If, going about your business within the Labour Party, you encounter a confident, self-described and evangelical Blairite, it is very likely they have some association with the organisation that began its life as “Progress”. Founded a year before Blair’s 1997 victory, it flew the flag of New Labour reformism more enthusiastically than anyone else. After the 2010 election, Progress formed a haven for New Labour’s loyalists. During Ed Miliband’s leadership, it provided a forum for internal critics of his limited attempts to move the party left. Through the Corbyn years, Progress were definitively Core Group Negative, loud and angry about Labour’s political transformation. Their strength derived from the fact that, in the broad sense of the term, they had “a politics”: policy instincts, strong branding and a distinctive affect, all of which extended to their organising efforts and intra-party networks.
You knew what these people thought about tuition fees and public private partnership and interventionist foreign policy and economic flexibility and Europe (enthusiastically pro in all cases). Their positions on the singular merits of the trade union Community and the need to systemically crush the Labour left were similarly clear. It was a way of thinking that many people (myself included) saw as rigid and dogmatic. But at least it had dogmas – belying the stereotype of the Labour right as unthinking pragmatists. Arguably theirs was a set of views that made sense between the end of the Cold War and the coming of the financial crash – but one that even in the 2010s was beginning to creak and calcify. Post-pandemic and post-Corbyn, it’s an approach that seems hopelessly out of date. For instance, what does the Labour progressives’ immigration policy look like; where is its thinking on the rise of populism?
Progress is now Progressive Britain, following a merger with the think tank Policy Network in 2021. (This followed a previous collaboration with the old right faction Labour First to form the campaign group “Labour to Win”.) At Progressive Britain’s conference in central London earlier this month, there was certainly evidence of material flourishing: having foolishly bought a pastry breakfast at Pret, I arrived to find a spread of chia seed puddings and small avocado toasts. Copies of the new print magazine – titled, appropriately enough, “Progress”, now in its second issue, and physically a very handsome thing – were scattered about.
A faction’s flourishing, however, is measured by more than material prosperity (and Progressive Britain’s flourishing is supported by a US centrist behemoth, the Progressive Policy Institute, which is backing the conference). Measured in intellectual vitality and ideological commitment, and not in early-morning hors d’oeuvres, things look considerably less rosy – and speak to a crisis of imagination and relevance on the Labour right.
Superficially, these people – Labour’s progressives – are in charge now. Pat McFadden is one of the most important people in government; cabinet ministers Darren Jones and Bridget Phillipson both addressed the conference, as did former Progress chair and current employment minister Alison McGovern. Progress graduates have considerable command over party management: candidate selection at the last election was handled by former Progress deputy director Matt Faulding, who is now PLP secretary, and after the election former Progress staffer Henna Shah was initially put in charge of negotiating No 10’s relationship with MPs. But despite links and influence, this isn’t their government. Keir Starmer isn’t their guy, and the government’s programme, and many of its ministers, are not the ones Progressive Britain would have chosen.
This places Progressive Britain in a peculiar position. The Starmer administration is enough its own – and committed sufficiently to squashing the Labour left – that it has to be happy with the situation. But supporting a government that doesn’t belong to you puts you in a strategic bind. Maintaining a distinctive politics requires outlining points of conflict even with those you are broadly allied to. There is pressure from the right within Labour – just ask the MPs who think we should leave the European Convention on Human Rights. But with the notable exception of the discontent over the government’s plans on academies, it is not coming from Labour’s progressives.
Indeed, Progressive Britain explicitly says it wants to be better message-carriers for Starmer. “We all need to do better explaining the decisions of the government,” said its executive director, Adam Langleben, to open Progressive Britain’s conference. Providing this kind of support without the clarity of critique means the political space Progressive Britain occupies feels vaguer than before. This stems equally from problems with the government: the boat is drifting, everyone knows that. But while the protesting left has been locked below decks, the right is cheering on the captain even while squinting nervously at the horizon.
In this slightly listless position, there are two things, going by the conference, that are still animating Labour’s progressives. Those things are Yimby-ism (the magazine splashes “builders, not blockers” on its cover and in the afternoon you could listen to Mike Reader MP at a session titled “The Yimby party?”) and the reforming possibilities of artificial intelligence. Even then, the impetus behind these issues is largely exogenous to Labour. Instead it can be found somewhere between the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), the PricedOut housing campaign group, and Lawrence Newport’s Looking for Growth. And if the TBI has created a recognisable and coherent form of neo-Blairism, it is not one that regards the Labour Party as its vehicle for change, and those who might see themselves as internal heirs to Blair do not seem to have a theory for revitalising the party in the manner of their hero.
As well as a vaguer intellectual programme, a lot of people I spoke to had vaguer commitments than I might have expected at such an event. Most of these people are Labour centrists, shunted in their associations and alliances to the right of the party by the dramatic line-drawing of the Corbyn years. Perhaps I’m just getting old, but it didn’t used to be like this: where are the people with blood on their teeth, filled with messianic belief and ruthless purpose? The Friends of Labour Students, the ones still in “Team Tessa” WhatsApp groups? Did the loss of the Labour left mean a loss of purpose for Labour’s progressives, revealing a thinner politics than previously thought? Was the right’s eventual triumph more of a pyrrhic victory than it looked from the outside, with ‘stay and fight’ drawing attention away from the many who left and the resources they took with them? Did the siloing of organising efforts into Labour to Win leave Progressive Britain with more time to think, but less to think about? Or are Britain and the government’s problems simply so intractable that no one, up to and including the Progressive Britain set, knows what to do about them?
The ghost at the feast is Wes Streeting, for a decade the coming man in this part of the world, and for almost as long their once-and-future leadership hope. But even at this event, no one I ask thinks he will be the next leader of the Labour Party. Among other considerations, his positioning on trans issues has created a red line for many people of this political persuasion who might otherwise have supported him (a problem particularly acute given Progressive Britain’s historically close relationship with LGBT Labour, which is one of a handful of groups – Labour Friends of Israel, Community union, East and South East Asians for Labour – with stalls at the conference).
In 2011, Progress (as it then was) produced The Purple Book: A Progressive Future for Labour, an essay collection featuring rising stars of the time: Rachel Reeves, Liz Kendall, Caroline Flint and Steve Reed. Many of these people are in government now, but the success of the authors has not translated to success for the faction. It’s hard to imagine what a contemporary Purple Book would look like, and whether this faction are capable of the difficult work that considered revisionism requires. It seems that Labour’s progressives are no longer the future they once believed was theirs.
[See also: How Labour learned to love immigration control]
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