Corbyn’s leadership prompted a determined effort by sections of the parliamentary party, donors and external advisers to reassert control and ensure that the party would never again threaten established economic interests. Labour Together was a central vehicle for that effort, coordinating funding and strategy in support of what its supporters viewed as a necessary correction.
This campaign was framed as a return to ‘seriousness’ and electoral ‘realism’. But in reality it fostered habits that transgressed Labour’s democratic traditions. Internal dissent was managed rather than engaged. Thoughtful left-wing MPs and parliamentary candidates, such as Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Faiza Shaheen, were defenestrated at the last moment before the 2024 election, replaced by pliant loyalists. There have been widespread reports, since the fall of Peter Mandelson, of his role working with McSweeney in vetting the party’s 2024 candidate list, to ensure that the left would be locked out of the Parliamentary Labour Party for a generation. Meanwhile party members who had joined in large numbers during the Corbyn period were often treated with contempt: Starmer invited them to leave the party, while another party source spoke of ‘shaking off the fleas’.
Political cultures rarely remain confined to the battles that produce them. Techniques developed for internal factional struggles have become a settled way of doing things. When the individuals and networks formed during that period moved into government, they carried those habits with them. It wasn’t only that Labour moved to the right under Starmer, it also normalised tactics that treat scrutiny and opposition as a security threat. One has only to think here of Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action, which reveals the same anti-democratic and authoritarian instincts. Cooper’s actions were held to have been unlawful by the High Court in its judgment of 13 February 2026 (a judgment now being appealed by her successor as Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood), on grounds of its violation of basic democratic rights of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. The cavalier attitude towards basic democratic rights and protections is all of a piece with the broader degeneration of values within the Labour Party.
