the same table. Early on working with Small Axe, we pioneered a new political format of roundtables that brought members together around a shared meal to explore what politics in the future might look like. These informal encounters were a chance for members to identify a shared purpose and have more substantial conversations that moved beyond simply voting for or against a motion at a CLP meeting. For many it was an empowering experience which showed how together you can create a shared purpose which is greater than the sum of its individual parts. During this time, we organised many different events following this model including running Labour Together BBQs on the beach during conference, convening the leaders of Progress and Momentum and, in the week that the ill-fated Change UK Party was launched, we ran the first ever cross-factional takeover of LabourList.

This early bridge-building work created the relationships we needed to set up Labour Together’s 2019 election review. In the face of our fourth election loss, in the heat of a leadership election, we sought to establish a cross-factional commission to generate a shared and agreed analysis of Labour’s successive defeats and create some consensus for what needed to be done going forward. The commission, made up of people from across the labour movement, invited contributions from all the factions, interviewed candidates, ran a series of citizens-panel style focus groups and a survey of over 11,000 Labour members. In the end what the whole commission could agree on ran to over 200 pages, creating an in-depth analysis of Labour’s position and a series of concrete recommendations that are still used today as a touchstone for many across the party.

Our review showed that Labour could operate in a new open and more empowering way, that it was possible to build a common purpose within our movement. Our recommendations embodied these new forms of politics, encouraging an end to siloed, hyper-factionalised working. We prioritised member mobilisation and empowerment, using digital to innovate our campaign techniques. We committed to using methods such as community organising to deepen our relationships with the communities we hope to represent. Many networks were established to continue this work including the Labour Society of Campaigners, which brings together campaigners across the movement to share best practice. We set up Campaign Lab, a group that aims to innovate campaigning practices and a new effort to deepen Labour’s engagement with communities in online forums.

Yet Labour Together was never just about bringing our movement together – it was also about figuring out how to bring the country together. Our election review concluded that to build a new political coalition we needed the same politics of bridge building we were exploring inside the party. Following our review, we started to convene a network of over 100 academics, policy makers and thinkers to try to understand what this could look like. After two years of convenings, the result was Labour’s Covenant: a plan for national reconstruction.

In Labour’s Covenant, you can see how the different currents of the different ideological parts of our movement have been weaved together. It rejects the existing neoliberal settlement, in favour of rebuilding our national economy through a new industrial strategy realigning our national interest with the interests of working people. It argues that national reconstruction must prioritise the everyday economy – the business and services that people use day-to-day and which make up the social relationships of the everyday economy. It embraces the need for a new statecraft with much richer systems of democracy at a local level to empower citizens to reconstruct social fabric and local institutions. Finally, it also argues for a new politics of nature rooted in meaning, where instead of a technocratic approach to net zero, we unlock the deeper democratic love people have for nature to protect it.

You see much of this political framework running through Keir Starmer’s most recent speech to conference, as it represents the centreground to where the country has now moved. These positions were unlocked by Labour Together’s political practice of bridge building; they were actively constructed. It’s this same practice that we need to rebuild our relationship with the country.

As we head into the next century, the lost political art of bridge building will be needed now more than ever at every level of our movement. We face not only the enormous challenges presented by technology and climate collapse, but also the re-emergence of a politics of hate, culture wars, populism and easy answers. People have lost their faith in politics so in this context, reconciliation becomes an inherently political act. To open up the space for people to bridge build, is to open up the space for new political relationships. The result isn’t just a series of positions, policies or messaging – it’s the construction of shared power.

This kind of political practice is already happening across the country. Time and again, often outside of politics, as people come together to organise food banks, mutual aid groups, workplace campaigns to demand better in the face of the cost-of-living crisis, a broken economy and a failing government. This is the future current of political practice that Labour must continue to try and understand and follow.

Over the past five years, I’ve had the privilege of working for Labour Together and witnessing this new kind of politics emerge. I’ve been able to meet hundreds of members from across our movement, listening to different perspectives, empowering new networks and building bridges. It’s been a humble reminder of what our movement can achieve when it works together and has helped me to realise what is possible within our politics. This work has shown me that the Labour Party has never been about one leader, one person or one faction. It’s about all of us, and we all have the capacity to do things differently.