Rebuilding Labour’s Democratic Left

Back in the Autumn of 2023 Labour Hub launched a new podcast, with host Bryn Griffiths, one of their regular contributors to foster strategic discussions about the way forward for the Labour left after the terrible 2019 General Election defeat. He explains its aims and work.

Those of us on the left have suffered far too many defeats in our lifetimes.  Democratic socialists in their sixties and beyond can remember the victory of Thatcher in 1979, which brought down the curtain on the post-war consensus and plunged Labourism into a deep crisis.  The Thatcher victory was followed by the high water of the Labour Left when Tony Benn was pipped at the post by Dennis Healey for Labour’s Deputy Leadership in 1981.  To make matters worse, Thatcher, equipped with the Ridley Plan, avenged the Miners’ victories of 1972 and 1974 to defeat the whole of the trade union movement in 1985.  Thatcher then focused her attention on bringing the municipal left to heel with rate capping in 1985, followed by the abolition of the Greater London Council and the metropolitan authorities in 1986.

We had to wait until May 1997 to bring an end to the long cold night of Conservative rule, and even then Thatcher felt able to taunt us.  When asked by a Conservative politician what her greatest achievement was, she simply replied, “Tony Blair and New Labour.  We forced our opponents to change their minds”.   In 2015, more than three decades after Thatcherism started to transform British politics, Jeremy Corbyn unexpectedly became Leader and signalled a sudden renaissance for the Labour Left. Five years later, Hannah Proctor, a Corbyn supporter, identified the 2019 General Election defeat as another decisive moment and felt moved to write Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat.  A few years later, Labour Hub launched the Labour Left Podcast with Bryn Griffiths and set itself the lofty objective of providing a place for the Labour Left to discuss how we might develop a strategy to deliver a comeback.  The podcast always looks forward to a future left revival but consistently mines the past for lessons about how we might act today.

An early interview with Mike Phipps, the Labour Hub editor and author of the aptly titled Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, insisted we should spend less time traitor spotting and more time developing a strategy to actually move us forwards. 

The podcast established its democratic socialist credentials by embracing a history from below with Professor Harvey J Kaye, the author of the British Marxist Historians; bychampioning a consistent socialist internationalism, with Nadia Whittome MP, which stretches from Kyiv to Gaza; and, more recently, considering how democracy must be placed at the heart of our English socialism with Sandy Martin of the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform.  The show has enthusiastically championed proportional representation. Such discussions are important if we are to establish a politics which gives us the possibility of creating a left coalition capable of rebuilding the Labour Left.

A focus on coalition building has meant that the legacy of Antonio Gramsci makes regular appearances on the show. Most notably, Stuart Hall’s application of Gramsci’s ideas to Thatcherism with Jeremy Gilbert, a Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London; the use of Gramsci in his book The Starmer Symptom in an interview with Mark Perryman; and John McDonnell MP’s use of his ideas when he was in and against the state at the Greater London Council. During these discussions, it has emerged again and again that we must learn a lot from Gramsci if we are going to reignite socialist politics in Britain. 

The Labour Left Podcast’s commitment to exploring a new, much-needed pluralism of the left has led to appearances by guests keen to peer over the barricades, to see if the time has come to heal the soft left/hard left divide!  The most notable appearance this way was probably Mainstream’s Neal Lawson, who appeared in a podcast titled The Hard Left and the Soft Left Are Talking Again.

Readers of The Chartist will also recognise contributors such as Rachel Shabi explaining the truth about antisemitism; Corinne Fowler talking about Britain’s history of slavery and colonialism; socialist-feminist Lynne Segal discussing a life of Making Trouble, the title of one of her books; and Bell Ribeiro-Addy telling us about the fight against racism in Parliament

Bryn Griffiths is an activist in Colchester Labour Party and North Essex World Transformed. He is the Vice-Chair of Momentum and sits on the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s Executive. In the 1980s and 1990s, Bryn was involved in Labour Briefing.

Brynhosts Labour Hub’s spin-off – the Labour Left Podcast.  You can listen to all the episodes of the podcast on your favourite podcast site.  If you prefer to watch your podcasts, you can do that on YouTube, Spotify or Substack.  In all cases, just search for the Labour Left Podcast or click on the QR code.