The drift to tribal, factional politics isn’t just between parties it is within them and no more so than within the Labour party. However if any party is to be successful it must allow for debate and differences in order to develop positions that serve mutual interests.
Neal Lawson’s article in The New Statesman from November 2025 The Starmer-McSweeney tendency is sinking Labour could have been written after Morgan McSweeney’s resignation. The writing has been on the wall for some time. “Their tiny faction is dragging social democracy into an abyss”
In the article Lawson quotes Bernard Crick from “In Defence of Politics” (1962): “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.” Politics is about building bridges, not about papering over or suppressing differences.
Lawson says “This honouring of difference is not just morally right but instrumentally and intrinsically essential to good progressive governance”
He argues that the absence of fresh ideas in the party leaves just a bureaucratic machine. He goes on to say “… today we have an administration revealed as narrow, shallow, brittle and alarmingly defensive. It was always going to unravel. You can only put faction before party and country for so long. Because while you can bureaucratically control a party for a while, you can’t control a country in the same way.”
He finishes the article with this comment “Labour is dying because it’s being denied the oxygen of debate and difference. It is time for the party to breathe once more.”
It’s clear that the country needs a new kind of politics, but it seems unlikely that a new vision of cooperation in pursuit of mutual interests is going to emerge from the Labour Party in its current state.
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