‘Labour’s cultural turn is how and why Lucy Powell won’

It was 1959 when Hugh Gaitskell railed against ‘small cliques’ rendering the Labour Party ‘out of touch with the mainstream’. His remarks were made in a different era of troubles for Labour, but their echoes were heard in the contest to elect Angela Rayner’s  successor that wrapped up on Saturday. 

An understandable level of cynicism abounded when the contest to elect our new Deputy Leader began. Changes to the nomination process requiring contenders to be backed by 80 parliamentary colleagues narrowed the field. Interesting candidates like Paula Barker were excluded, and there was no obvious Cruddas-esque figure in the running. The timings set by the NEC for the election made matters worse, reducing opportunities for meaningful debate at each stage of the process. 

Six weeks later, the mood is quite different and the result is, in a sense, a surprising one. Lucy Powell and Bridget Phillipson were initially judged to be cut from the same cloth, dismissed as being indistinguishable. Lucy’s victory over Bridget today, however,  renders that line unconvincing. 

But it is true that this election wasn’t a battle between two competing policy platforms. Indeed, there was next to no disagreement between Lucy and Bridget on major policy issues. Both called for an end to the two-child benefit limit (though Lucy went slightly  further than Bridget, backing Gordon Brown’s proposal to fund this through a gambling  levy). Both made impassioned commitments to the Employment Rights Bill. Both spoke of crafting an offer that challenges rather than imitates Reform. The vast majority of  members, who we know back a bolder suite of policies on the economy, on democracy, on foreign policy and more, probably hoped for more clarity. 

So what was the magic sauce in Lucy’s campaign? What enabled her to overcome not just a pervasive mood of cynicism but the impressive popularity of her opponent, which originally made the result of this contest seem like a foregone conclusion? In the last survey of personal popularity conducted by LabourList and Survation, for which Lucy was still a member of the Government, her personal ranking was +4, considerably  lower than Bridget’s +28. In the ranking released during this year’s Labour Party Conference, Bridget’s popularity had increased to +32. Lucy’s wasn’t surveyed again because she had, by then, been unceremoniously axed from the Cabinet. 

This was a contest fought and won on the terrain of political culture. Whilst both candidates pledged to represent members and to bridge the gap between the leadership and the Labour Party at large, only Lucy explicitly diagnosed the malaise at the root of Labour’s past year of missteps and missed opportunities. She delivered her clearest articulation of the problem in an interview with Victoria Derbyshire on 14th  October, outlining that poor decisions are being made by the party leadership due to the omnipotence of a ‘narrow’ group of voices at the top of the party. 

At around the same time, supporters of Bridget’s campaign made a strategic gaffe of twofold significance. They began briefing the press that Lucy was untrustworthy,  disliked by Cabinet colleagues and would be proactively marginalised if she was elected Deputy Leader. These briefings achieved nothing except for the poisoning of Bridget’s campaign. Lucy’s charge of insularity and disconnect at the top of the party was immediately vindicated, and members were essentially told that they would be ignored if they elected Lucy. 

That Lucy’s messaging cut through in this election is the clearest indication yet that we’re witnessing a cultural turn in the Labour Party. There is a growing consensus at the grassroots that the means shape the ends; that for as long as we do politics badly, the  output of our politics will be wanting. 

It’s not hard to see why this consensus is crystallising. The abject failure of Labour’s recent experiment in political centralisation is clear for all to see. When you exclude civil society and backbenchers from the legislative process, you end up with disasters like that which we saw around the Welfare Bill. When you hire for loyalty and uniformity, you end up overlooking serious concerns about people, and later having to sack your ambassador to the US. When you ignore the views of the party and the public on issues like taxing wealth, ownership of utilities and democratic reform, you end up trying to sell a policy platform which simply doesn’t inspire hope. This is a story of a small clique out of touch with the mainstream. 

Lucy’s winning pitch echoed the message issued by the broad coalition that came together to back the formation of Mainstream in September. The message was this: the narrow, intolerant, centralising hyper-factionalism at the top of this government is pushing the Labour Party to the brink of electoral ruin and the country into the hands of the populist right. Only by drawing upon the wisdom, talents and energy of all sections of the labour movement will we be able to construct a political project capable of transforming the country, and thereby dealing with the fundamentals driving voters to support Reform. 

Labour is running out of time to avert the disaster that is coming down the track. The Caerphilly by-election result is a flavour of the scale of devastating loss that we will have to face if we can’t collectively build a popular, principled and practical left politics for the country. The reckoning that the polls suggest is coming for Labour would make Gaitskell’s 1959 defeat look marginal. 

The election of a Deputy Leader concerned to bridge the gap between the government and the grassroots is a good start for correcting course. But only a deep and  fundamental cultural reset and an end to the centralising control-freakery at the top of the party can stop Labour from driving off an electoral cliff. The mainstream of the Labour Party knows it, and in this internal election they voted with their feet. Will the rest of the party take the cultural turn with them?

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