It’s the 12th of December 2019 and a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party await the exit polls for the general election triggered by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Labour members, voters, and canvassers look for a glimpse of revived hope to rival comparatively dire opinion polls gathered prior to the date. Unfortunately for them, no swing would occur.
Almost five years later, following a humiliating election defeat and three Conservative prime ministers, an almost unrecognisable Labour Party finds itself elected into government. A now more centrist party finds itself under the leadership of equally centrist Keir Starmer, a starkly different political position than under previous leader, the left-wing socialist Jeremy Corbyn. Policy such as ending austerity, to the current refusal to scrap the Conservative two-child benefit cap raises the question of how such a revolution of the Labour Party occurred in just under five years.
Following Labour’s crushing election defeat, Corbyn announced that he would resign as leader of the party. This would allow Labour to decide their path, and ultimately the direction of all future policy. Starmer would find himself victorious in the 2020 leadership bid, beating Corbyn ally and fellow socialist Rebecca Long-Bailey and current Secretary of State for culture, media and sport, Lisa Nandy.
Although one could point to this election result as being the end of the Labour left, through the defeat of Rebecca Long-Bailey, Starmer’s campaign included numerous, now uncharacteristically, socialist pledges. These pledges include promises such as the re-nationalisation of rail, abolition of university tuition fees and, perhaps most notably, to promote peace, prevent wars, and to review arms sales. It was not until after Starmer’s election to party leader that these left-leaning policies, in hand with the party’s general political position, began to shift into the centrist standing seen today.
Starmer has since denied claims that he has abandoned the pledges due to them having already served their purpose in gaining votes from the left of the party for his leadership, and instead told the BBC that these pledges had been “adapt[ed]” due to changes in circumstances following “covid... and the conflict in Ukraine.” This shift in policy can be seen most clearly in the example of the aforementioned refusal to scrap the Conservative’s two-child benefit cap. Following a motion called by the SNP for its abolition, seven left-leaning Labour MPs had the whip suspended after voting against their party. Support for the left was shown to still have strength when Starmer was forced to backtrack on his decision to prevent Dianne Abbot to stand as a Labour candidate.
It is perhaps most necessary then to realise that, although the left of the Labour Party do not exist as strongly in the parliamentary party anymore, the reminiscence of this stance still remains. And perhaps most fittingly, as Jeremy Corbyn told Mohammed Hassan in an interview on The Big Picture, the left of Labour still exists “on the streets, in the community, on the picket lines and in the campaigns” and that the view that the left has dimished is merely a result of less coverage by the media. It seems to be that the Left has merely momentarily stepped out of the political spotlight.