Labour MPs revive ‘desperately needed’ soft left group to take on Reform
Senior MPs who were the architects of the Labour welfare rebellion are to revive a powerful caucus on the party’s soft left to influence the budget and beyond, in a move likely to further unnerve No 10,The former cabinet minister Louise Haigh and Vicky Foxcroft, a former whip who resigned to vote against welfare cuts, are to take the reins of the Tribune group with the aim of giving an organising voice to their wing of the party,Key figures in the group, which hopes it will attract more than 100 MPs to revitalise the caucus, were major players in Lucy Powell’s successful deputy leadership campaign,They also include the former minister Justin Madders, Sarah Owen, the chair of the women and equalities committee and Debbie Abrahams, the chair of the work and pensions select committee,Two other new MPs will also steward the group – Yuan Yang and Beccy Cooper.
Leading figures in the group have been pushing for Labour to take a far bolder and openly progressive approach in taking on both Reform and the resurgent Green party.Powell, described as a “natural ally” of the group, praised the newly elected New York mayor Zohran Mamdani with a warm message on Wednesday morning, saying his communication style was a lesson to the party.“His victory shows that boldness and a story of economic change in the interests of the many not the few, defeats the politics of division and despair,” she tweeted.Tribune – a group which dates back to the 60s – was re-formed by the Labour MP Clive Efford in 2017 under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, when members included Yvette Cooper and the former Labour leadership challenger Owen Smith.But it had limited success during the Corbyn era and was effectively moribund under Starmer.
MPs said that Efford had given way so that new MPs could revitalise the group and make it a better organising force – with the first aim being to pile on pressure over the end to the two-child benefit limit in the upcoming budget,“Clive has done a great job of ticking it over for last eight years and with new intakes heavily involved, there is a big appetite to get people together with similar values and ideas to debate issues and influence in the same way other groups do,Soft left has not been organised well for years so it is desperately needed,” one MP involved in the group’s relaunch said,One MP said the group would now take a far more “muscular” approach, saying it would be “much more firmly rooted in the centre left, spanning the intakes and committed to organising in the PLP [the parliamentary Labour party],” They said they hoped Tribune would represent the interests of “a significant minority, if not a majority of the PLP”.
The group would be likely to attract a far greater number of MPs from the 2024 intake than the traditional left of the party – the Socialist Campaign Group – whose members include those who were close to Corbyn’s leadership like John McDonnell and Diane Abbott,The original Tribune group of Labour MPs was formed as a support group for the Tribune newspaper in 1964, though it is now no longer associated with it,But it split over Tony Benn’s bid for the deputy leadership of the party in 1981, when Benn’s backers formed the Campaign group,A separate new group on the left was launched over the summer that appears to more explicitly back a change of leadership – Mainstream has the backing of the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, and other MPs on the left, including Rachael Maskell and Clive Lewis,But several MPs said they had been turned off by the aggressive communications approach of the group and its focus on electoral reform and believed Tribune would have more organising success within the party.
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