Progress looks to post-Starmer phase as battle lines drawn with Burnham

Members from Labour’s centrist tradition came to the Progress conference in search of solutions, after a week of chaos at Westminster and with the party still reeling from the miserable local and regional election results. 

Many brought stories of the electoral bloodbath inflicted upon Labour by Reform and the Greens, with plenty of ex-councillors among the 150 or so activists gathered in central London. Tissues are on standby, speakers were advised as the day began.

But there were also warnings too, most notably from Wes Streeting. The former health secretary, who resigned last week, launched his own bid for the Labour leadership with an appeal against a “tyranny of silence in the name of party unity” and a call to act now to avoid the party becoming the “handmaiden” of a Nigel Farage victory in three years time. 

Streeting was on safe territory at the conference as Progress, set up 30 years ago as a Blairite think tank, gathered to consider its role in the “battle of ideas” that will dominate the coming weeks as Andy Burnham prepares for his Makerfield by-election and a potential return to Westminster. 

Yet away from the headline-making main stage, there were starker warnings too about the danger the country faces and an implicit sense that sooner, rather than later, Labour would be entering a post-Starmer era. 

Peter Kyle, who praised “legendary” Streeting from the conference stage, spoke of the “next phase” of the government. Abena Oppong-Asare, the parliamentary private secretary to the prime minister, begged “please don’t shout at me” when members gathered to discuss the pace of rental reforms. 

And while  one audience member complained that Starmer was being driven out by “mob rule”, few made much effort to defend the leader as his time in Number 10 slips into the past tense. 

Not everyone there had picked a horse in the future leadership contest, but everywhere there were appeals for Labour to change course. Sem Moema, a London assembly member, told one panel that the next set of local elections cannot see councillors sent out like “lambs to slaughter”.

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Alison McGovern, the homelessness minister and Birkenhead MP, was more diplomatic. “It hurts to lose. But when you lose, you learn. You learn how to recommit to your values and find a new way through.”

Inevitably perhaps, there were calls for Labour not to lapse into old debates and left-right divides. Kyle, who spoke at length about the new “industrial revolution” and AI, called for change to be faced “free from the ideological shackles that are the constraints of looking at the world through just left and right”. 

“The British people are beyond tired of those stable ideological reflexes. 

“They want government that works for them and they want it to work for them in their everyday lives. They want markets where they succeed. They want public services where they can’t. They don’t want a clash of public and private, bosses and workers,’ he said. 

But the spectre of Burnham, a former Blairite himself now steeped in Labour’s soft left, loomed large. Occasionally, it was directly addressed. 

Adam Langleben, the executive director of Progress, won applause when he told the event: “We should have no time for coronation politics, it’s arrogant nonsense, and our party and the public deserve far better.

“A by-election in a single seat, win or lose, is no substitute for our party publicly setting out its direction and a full spectrum of ideas. By definition, the mayor of Greater Manchester did not stand on the 2024 manifesto, and by-elections are no place to set out a policy agenda. 

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“The strongest Labour leaders are those who win the argument, not those who avoid having one.”

But another, more pressing spectre also hung over the gathering, which was held on the same day as Tommy Robinson and his far-right supporters took to the streets for a “Unite the Kingdom” rally. There was also a pro-Palestinan demonstration, commemorating the Nakba. 

Uma Kumaran, the Stratford and Bow MP and daughter of refugees, told a panel on migration she was scared to get the train on Saturday morning. A sharp correction on immigration rhetoric was urgently needed, she said. 

“This is my country and I will never cede ground that this is my country. We are in the fight for our lives for our country:”

“If we don’t make the case, we have failed.”

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