‘Labour values: Power, principles and the red lines Labour must not cross’

This week we held the first of our ‘In Conversation’ events – which we will be holding monthly in partnership with the Fabian Society. I had a wide-ranging discussion with the Liverpool Metro Mayor, Steve Rotheram. We talked about his life in politics and what drives him; about tribalism, belonging and place — Liverpool, obviously, but also the broader picture on devolution to shift the balance power away from Whitehall and closer to where people live and work.

We also talked about Labour’s culture, and Labour’s values. Both have been on my mind all week, for obvious reasons.

We often invoke the phrase ‘Labour values’. The phrase has become a catechism — a reflex rather than a reflection. And when that happens in any political movement, it becomes dangerously easy to pay lip service to values rather than genuinely live by them. To place trust in people who demonstrably do not share those values, simply because they happen to situate themselves as on “our side”.

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What we do far less often is interrogate what these values actually are and relate what we are doing back to them in tangible ways. What makes us Labour? And how does this relate to the ways in which we manage ourselves as a party and offer a coherent set of policies in government that can always be clearly related back to those values. 

Labour was born from the recognition that working-class interests were absent from democratic life and marginalised in the organisation of the economy. It was founded to address this fundamental class injustice and to rebalance power through democratic means. Over time, that fight against inequality expanded — rightly — to include injustices rooted in race, sex, religion and sexuality. Always in pursuit of the same core Labour value: the relentless effort to build a more just and equal society. Central to that is rebalancing power between labour and capital, and improving the life chances of those born with the least.

Much has changed for the better because of Labour governments. We built a stronger public sector that provides the foundations of a good life — education and healthcare, free at the point of use. We have, at different points in our history, provided genuinely affordable council housing. That commitment has waxed and waned, but it is rising again under the current Labour government. We created the welfare state to protect those who cannot work, and introduced the minimum wage to begin addressing the exploitation of those who do.

And this government has delivered significant reforms too. The Employment Rights Act and the Renters’ Rights Act are among the most substantial attempts to rebalance economic power in a generation. These are explicitly class-conscious measures that speak directly to the values Labour was founded on.

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Steve and I also talked about the Hillsborough Law. Because Labour’s belief in the power of the state to improve lives has always been accompanied — or should be — by an understanding that state power can also be abused. It can be wielded cruelly and callously against those with the least power to resist it. Anyone who believes in the state’s capacity for good should be first in line to demand strong guardrails on its use.

This has been a week in which the phrase ‘Labour values’ has been invoked repeatedly, often in disgust, in response to a man who spent his career as a senior figure in the party yet never appeared to embody those values or even attempt to live by them. Speaking to Steve, he seems the polar opposite in temperament, outlook and – well values. 

This is not a factional argument. There are entirely legitimate debates between Labour’s different traditions about how best to deliver on our shared values. In fact, it is often in those pragmatic conversations — about what will actually work — that people on the party’s left, like Steve, find common ground with those to their right. Compromise, when it breaks deadlock and enables delivery, can itself be an expression of Labour values.

Across the party, MPs, councillors, activists and members hold a wide range of views on policy. People who share Labour values will disagree, sometimes profoundly, about how to realise them. That is politics.

What is different — and unacceptable — is when a party that should be bigger than any individual becomes a vehicle for people who do not share those values at all. People drawn to power for what it does for them, not for what it enables them to do for others. That is not a difference of strategy; it is a corruption of purpose, and it should never be tolerated, regardless of talent or faction.

What was already known about Mandelson was enough for many, including those broadly aligned with his politics, to question whether he shared Labour values. What has since emerged makes it almost impossible to believe that he ever shared them in the way that Labour people recognise in one another — even across bitter internal disagreements.

Talking to Steve at the start of the week about his determination to ensure Liverpool fulfils its potential as a city region was genuinely inspiring. It was a conversation rooted firmly in Labour’s tradition of changing lives and confronting injustice. And today, watching the excellent videos my colleague James Tibbitts has been posting to our TikTok feed, I see Labour members campaigning in the hardest of circumstances, at the end of an exhausting week. I remain inspired by the commitment of everyone who is fighting for Labour values at every level. 

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They are still fighting because they understand that these values are not something we invoke when convenient. They are something we have to live every day — not give lip service to as we glide past the people we are meant to serve on our way to the top. 

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