New rows over old divisions in Labour before Westminster MPs take summer break

Irish Times

6 days ago

The
House of Commons
doesn't officially rise for summer recess until Tuesday, but a giddy, end-of-term vibe had already enveloped parliament by Thursday afternoon, the time of week when most MPs leave Westminster and head back to their constituencies.
After an exhausting, battle-laden few weeks for
Keir Starmer
's
Labour
government, the prime minister sent his charges off for the summer with a flurry of decisions aimed at reasserting his waning authority over the restive parliamentary party.
Late on Wednesday afternoon, it emerged he had suspended four MPs, including three of the new intake from last year's general election landslide win. They had been prominent among Labour rebels who recently forced the government into an embarrassing U-turn on £5 billion (€5.8 billion) of disability benefit cuts.
The decision to remove the whip from newbies Brian Leishman, Chris Hinchliff and Neil Duncan-Jordan, as well as rebel leader Rachael Maskell, who was first elected in 2019, was viewed in Labour as a warning that Starmer will not idly brook such dissent.
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However, as the party's MPs gathered for the last of Westminster's relentless stream of booze-fuelled summer receptions later that evening, many on Labour's soft-left wing complained the suspensions had made Starmer look vindictive and weak.
Others, notably MPs supportive of the view that Labour should focus on countering the populist threat of Reform UK, argued it was about time he was robust.
With Labour's factional fault lines laid bare, the only thing that seemed to unite Labour MPs as the week ended was that they all badly needed a break to reset over summer.
The situation was complicated further on Thursday morning by the emergence of comments by Diane Abbott, the veteran Hackney MP. She told the BBC she had 'no regrets' over a furore sparked by a letter she wrote to the Observer newspaper in 2023.
Her critics argued the letter had downplayed bigotry experienced by Travellers, Irish and, crucially, Jewish people compared to racism suffered by the Black community. The original row led to Abbott's suspension from Labour for alleged anti-Semitism, which she had always denied.
She was only readmitted on the eve of the last general election campaign, as a groundswell of support for her opened Starmer up to accusations of vindictiveness against a woman who had experienced racism all her life – Abbott was also an ally of former leader
Jeremy Corbyn
, whose backers Starmer had sought to vanquish.
By effectively doubling down this week on her original comments, Abbott presented the prime minister with a dilemma were he to reopen his row with her and, with it, old divisions that had damaged his party in the past.
Meanwhile, Thursday's announcement that Labour will lower the voting age to 16 in advance of the next general election points to divisions that may affect the party's future.
It had always been assumed that any move to reduce the voting age would directly benefit Labour over the Tories, as younger voters tend to tack left. Recent polls from ITV and More in Common, however, suggest the impact might be more nuanced.
A July survey by More in Common, a Westminster think tank, found that among 18- to 24-year-olds, the youngest cohort allowed to vote, the Greens were by far the most popular party, on 32 per cent versus 24 per cent for Labour. If that trend continued into 16- to 17-year-olds, then whatever Labour gained from the Tories on its right flank might be eliminated on its left, where anger over Starmer's stance on Israel pervades.
Meanwhile, an ITV poll of 16- and 17-year-olds found that while Labour was the most-supported party, the most popular politician was Starmer's old foe Corbyn, which doesn't play well for the prime minister as he battles with his predecessor's acolytes.
Both surveys also point to surprising levels of support among young people for Nigel Farage's Reform, which will cheer the populist politician as he gears up for his summer break. The numbers were awful, however, for the party he seeks to supplant, the Tories, down to just 6 per cent among 18- to 24-year-olds in the More in Common survey.
The decision by Starmer to risk more infighting in his party by suspending rebels was also criticised by some in Labour for letting the Tories off the hook; it took the focus off the Conservative party's handling when it was in power of a 2022 leak of the identities of 18,700 Afghans who had risked their lives by helping British forces there.
The fiasco, which emerged this week only after a court superinjunction was lifted, sparked an airlift of up to 24,000 Afghans to Britain to keep them safe from Taliban retribution. It was the perfect opportunity for Starmer to remind voters of what one of his minister's this week described as Tory 'ineptitude'.
Yet as the week petered out and the summer break beckoned, the British press was full of headlines over Labour division and the possible galvanisation of the party's left.