Shifting ground – the inheritance facing Labour’s new General Secretary

This is the first of three essays to be published over the coming days by LabourList chair Karin Christiansen looking at the challenges facing Labour’s incoming General Secretary – and the opportunities they present if Labour is bold enough to take them. 

Labour will today appoint a new General Secretary. Most coverage will talk about who got the job. Less of it will ask what they face – arguably a harder inheritance than any General Secretary in recent memory.

Why it matters

Labour won 411 seats in 2024 on just under 34% of the vote – a large majority resting on a shallow vote share. That combination means even a modest swing back to the Conservatives, or losses split across several challengers, will look like a historic collapse. This General Secretary is reasonably likely to end up presiding over one of the largest losses of Labour seats in the Party’s history. That will not be their fault. The electoral position, political fragmentation and the state of the movement were all set before they will take up the job. Minimising general election losses is going to be the main part of the task they face. The hard part of the challenge they face will be that the depth and speed of operational and cultural change needed has rarely, if ever, been attempted.  But if they succeed, they might help keep us in power for a second term, and will ensure the Party is ready for the next contest and able to keep adapting as the ground shifts again.

What is Labour for?

Let’s start with what the point of the Labour Party is. The socialist and social democratic parties of Europe were built by social movements, primarily organised labour. They were the political wing – the legislators – of those movements, created to win power and deliver for the interests behind them.

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In Britain, the social movements that built the party included unions, co-operators and Chartists. Peace, women’s liberation, gay rights, anti-racism and the environmental movements kept it refreshed. But those later movements have since diffused and Labour is now not always their first port of call.

That founding purpose shaped us: how the Party organised, who it drew talent from, and who it answered to.

But things have changed. Most of this sits outside the control of whoever takes the Gen Sec’s job. But all of it now lands in their in-tray.

The movements that built us are either gone or in decline. Union membership density has fallen from around half the UK workforce at its peak in 1979 to roughly a fifth today. Private sector membership is around one in eight, against nearly half in the public sector. The co-operative movement is a shadow of the mass institution that once ran shops, funeral homes and building societies across working-class Britain. The Chartists are long gone, their demands largely won. This is not only a British story – the same erosion has hit the social bases of sister parties across Europe. What matters for Labour is not that these movements have declined, but that nothing has taken their place.

The consequences run deeper than lost affiliation fees. Movement parties without strong movements start to feel disembodied. The base that once supplied it with purpose, ideas, energy, talent and accountability thins out. The funnel for candidates and staff narrows too. It sometimes feels like the only people willing to navigate the Party are those who grew up inside it – not just the Red Princes and Princesses, but anyone whose family orbited party jobs, or who did the student Labour clubs and have spent their working life in and around politics since.

That raises a question few want to ask out loud: what is the purpose of the Labour Party now? Too often, we seem to hark back to a nineteenth-century notion of the working class. The reality is now warehouse pickers, shop workers, bar staff, call centre workers and agency carers. We also have to include the urban barista and charity workers. These groups are rarely unionised and unlikely to recognise themselves in the Party’s projected, often nostalgic self-image. There is also a strain of inverted snobbery in the Party – a habit of treating one kind of worker as more authentically Labour than another – which tends to alienate people we need and who do not define themselves that way. Here there is something worth retaining from the Blair era. Tony Blair’s ambition was to break the assumed link between getting on in life and voting Tory, and to treat the aspirational voter as one of our own rather than someone tolerated for electoral convenience.

Be open and get curious

The Labour Party sits in a long-established ecosystem of affiliates, socialist societies and campaign groups. A whole range of newer organisations, actors, platforms and tools have grown up over the past few decades: digital campaigning and online petitions, apps for voter registration, canvassing and accountability, and a wide range of single-issue campaigns with memberships far larger than ours. There is also an array of progressive social media content creators and influencers who between them reach different audiences and more people than our traditional comms operations can now dream of.

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Too often the instinct is to manage or contain them rather than draw on them. There is a habit of applying a purity test that nobody could pass – though in practice it often seems less about ideology than familiarity. Are you known? Have you been around? Do the right people vouch for you? We need to reach out far beyond that trusted realm and, right now, that particularly means engaging with those  who are motivated by stopping the hard right rather than by any great love of the Labour Party. Their objectives are not always the same as ours, and working with them might be uncomfortable, but it is absolutely essential.

Building or rebuilding social movements is not in any General Secretary’s gift. But building a party that is more open and porous is. Who gets invited? Who gets listened to while decisions are being made – and even while questions are being asked? Is good faith criticism treated as intelligence or as disloyalty? These are choices about posture, not structure, and they can be made from HQ. It is not a substitute for the broader movement, but it is a way of borrowing some of what movements used to provide.

Over the next two days I want to look at what should land in the Gen Sec in-tray. A range of areas which seek to ask two fundamental questions:

Is the Labour machine fit for the fight we are now facing? 

Answers to this need to cover:

• The gap between the contest the machine was built for, and the contest we actually face
• What we know about changing minds — and why not voting is increasingly an active choice rather than a failure to turn out
• How to build a two-way communications operation for the media environment we now have
• The role of members and activists – who might be our greatest assets in all of this
• How far down decisions and resources need to go, because local context rules

Is the Party capable of changing fast enough?

This is more exploratory and will encompass: 

• Potential new sources of the purpose, ideas, energy, talent and accountability the movement used to supply
• What internal processes would widen rather than narrow the range of ideas reaching the table — the manifesto process being the obvious test
• And most important of all, the culture of the Party, which will either foster or sink every one of these — and where the General Secretary is squarely in the driving seat

All of this is a much larger brief than tweaking the current machine. It is deciding what kind of organisation Labour needs to be, for an electorate and a membership very different from those that shaped the Party.

In part two Tomorrow – the contest has changed, and the machine has not.

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