Why Labour are in turmoil one year after their election win

It’s safe to say this is not the first anniversary the Labour government at Westminster would have hoped for.  Small will be the celebrations in Downing Street marking 12 months since the party was returned to office at the general election. 

Little wonder, given that recent days have seen the most unholy self-inflicted mess over proposed welfare reforms, with backbenchers shredding the government’s plans.

There followed the sight of the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, openly weeping at Prime Minister’s Questions; whatever the cause, this was a spectacle without precedent. 

Remarkably, with a 165-seat working majority, the government now finds itself looking for ways to recover its authority. For Labour, things need to be turned around in very short order. 

Coming to power with a headline promise of ‘change’, Keir Starmer and his team now need to go back to the drawing board and clearly set out how they will demonstrably improve the lives of so many who envisaged a more hopeful Britain after fourteen years of the Tories. 

Having spent considerable time writing about every general election since 1900, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that understanding the past can help guide those now running the show. 

For instance, it was precisely a refusal by MPs to implement huge savings injuring those most in need which doomed Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour administration way back in 1931. Then it was the unemployed, today it is the sick and disabled. 

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Two decades later, in 1951, Nye Bevan and Harold Wilson resigned from the government over the imposition of charges on false teeth and spectacles for NHS patients.

The Daily Express said of the plans, by the then Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell, ‘that is what the Tories would have done. Now the job is done for them.’   

In essence, Labour does not exist to hammer those who most need help, quite the opposite. Think here of Neil Kinnock’s words on the eve of the 1983 general election.

Fearing the re-election of a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, he said: ‘I warn you that you will have pain – when healing and relief depend upon payment....I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away.’ 

Backbench rebels in Parliament today know all too well that Labour must always be an anti-poverty party or it is nothing.

Protecting the most vulnerable in society while building a strong economy in which we can all lead good lives is the tune Starmer and co must play, just as his namesake Keir Hardie understood in 1900.       

Yes these have been difficult days of late, and yes government is relentlessly tough work.

All is not lost, but the Prime Minister would be well served to tack leftwards, taking a more traditionally Labour direction. 

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My feeling is the country would be behind them should Ministers pursue options such as a wealth tax on the richest, or levies on the burgeoning gambling sector; such measures, and others like them, would raise billions of pounds each year. 

Politically, there is not a moment to lose, a year in government has passed in the blink of an eye and the local and devolved elections of next spring – including to Holyrood – are already in sight; these will go a long way to defining Labour’s chances of winning the next general election. 

Douglas Beattie is an award-winning former BBC journalist and the author of 'Victory at the Ballot Box: The History of How Labour Built Britain'