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Home » Breakthrough barriers for UK’s populist left

Breakthrough barriers for UK’s populist left

Blake AndersonBy Blake AndersonJuly 4, 2025 UK 6 Mins Read
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This article is an on-site version of our Inside Politics newsletter. Subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every weekday. If you’re not a subscriber, you can still receive the newsletter free for 30 days

Good morning. Will there be new organised parties challenging Labour from the government’s left? Yes. And with some MPs wanting to swerve left on policy to meet that challenge, they will add to the pressure on the public finances. But those parties face challenges of their own, too. Some thoughts on a couple of them in today’s note.

Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on Bluesky and X, and Georgina on Bluesky. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com

Come together but not right now?

Towards the end of the last Labour government, Labour faced three challenges on its left flank: from the Liberal Democrats (sort of), from the Green party in Brighton, and from Respect — an alliance between liberal lefties of all creeds and colours and the Muslim working classes that grew out of the opposition to the Iraq war.

Now some Labour MPs fear that a similar set of threats could re-emerge — chief among them, Jeremy Corbyn returning to lead a new leftwing party. For a brief moment last night, that fear seemed to have been realised when Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South, announced that she was leaving the Labour party and would stand as the co-leader of a new party alongside Corbyn. Then he was reported to be frustrated that Sultana had made the announcement without consulting him first. “Zarah has really overplayed her hand,” one Corbyn ally told our team, adding that “she jumped the gun to get the data and the donations”.

Traditionally, the problem facing parties to the right of the Conservatives concerns the supply side — few groups have actually emerged, they’ve lacked professionalism, they’ve been associated with violence and they’ve therefore been unable to thrive. Nigel Farage’s Reform may prove to be the first major exception.

The problem that afflicts parties to Labour’s left has tended to be a demand side one: there have been lots of political parties, they’ve frequently been schismatic but they have not had as much electoral demand. As it stands, the “schismatic” part is still true: this new party has split before it has even been launched, in part on the question of whether it should even launch yet.

At the 2024 election, there was demand for “left of Labour” alternatives, partly because, just as in 2005, there was a general expectation that Labour would win and the Conservatives did not inspire enthusiasm.

But no one really believed or feared that left of Labour rivals might be on their way back to, or hold on to power. As in 2005, one particular area of unhappiness with the Labour party was foreign policy. Throw in a more ethnically diverse country 19 years later, and you have the recipe for the election of five such independents in 2024.

At the next election, one reason why there may be hunger for a left of Labour alternative is that the Labour government may well continue to be unpopular. One risk for Labour is that the next election becomes, as with the Conservatives in 2024, an “everything must go” sale in which voters bolt to whichever out of Reform, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and various independents, whether organised collectively or alone, is the best opportunity to beat Labour.

But the risk to a left of Labour alternative (in addition to the documented difficulties these parties have in getting off the ground and not splitting into fragments), is that, at the next election, the alternative prime minister to Keir Starmer really will spark fear among the voters they are targeting. Part of why Labour regained some of the ground it lost in 2005 in 2010 is that even as it lost voters elsewhere, its traditional core returned to it in a doomed bid to “keep the Tories out”.

If at the next election, whether the main opponent to Labour is Nigel Farage or Robert Jenrick, they will probably be someone who is a polarising force: a problem for these left of Labour challengers and a boon for Labour.

What these parties on the populist left need, or at least have needed in the past, is for the Labour government to become more popular and/or for the rightwing alternative to become less threatening. (In addition to sorting their own internal affairs out.) Labour failure creates opportunities to gain council seats and win elections, but it has generally been Labour success, or the prospect of it, that paves the way for parties further to Labour’s left to actually gain seats.

Now try this

I’m off to see the new Jurassic World movie. Have a lovely weekend, however you spend it!

Top stories today

  • ‘It’s the worst start’ | Labour’s support has shrivelled to about 24 per cent in the polls. George Parker, Jim Pickard and Sam Fleming spoke to insiders and allies, including Keir Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin, about strategy, delivery and disconnect in a tumultuous first year. You can read my thoughts on Labour’s first year in the comments here, where Robert Shrimsley, Miranda Green and I did our best at answering all your fascinating questions.

  • Investor fright is real | This week’s sell-off in UK gilts, sparked by a tearful Rachel Reeves in the House of Commons, showed how fragile investor confidence is in Britain’s precarious fiscal position. Although gilt prices rallied yesterday, investors said Wednesday’s sell-off was a “dry run” in case the chancellor eventually departs — while economists warned of a “perfect storm” that could lead to a tax-raising budget of a similar scale to last October’s. 

  • Just a vision? | Get the lowdown on the 168-page 10-year plan in England to fix the NHS. Jennifer Dixon, chief executive of the Health Foundation, said without reform of the social care system “or co-ordinated action to address the wider social and economic causes of ill health”, the proposals remain largely “a vision”.

  • The nature of business | Some farms in England could be taken entirely out of food production under plans to make more space for nature, the environment secretary Steve Reed has said. He said a revamp of post-Brexit farming subsidies and a new land use plan would be aimed at increasing food production in the most productive areas and decreasing or completely removing it in the least productive, according to the Guardian.

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