Infighting within the Labour Party has broken out into the public following its disastrous defeat to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK at last week’s England elections. While some are calling for the government to abandon its “hyper liberal” agenda, others argue for doubling down on mass migration and high taxes.
There appears to be desperate scramble to figure out what lessons should be learnt by Labour form the council elections in England, in which Farage’s Reform party blew all other parties out of the water, picking up a stunning 677 seats of 1,641 in contention, taking control of 10 councils, winning two mayoral races, and adding to their ranks in the national parliament at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election.
In contrast, less than a year after winning a large majority at the general election, Labour suffered heavy losses, ceding control of 187 seats to candidates from Reform, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and pro-Gaza “independents.”
Despite Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer claiming that he “gets it” after being punished by the public, he vowed that his government would “go further and faster on the change that people want to see.” However, exactly what form that change will take remains to be seen, with deep divisions breaking out among his backbench.
In an article for the LabourList website, MP for Nottingham East Nadia Whittome, a member of the far-left Socialist Campaign Group within the party, said that Labour will never be able to “out-Farage Farage on immigration” and thus should abandon its half-hearted attempts to appear “tough” on migration.
“This performative cruelty hasn’t stopped Reform’s rise. In fact, it has probably contributed to it. We have legitimised the far right’s narrative, instead of challenging it and addressing the material problems in people’s lives,” Whittome wrote.
Taking a page out of Marxist universalism, the far-left MP argued that rather than focusing on the well-being of Britons, “the point of our party is to stand up for working class people, wherever they were born.”
Despite the strain that mass migration places on housing, social services, and wages, Whittome appeared to undercut her own argument, by acknowledging that the “majority who raise immigration as a concern have spoken to me about not being able to get a GP appointment, a council house, or a school place for their child.” Nevertheless, she declared that “Labour should target the ruling class, not migrants.”
Former Labour cabinet minister Louise Haigh, speaking to The Guardian newspaper, acknowledged that it was fair for the public to be angered over benefits cuts while the government was spending billions to put up migrants in hotels or on foreign aid.
However, she concluded that tracking to the right would be “simplistic and naive” and that rather than stemming the tide of mass migration or cutting foreign aid, the government should increase taxes to avoid unpopular cuts to welfare programmes.
“A changed approach to tax is almost inevitable, because I think without it we’re going to see the government keeping on coming back and making the same type of decisions as they’ve done around welfare on a very regular basis,” she said.
Haigh, who resigned from Starmer’s government last November after it emerged that she had previously been convicted of fraud, also claimed that there was a sexist climate within the government against female cabinet members and that it needs to be more open to ideas put forward by women.
On the other end of the spectrum, MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, Jonathan Hinder, told The Telegraph that Labour should abandon its “hyper-liberal” approach, which he argued is costing the party among its traditional base of working-class voters, as the urban elite Westminster establishment has largely ignored their concerns over immigration.
The Red Wall MP said: “The voters know instinctively what the Left often refuses to acknowledge – immigration is fundamentally an economic issue as much as it is anything else, and working class people are generally the losers.”
Therefore, Hinder argued that the government should adopt a Reform-style agenda of essentially freezing immigration, calling for only allowing in as many migrants as people leave the UK per year. Otherwise, he warned, Labour will face an “existential threat” of blue-collar voters abandoning the party for good, saying: “This week’s results should be the wake-up call we need.”
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