‘Forget New Year – for Labour, discipline done well has to be their year-long resolution’

New Year’s resolutions are hard to keep. We all plan to live healthier and better in January, only to find ourselves slipping backwards in a matter of weeks or months. Falling back into bad habits as all the other pressures life throws at us reassert themselves, and our desire for improvement fades into a simpler pattern of ongoing momentum.

So while Number 10 may be planning a big comms blitz to start the new year in style and set a tone for 2026, deeper work will have to be done to ensure that any new start lasts longer than the resolution phase.

The truth is we all need discipline and we all need rules. Human nature demands it – that’s one of the reasons we have laws. Because they mitigate against the darker side of that very nature. It’s why those who believe in social democracy argue in favour of regulation and mitigation through state action. Because rules level the playing field. They ensure that the strongest, the richest and the most powerful have to compete more equally with the rest of us.

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But those rules have to be equally and fairly applied to all, or the system breaks down. History teaches us time and time again that this is the case. Where rules are unevenly enforced, where they are applied arbitrarily with no input from those expected to live by them, or where they serve only the internal logic of the enforcers, they instil not discipline but first fear and then rebellion against them. And with enough rebellion, the spell of that fear is broken.

Labour has become an ill-disciplined party not through a lack of rules or a laxity in their application. I don’t think anyone watching the progress of the party over the last five years – from oblivion to success to electoral danger territory – can say that what was missing was a sense of internal pressure. But there has been a sense – as I have said before – that rules have not been consistently applied, nor has there been an eagerness to develop a shared understanding of their purpose and implementation.

What makes good rules work is not a sense that following them would lead to punitive punishment. The odds of cheating the rules are always too good for some. It is a sense that those rules are ones we understand, agree with and want to follow even if – on occasion – our worst instincts let us down. That they have logic and give our lives structure. We stick to the rules because we believe in them. Enough of us agree that the outcome of those rules is a better society for all of us, and we enforce them socially as much as we do legally.

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From my many conversations with Labour Party members – from ordinary activists to backbenchers to Cabinet members – I don’t get a sense that the breakdown in discipline is making anyone feel happier about the party. In fact, quite the opposite.

What members, backbenchers and the government want all looks quite similar. They want the Labour government to succeed and to achieve, in government, the implementation of Labour values. The frustration has often come where either there has been a sense that those achievements were too piecemeal, too slow or too disjointed – lacking in coherence and a consistent narrative. That, coupled with a sense that the rules in terms of how they were applied were being used unevenly and for factional purposes rather than in the service of the overall organisation, led, at times, not to a highly disciplined party but an almost nihilistic one.

Sometimes the criticism has been unfair. Sometimes people have broken the rules and cried foul for their own factional purposes. That too is wrong. But it can’t be defeated by an equally unfair application of the rules. It can only be called out as charlatanry by those who can, indeed, cast the first stone.

The end of 2025 saw a range of activity across a number of areas that might well see much of the immediate unhappiness at Labour’s lack of narrative and sense of drift addressed within the party and in the country in 2026. As the Renters’ Rights Act and the Employment Rights Act come into force, and as rises to the minimum wage and the scrapping of the two-child cap take effect, a tangible difference will be felt by the people Labour were elected to represent. With new strategies for everything from child poverty and violence against women and girls to animal welfare civil servants and ministers have roadmaps to follow and report against to allow for consistency of progress.

Indiscipline is a habit. It can be broken, but the benefits of doing so – to individuals and to those they work with – have to be seen and have to be understood. You have to want to change not simply fear not doing so.

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Labour has an under-explored chance to turn its fortunes around in 2026. The mistakes made in government are not yet fatal for the Party’s chances overall and they offer valuable lessons that can be learned from. Equally, much of the foundation-laying for success has been done.

But to succeed, the leadership and the PLP have to start pulling in the same direction. That does not mean one side ‘winning’ and the other ‘losing’. In fact, that zero-sum mindset is what would guarantee it wouldn’t work. Instead, it means that the really hard, disciplined, lasting work of developing cooperation and a genuine spirit of partnership between the two has to be done – and it has to be maintained. That way lies real success and real change.