A year before Jeremy Corbyn’s election defeat in 2019, Keir Starmer was shown a secret blueprint that described how to woo the party membership in order to win a future leadership contest. The group behind the three-year strategy, shown to a number of senior party figures, was a little known thinktank called Labour Together. It was an obscure organisation then – but under Starmer, its key figures have now risen to become some of the most influential people in the party. But what is Labour Together, how did it help propel Starmer to power – and what is likely to be its influence should the party get into government next year? A strategy years in the making The strategy Labour Together started devising in 2017 was years in the making. It claimed to set out how to oust Corbyn as party leader, alongside policies needed to change the structure of Labour’s membership and a focus on a “voter-first” approach. Its leading architect was Morgan McSweeney, who is now Starmer’s key election strategist. Another big player was Steve Reed, now the shadow environment secretary. But Starmer was initially unconvinced. He had been asked by a current shadow cabinet member whether he was thinking about running for party leader in the event of Labour’s electoral defeat. Then shadow Brexit secretary, Starmer was staying loyal to Corbyn in public at least.
Yet over the the following months, further conversations took place. By the time Corbyn led the party to a devastating general election loss in December 2019, Starmer had been won over – and he would seemingly never look back. Labour Together – originally called Labour for the Common Good – had been foundedafter the 2015 election defeat when the Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas decided to gather like-minded MPs together to prevent the party from fracturing. They included Reed and the future leadership contender Lisa Nandy. The thinktank was focused on avoiding Labour going back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when the party was considered by many to be unelectable. “Politics is like an arch,” Cruddas is remembered to have said at the time. “The party will swing so far to the left that it needs something to keep it anchored to the centre or things will get out of control.”
Labour Together, and the Starmer project that it launched, have since been accused by the party’s left of being factional. But two MPs involved from the early days claimed that was never its purpose. It was initially such a broad church that it included the likes of Laura Parker, a former national coordinator of the leftwing campaign group Momentum; James Meadway, who was economic adviser to Corbyn’s shadow chancellor, John McDonnell; and Ed Miliband, the party leader turned Starmer frontbencher. Yet the thinktank’s original members soon came to the view that they could not anchor the party by supporting the Corbyn agenda. “For a while it felt we had found the space where all the wings of the party could work together,” one said. “But it didn’t last. We split in every different direction during the 2020 leadership contest.” The group had become more industrious in 2017, when McSweeney took over as director. Previously Reed’s chief of staff at Lambeth council in south London, where they fought to wrest control of the local authority from the hard left, McSweeney had built a reputation as a formidable organiser. Labour Together insiders recall him running a hi-tech political strategy operation. He also relied on advice from David Evans, the party’s general secretary since 2021 and another Lambeth council veteran. “In some ways Morgan made Labour Together but in other ways Labour Together made Morgan,” one insider said. They described McSweeney variously as a “massive data nerd”, “hugely earnest and enthusiastic”, “a workaholic”, “ruthless” and “a lovely man”. After securing funding from a wide range of donors united in their opposition to Corbyn, Labour Together focused on polling party members to understand their values and attitudes, and map out their policy priorities. Its research split the membership into three: • “Instrumentalists” would vote for whichever leader would be likely to win the next election, and tended to be older and joined Labour in 1997 or just before. • “Idealists” made up the middle 40% of the membership and were often younger and projected on to Corbyn what they wanted him to be. • “Ideologues” rejoined the party to vote for him having initially signed up in the 1970s and 80s before leaving or being kicked out. The data suggested that idealists made up two-thirds of Corbyn’s coalition, with ideologues making up the final third. With this information, Labour Together decided that any successor to Corbyn would need to win over all of the other group – the instrumentalists – and “peel off” at least a third of the idealists. The thinktank spent the following two-and-a-half years focused on how to first win over the party membership and, after that, the wider electorate. Cruddas told the Guardian: “It was such a turbulent period. There were all sorts of suggestions about breakaway groups from Labour. So we were keen to use this group to pull the party together.” He said he was never interested in factionalism and did not get the impression that the “astute and effective” McSweeney was either. Another said McSweeney understood more than anyone else that for Labour to be voter focused and win, the party first had to be membership focused, change the leadership and then restructure the party. His eyes were always on the prize. Some recall him telling them to stop complaining about the thinktank not adopting particular policies because “that’s not the goal”. The next Labour leader Labour Together believed that a successful successor to Corbyn would need to have served under and backed him to win over the membership. Starmer was said to have been advised that the only way he could “cash out” of working in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet was to ride out the storm in the run-up to the election. One source said he came close to resigning several times during Corbyn’s leadership, over issues of antisemitism, although never did. McSweeney was desperate to ensure Starmer’s campaign did not end in failure like that of Liz Kendall, which he ran in 2015 when she came fourth, picking up just 4.5% of the vote. In the 2020 contest, Starmer was up against Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey, who was backed by the Corbynite left. He ran a soft-left campaign but promised Corbyn’s supporters not to steer too far away from his radical policy programme of nationalisation and fighting austerity. He won with 56.2% of the vote.
McSweeney joined his leadership team, first as chief of staff and then as director of campaigns from September 2021. He remained close to Labour Together, and research he had commissioned at the thintank continued to inform his – and the party’s – thinking. However, team Starmer then began to back away from his leadership policy pledges. Labour Together’s data suggested that for the party to win back substantial numbers of seats across the country, it had to ensure Conservative voters stayed at home or switched to Labour, instead of worrying about losing votes to the Greens or the Liberal Democrats. This later became a more explicit focus on what Labour called Conservative 2019 “hero voters” – those who voted Tory in key seats, many in the “red wall”, and might be persuaded to switch to Labour. Some in Labour Together accept that a strategy criticised for neglecting the party’s loyal voter base is an “uncomfortable reality” they must live with to win. However, Josh Simons, who took over from McSweeney as director of Labour Together last year, said: “It’s always baffled me that people think it’s a moral compromise to be voter focused. A politician’s job is as much about listening as speaking.” ‘Leadership is going too far’ Two-thirds of Starmer’s first shadow cabinet had worked with Labour Together. Some of its current key players, like the shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, were promoted in later reshuffles, with Shabana Mahmood getting a promotion to shadow justice secretary in the latest. Under Simons, a former policy adviser for Corbyn who quit in protest against rising claims of antisemitism within the party, Labour Together has focused on “security”. Its latest report shows how its research has guided Starmer’s five missions, which can be seen as five conditions of a secure life. Recent speeches by Starmer, the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, and the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, have notably included the term security. But Cruddas has voiced discomfort at the leadership’s direction. He left Labour Together this summer and claimed the party had fallen under the control of a “rightwing, illiberal” faction embarking on a “witch-hunt” against the Corbynite left and anyone with an independent voice. “There’s been a lot of ‘boasting’ on Labour Together’s work within the party. Many are reinterpreting history for their own purposes,” Cruddas said reflecting on the group’s influence. “I wish things will be different if Labour wins. What might seem like a good move in the short term, isolating the leadership, might be bad in the long term. “Labour in government only succeeds, like under [Clement] Attlee and [Tony] Blair, when it holds together different coalitions and tradition. And that was behind the origins of Labour Together. That’s not a universally held position at the moment. Leadership is going too far.” Yet with McSweeney still one of Starmer’s most powerful aides, and the links between the leadership and Labour Together as strong as ever, the thinktank is on course to become an even more powerful player if the party wins the next general election. One member of the shadow cabinet believes it will be instrumental in the next Labour leadership contest, too. “Finally Labour Together will be a policy hub that MPs can rely on instead of ideas being tied to MPs,” they said.