Labour Needs a New In-Group

How Labour's Factional Culture Produced a Government Without Ideas

Political parties inevitably generate in-groups, and the nature of the in-groups matters substantially for the character of the political party. The slow collapse of the Starmer Government is the predictable consequence of a party whose governing in-group was selected not for its capacity to develop and communicate ideas, but for its ability to win internal battles. It has become cliché to refer to the lack of policy specialists in the core Starmer team. But the whole culture of the right of the party has become deadened of internal debate and replaced by a winning at all costs mantra that self-consciously rewards those who canvass regularly, play CLP politics well, know how to ‘run a board’ or use Organise and Doorstep effectively. These are all vital skills. But they create costs, especially for the ability of this in-group to attract people who think creatively about policy.

That the party is devoid of substantial politics is not just a failure of individual competence but a longer-term failure of talent cultivation, rooted in the peculiar in-group dynamics of the contemporary Labour Party in the wake of battles under Corbynism. Understanding how this in-group formed, what holds it together, and why it cannot govern effectively is essential to understanding Britain’s current political malaise and to identifying what might replace it.

Old In-Groups and New In-Groups

To understand how Labour arrived at this impasse, one must return to the trauma that shaped its current leadership: the Corbyn years. Between 2015 and 2019, the Labour left, led by Corbyn, achieved something unprecedented in the party’s history: complete dominance of its internal structures, membership, and leadership. They also cultivated a media ecosystem willing to back them, too, like that of the Canary and Novara Media.

For those on the Labour right, this was an existential crisis. The party they had known, the party of Attlee’s pragmatic socialism and Blair’s electoral modernisation, and which had won the support of the mainstream, appeared to have been captured by the same Trotskyists that Kinnock had fought against in the previous century. In this case, though, those literate in policy and comms expertise, and of the moderate tradition, who had cut their teeth in the Blair Government, abandoned the fight on the ground and got on with their own careers, applying their talents elsewhere. They did not, in the main, turn up to fight the left at CLP meetings on wet Tuesday evenings in provincial towns.

The fightback, when it came, was led by those who remained, namely, organisers. The key figures in what would become the Starmer project, most notably Morgan McSweeney, who served as chief of staff until his recent resignation, had built their careers in the trenches of this internal party warfare.

These were the people who won the war against Corbynism, won delegate battles in Constituency Labour Parties. They organised slates for National Executive Committee elections. They controlled candidate selections. They understood, in granular detail, how to move votes within Labour’s baroque internal democracy. They did not concern themselves with deep ideological contestation, a development of a strong personal politics, but saw the ends being the means – simply, control of the Labour Party.

The group which won these elections fought on competence, electability, and an intense ability to command and control the internal party structures of Labour. You hold the line, do not break ranks on policy, as holding these positions is the critical aim. As the Corbynite left was cleared out, all “moderates” who came to dislike Corbyn found themselves in the once more selective groups of the Labour party, such as Labour First and Progressive Britain. There was an oppositional unity which brought people together, based around winning power in the Labour machinery, but this hatred of Corbyn was the only thing that held this new coalition of the Labour Right together.

Indeed, the anti-Corbyn Labour right’s internal culture rewards those who can be trusted in factional combat, who demonstrate loyalty to the project of defeating the left, and who avoid saying things that might provide ammunition to opponents. It does not reward those who develop heterodox policy positions, engage seriously with ideas that cut across factional lines, or challenge the emerging consensus. The result is an intellectual flattening, or a lack of deep policy work. The culture of this in-group, the norms that govern advancement, the behaviours that are rewarded, the qualities that mark someone as sound, does not prioritise intellectual seriousness. It prioritises reliability and a need to be in command of all party structures, but does not think about why much.

This produces a governing in-group that is, in aggregate, more skilled at not saying things than at saying them, with an avoidance of controversy becoming habitual. This is combined with a reluctance to engage with difficult policy questions, on issues which the public prioritise, like immigration, welfare, and the fundamental trade-offs of social democracy in an era of constrained growth. When policy positions are chosen, they are adoptedbecause they represent the best available thinking, but also because they are unlikely to generate internal conflict or provide material for opponents. Indeed, this concern not to give material to opponents leads to a complete lack of preparedness for governing, as I have written about before.

Those who succeeded and became part of the post-Corbyn in-group organisers demonstrated discipline, patience, and tactical sophistication. They played a long game when others counselled despair. But the skills that win internal party battles are not the skills that prioritise deep politics nor a hinterland, or which grapple with the real political concerns of the public. This then lack of politics means they did not consider or really think further about what decisions and hard trade-offs governing would require.

The Pipeline of This In-Group

The pipeline through which this in-group has developed and reproduces itself reinforces this lack of politics. This in-group cut its teeth through local government and internal organising, where individuals gain notoriety through becoming CLP Chair or councillor, and then hopefully get chosen as a parliamentary candidate. This path demands years of intensive party activity, attendance at interminable meetings, and cultivation of relationships with local power-brokers. It is a path that selects for those with the time and inclination for such work, and against those whose talents might lie elsewhere.

A successful barrister, a senior civil servant, a business leader – such people might have much to offer a party seeking to govern, but the current in-group makes little room for them. The commitment required to become a councillor, let alone to progress beyond, is largely incompatible with a demanding external career. The result is a political in-group drawn disproportionately from those for whom party politics is the career: organisers, researchers, special advisers, think-tank staffers, and, less flatteringly, those whose prospects outside politics are sufficiently limited that the opportunity cost of total immersion is bearable

This is not a problem unique to Labour. But it is exacerbated by the particular intensity of Labour’s factional culture. In a party where internal positioning matters so much, where the wrong association or the wrong statement can mark someone as unsound, the incentives all point toward conformity, caution, and the accumulation of factional credit. The incentives do not point toward the development of original thinking or the cultivation of communicative skills. Those who might challenge the in-group’s assumptions, or who might bring perspectives from outside the narrow world of Labour politics, are filtered out long before they reach positions of influence.

The Consequences

The consequences of this in-group winning control of the Labour Party, and then in 2024, the country will be one of a lack of ability or even ideas concerning what is required to run the country, to deliver and action parts of the British state to deliver change. This in-group is highly literate in how to control Labour, but has not cultivated a critique of Britain today, where the state needs to reconfigure, what trade-offs will be necessary, and what they want to convince the public of. The absence of this intellectual foundation is felt daily in the government’s reactive, defensive, directionless conduct.

This matters for a reason beyond electoral calculation. Democratic politics requires argument and capital-p-politics. It requires parties that can articulate competing visions of the good society, contest each other’s claims, and persuade citizens that one path is better than another. The vacuum is filled by those who can tell a story, however simplistic or destructive that story may be.

What Needs to Change

What Labour requires, therefore, is the emergence of alternative in-groups with different binding commitments, different criteria for membership, and different pathways to influence. What would such an in-group look like? Three characteristics seem essential.

First, it would need to be unified by a positive political project rather than a negative one. The current in-group is held together by anti-Corbynism, but Corbyn is gone, and his movement is scattered. A binding agent of pure opposition cannot sustain a governing coalition. A new in-group would need to coalesce around a substantive vision of what Labour governments should achieve, a vision capacious enough to accommodate internal disagreement but specific enough to provide direction. This, in my opinion, is a vision which reckons with the dire predicament of structural and state failure that we are in now, which sees serious state reform as paramount to safeguarding ourselves against a Reform Government.

On the issue of talent, critically, the party must seriously invest in alternative pathways into the party which are not through the typical CLP, to councillor, to MP pipeline. This might mean more systematic recruitment of people with experience outside politics, more weight given to policy and intellectual contributions relative to organisational loyalty, and a culture that treats serious argument as a qualification rather than a risk.

Third, it would need to be willing to engage in the arguments that the current in-group avoids. Immigration, welfare, the limits of the state, the trade-offs between growth and redistribution, these are the questions on which elections are increasingly fought and governments increasingly judged. An in-group that treats such questions as dangers to be managed rather than arguments to be won will continue to cede ground to those less encumbered by caution. This is not an alternative that the soft left of the Labour party is proving itself to be capable of delivering, though; they do not grapple with the structural issues of policy, but instead have their own sacred shibboleths, and do not necessarily engage with the issues which the public cares about.

How Might Such a New In-Group Emerge?

Those with deep policy expertise and a structural critique of Britain, the state and what will be required to change it, need to be brought together. They cannot sit around the edges of existing factions like Labour First or Progress – these institutions have failed to deliver an adequate governing in-group. Therefore, we must create our own. This new in-group must be grounded in an unflinching analysis of institutional failure. It must be pro-business and optimistic about technology. It must be pragmatic, willing to reckon with uncomfortable questions, and indifferent to the factional positioning that has consumed the party for a decade. And it must retain, at its core, an unapologetic belief in the role of the state in protecting communities from the excesses of capitalism.

The organisers won the battle for Labour’s soul, and they did so by being more disciplined, more patient, and more committed than their opponents. If those of us who believe Labour must recover the capacity for serious politics want to change the party’s direction, we will need to match that commitment.