With just under a week to go until polling day, Tony McNulty reflects on what New Labour's time in government from 1997 to 2010 can teach Keir Starmer and his team about managing the Parliamentary Labour Party in government.
In 1924, after an indecisive election, Labour joined with the Liberals to vote down the King’s Speech of Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative Party. Labour went on to form its first (minority) government with only 191 seats. The election realigned the party system, establishing the dominance of the Tories and Labour for the next 100 years and marking the end of the Liberals as a party of government. One hundred years later, Labour look set to win this year’s General Election with what will possibly be the largest majority in British political history.
Will the 2024 election prove to be as seismic as 1924? Is there to be a new realignment of the political parties as there was a century ago? Will the Conservatives recover from what looks to be a crushing defeat? Will 2024 be the UK’s equivalent of the 1993 rout of the Canadian Progressive Conservatives who were reduced to merely two seats?
Time will tell. But what would be the consequences of such an election victory be for the Labour Party? What will the new Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) look like? Is the lack of experience amongst the Shadow Cabinet a problem? What will be the defining issues of the first weeks and months of the government? What will the Whips Office look like and how will it function?
The starting point for looking at the composition of the post-2024 election Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) is what I call the ‘core legacy’ – the MPs who are seeking to remain in the House of Commons by standing as candidates in the election.
Labour had a total of 202 MPs after the 2019 election – its worst election result since 1935. By the eve of the election in 2024, the position was as follows:
PLP 2019
202
Resignations during 2019-2024 Parliament
7
MPs standing down at this election
36
Sub Total
159
By-election winners during 2019-2024 Parliament
13
Ex-Labour MPs standing as Independents
2 [Jeremy Corbyn and Claudia Webbe]
Core Legacy
170
So, the assumed starting base for the PLP ‘core legacy’ is 170 MPs. There are also 12 former Labour MPs who are putting themselves forward in the election – not always in the seats that they had previously lost. Although not part of the ‘core legacy’ base, this body of experience – often rather cruelly referred to as ‘retreads’ - will also be important in the new PLP.
The latest polls put Labour ahead by between 18 and 26 points. One of the first MRP projections – that have been such a talking point during this election campaign – was based on a national vote share of Labour 43, Tory 25, Lib Dems 11, Reform 10 and Greens 7 – an 18-point lead for Labour. It projected a Labour majority of 194 (the highest ever) with 422 seats, compared to the high watermark of 418 in 1997. This would be a gain of 219 seats – compared with 146 in 1997. While polls are, of course, not the final result, this starting point is as useful as any other to get an indication of what the PLP might look like as the dust settles on Friday 5 July.
On these polling figures, all 12 ‘retreads’ will be elected, but nonetheless the new PLP will be enormously inexperienced. A PLP of 422 members would include the 170 core legacy MPs, the 12 retreads and 240 brand new MPs. Nearly 60 per cent of the PLP will be what the Americans call ‘freshmen’ [and women].
This matters because forming government typically requires about 125 to- -130 posts to be filled. The outgoing government currently consists of 125 ministers servicing 143 posts. There is little indication that the incoming Labour government will change these numbers. The nature and focus of some of the roles are likely to change, but it is unlikely that the overall number of government jobs will.
The government will face legal limitations too. The legal maximum number of ministers in paid positions is 109 (Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975) and the number of Commons ministers is capped at 95 (House of Commons Disqualifications Act 1975). There do not seem to be any plans to change these restrictions. The current government has 108 paid ministers – 91 in the Commons and 17 in the House of Lords.
Labour’s team of shadow ministers in the Lords will constitute an important secondary element of the core legacy and the new government would do well to utilise them to the full. These shadow ministers – many of them former MPs – will be a rich source of wisdom and experience.
Notwithstanding this secondary core legacy group in the Lords, the incoming government will need to find up to 95 MPs to serve as ministers, legal officers and whips. The Cabinet and senior ministers will also normally have unpaid Parliamentary Private Secretaries (PPSs) to help them with their roles. This would add a further 40-50 MPs to the Government team. In total then, something of the order of 95 paid Commons ministers and at least 40 unpaid PPSs are needed to form a government – a total of at least 135/140 MPs.
That is 135-140 MPs largely from the core legacy base and the retreads – a total of 170 MPs, given the lack of MP experience of nearly 60 per cent of the new PLP. It is very unlikely that this number can come from the core legacy or the retreads. Some MPs will prefer to continue or establish themselves on Select Committees. Some will want to enjoy the relative freedom of life on the backbenches. Some will have already served as ministers in the last Labour government and will not want to repeat the experience. For some, it may be a matter of age or external commitments, while others would not be chosen for factional reasons. There is likely be a core of 30 or so permanent internal ‘oppositionists’ who would be unlikely to serve in government even if they were asked to do so.
A further issue is the thin experience base of the core legacy MPs. Only three of the current 31 members of the Shadow Cabinet have any ministerial experience at Cabinet level in government. Hilary Benn served in Labour cabinets from 2003 to 2010, while Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper each served in Gordon Brown’s administration for two years from 2008 to 2010. Another six of the current Shadow Cabinet have some ministerial experience from the last Labour government including John Healey and Pat McFadden who ‘attended Cabinet’. As in 1997, this absence of experience reflects the party’s fruitless years of opposition.
Of the 31 members of the current Shadow Cabinet, 11 also served in some capacity in Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinets. None of the remaining 20 did so. Five resigned from their posts in the 2016 ‘coup’ against Corbyn, while the other six were still serving in the Shadow Cabinet at the 2019 election – Starmer, Rayner, Ashworth, Thornberry, Healey, and Smith [in the Lords].
Notwithstanding this serious lack of experience in both the PLP and the Shadow Cabinet, recent history suggests that this might not be too problematic. John Major assumed office as Prime Minister having been in Cabinet for just over three years as Chief Secretary to the Treasury (two years), Foreign Secretary (three months) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (one year, one month). Since then, two of the last seven Prime Ministers have been without any formal government experience at all before assuming office – Tony Blair and David Cameron. All the others – Gordon Brown, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak – each had some degree of ministerial experience before entering Number 10. You can argue that Blair and Cameron were the best two out of the last seven. They certainly lasted the longest – Blair for ten years and Cameron for six.
Lengthy periods out of office also accounted for the lack of experience amongst previous incoming governments. Labour’s absence from power for 18 years (1979-1997) meant that Blair’s first Cabinet contained only one former junior minister, Margeret Beckett, and one junior whip, Ann Taylor, from the 1974-79 Government. After 13 years out of power, David Cameron’s first administration (the Coalition with the Liberal Democrats) contained three former Conservative Cabinet ministers – Sir George Young, William Hague and Ken Clarke and a number of former junior ministers. Of course, none of the Liberal Democrats had any governmental experience.
So why should such a lack of experience be problematic? The domestic and international context that this incoming Labour government faces will be markedly different from that inherited by Labour in 1997. Michael Jacobs argues persuasively that multiple crises since 2008 including a 'global financial crash, austerity, stalled productivity, wage stagnation, rising inequality, inflation, climate and environmental breakdown' still have an impact. He contends that a new government in the UK will confront in this ‘polycrisis’ the 'most daunting array of policy challenges that any government has faced in the post war period'.
Added to this is an alarming international picture with the ongoing war in Ukraine, the turmoil in Gaza, the continuing debate about the UK’s relationship with the EU, ongoing debate about the power of China and Russia, and the prospect of a second Trump presidency in the United States.
On the domestic front, Starmer’s Chief of Staff, Sue Gray, has already drawn up a dossier of some of the immediate problems an incoming Labour government might face. Jim Pickard from the Financial Times dubbed it ‘Sue’s shit list’ and suggested that any one of the areas on it ‘could puncture a honeymoon period for the new administration’. The list includes items such as the potential collapse of Thames Water, public sector pay, prison overcrowding, universities failing, the NHS funding shortfall and collapsing local councils. Blaming 14 years of Tory misrule and ‘doing your best’ will only get you so far. As Pickard would have it, ‘each item on the list has the potential to upend the political calendar and dominate the new government’s focus’. This is before Labour starts to impose its own policy framework and choices.
In the context of the ‘polycrisis’, the international position and imminent domestic crises – Labour’s internal management and discipline will be of the utmost importance. Although deeply unfashionable, the Whips Office in any new government will always be important, but all the more important this time because of this daunting legacy and context, the relative inexperience of the incoming PLP and, ironically, because of the size of the majority.
Having secured a majority that allows the Labour Party to plan for at least two terms in office, the Cabinet will need to both establish very quickly how things will be organised, while at the same time pacing themselves. In party terms, they will need to ensure that party structures are preserved with their integrity intact. It is important that both the Party and the Government appreciate the importance of local party structures. Many felt that the last Labour Government allowed the Party to become ‘hollowed out’ and ‘no longer capable of sustaining democracy in its present form’.[1] An overconcentration on governing to the detriment of the party machine is perhaps a justifiable critique of the last Labour government. It is fundamentally important that the new Cabinet recognises that the PLP is more than simply ‘lobby fodder’ for the new government.
The key role of the Whips Office is to secure government business – a task that will be made easier by a majority of 194, as the YouGov/Sky MRP projection suggests - but with such a large majority comes problems. As soon as the Government is formed, there will be instant disappointment from some core legacy and retread MPs who did not secure positions and even from some new MPs anticipating immediate elevation. Freshly minted ministers will need to learn how to govern and will need reminding that they are working for the Labour government, not for themselves or for their individual departments. In what will be a talented and large intake, dozens of new MPs will need to understand that they will not become ministers straight away.
Once the Government is appointed, Starmer and his team will benefit enormously from the breadth of government experience that Gray brings as his Chief of Staff. However, it will be a stretch if they both think that they can somehow maintain control of the PLP from the centre of government. The management and discipline of the PLP is above all a party matter that will need political direction and strategy. The Whips Office will need to be about more than discipline. It will have to take on the role of a human resources department much more readily than in the past and the nature and tone of the whipping operation will need to be set from the very beginning. A hard-nosed and strict imposition of discipline will not work with such a large PLP and so many new MPs.
It may well have been necessary to impose strictures on the selection of candidates and ensure that some did not go forward to the election, but this approach will simply not work with the new PLP who have come through such an historic election. Whilst hyperbole around the notion of factional purges has been significantly over-blown, Labour will need to show a confidence that allows for space to discuss and debate the way forward. The vast majority of newly elected MPs will wish the new government only success, but hopefully someone somewhere within the hierarchy will have been thinking about how a PLP of (possibly at least) 422 will be managed and afforded this space – and how that might look different from 1997.
There will be difficult decisions to deal with early in the life of the new government. It will not have all the answers and it will need time to arrive at good decisions. The PLP must play a part in this, and the Government must have the confidence to engage them. This will take political leadership both from the centre of government and from the Whips Office who will be working with MPs on a day-to-day basis. This overtly political role cannot be a job for the new Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff as party political will, dexterity and political management will be required. In short, politics will still matter.
One particularly difficult issue will be tax. As Colm Murphy and Patrick Diamond have argued, quite reasonably, Labour should, at the very least, launch a commission on tax reform, arguing that there is an ‘overwhelming economic and ethical case for higher taxes on wealth and for taxing capital gains at the same rate as income’. This might rankle with the Labour leadership but it is a discussion that many of those new backbenchers will want to have sooner rather than later. It will be imperative that there are safe mechanisms to enable such discussions and it should not be the case that anyone seeking debate will be dismissed as internal oppositionists. Indeed, seeking to supress debate is almost guaranteed to see those ‘oppositionists’ grow and flourish. This is the last thing needed, even with such a large majority.
The large and unwieldy general PLP meetings in the 1997-2010 were, with 418 members, far from a satisfactory forum for serious discussion or concerns. It may be that the regional PLP groups will provide a better space. They will certainly be much larger than they have ever been before and might well have the potential for providing more effective engagement and focus for encouraging dialogue and debate. Early in the ‘New Labour’ government, departmental PLP committees were established to focus on each government department, but they fell into disuse as they proved to be relatively ineffective. It might well be that the ministerial teams in each department should be charged with revitalising these committees as a forum for internal party debate and discussion.
There could be a different role for Government MPs on Select Committees as occasionally critical but ultimately supportive voices. This role has more chance of working if the Government take the reports of Select Committees far more seriously than its predecessors. Each party is entitled to a number of seats on Select Committees in proportion to the number of MPs they have in the House of Commons. In a House with at least two-thirds of MPs from the government benches and a diffuse and weak Opposition, this could prove to be an important ‘safe space’ but there will need to be more.
So, there will be a new government, new ministers, new MPs, and an enormous Labour majority. This has huge potential. Whatever the difficulties, I have no doubt that many of the core legacy MPs will relish the end of fourteen years of impotent opposition and the return to power and government.
This time round though the price of success will be more agility and responsiveness than party discipline, more confidence and safe space for debate and discussion rather than the control freakery of the last Labour government, and a real sense of a return to responsible politics and a better future. This will be essential to ensure that the ‘noises off’ from those who think that ‘things can only get bitter’ are proved wrong.
References:
[1] P. Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (Verso, 2013), p. 1.
Dr Tony McNulty is Teaching Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He was the Labour Member of Parliament for Harrow East from 1997 to 2010 and served in various ministerial positions in Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s governments including two stints as Minister for London.