Dear subscriber
You may be interested in a piece I’ve written for Byline Times today. It’s on Labour’s internal culture.
It argues that Labour’s infighting can seem very distant from the interests of the wider public but that the party’s internal culture should be of interest to anyone who wants to know what a Keir Starmer-led government would be like.
An ethos of command and control can harden in office to the detriment of legitimately-held differences of opinion about major issues of policy.
By persistently intervening to assist candidates favoured by the Labour leader’s office means the left, the soft left, the affiliated trade unions and numerous local constituency activists, have now all felt the extent of the reach of the party’s centralised machine.
The question therefore is whether a sufficiently powerful movement will evolve to constrain the machine.
Simon