Labour can’t afford to ignore its membership crisis

Dropping like a bolt from the blue yesterday afternoon, Labour’s latest financial report covering 2025 makes for grim reading – confirming what many members and CLPs have seen play out over many months.

While it was already understood that the party had lost members, the scale of the haemorrhage is enormous – Labour lost a fifth of the membership, the largest drop in members in recent history. The loss of almost 70,000 members meant that, throughout 2025, one Labour member quit the party on average every eight minutes.

It’s not hard to see why so many members decided they had had enough. Keir Starmer’s government faced revolts over welfare reform, farmers’ inheritance tax and winter fuel payments, while he personally faced criticism for his “island of strangers” speech and for his judgement as questions emerged over his appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador.

All the while, Labour was being punished in the polls and at the ballot box as Nigel Farage and new Green leader Zack Polanski acted as sirens trying to woo Labour members and voters to the rocky shores of populism.

Party members aren’t simply another metric on a spreadsheet or an annual report – they are the backbone of the Labour Party. Too often taken for granted, Labour is nothing without the activists and volunteers willing to knock on doors, deliver leaflets and sell our message of hope to voters across the country. With the situation as it was in SW1, it is understandable, if disappointing, that many felt unwilling to be active in the party or opted to leave.

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So where do we go from here? Rebuilding trust will take more than better polling, but leadership matters. If members quit because they lost faith in the direction of the party, then changing course is the obvious place to start.

Perhaps, then, the biggest change the party could have made has already happened, in the form of switching party leader and Prime Minister. Burnham is achieving levels of approval among the party membership and wider public that Starmer could have only dreamed of – and LabourList understands that the figures reported yesterday are not a reflection of the current party membership. Could the Burnham bounce be reflected here too?

If Labour really is beginning to attract members again, these figures may prove to represent a low-water mark, rather than a terminal decline. But any recovery cannot be taken for granted. Rebuilding Labour’s grassroots must now rank alongside rebuilding its standing with the wider electorate. Without action, Labour’s connection to the communities it exists to represent will wither away – which would mark the end of Labour as a genuine movement of the people.

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