Labour Together and the Hollowing of Labour: How a Party of Working People Became a Managed Machine

Labour was founded to represent working people as a class, not to manage politics as a career. Yet by February 2026 the party was governing through a centralised apparatus that looked less like a movement and more like a machine. The resignation of Morgan McSweeney, the public fallout over Labour Together, and a vetting scandal involving a newly appointed peer did not arrive as disconnected storms. They landed on a party already losing members, losing trust, and bleeding the very voters it once existed to organise.

This is a story about how Labour got here. It is also a story about whether Labour can survive as the party for working people if it continues to drift away from them.

Labour as a socialist vehicle

When the Labour Representation Committee first secured MPs in 1900, Keir Hardie was not selling managerial competence. He was arguing that labour needed its own political voice, independent of elite patronage, because working lives were being governed by people who did not live them. Hardie spoke in explicitly socialist language about dignity, power, and the moral vandalism of an economy built around wealth and deference. His 1914 “Sunshine of Socialism” speech is not the voice of a centrist technocrat. It is the voice of a movement insisting that society should be organised for human need, not private command.

That founding purpose later acquired institutional form. The post war Labour government built systems designed to shift risk from individuals to the state. The National Health Service, associated with Aneurin Bevan, was not framed as a consumer product. Bevan argued for collective provision precisely because commercial principles were at their worst in healthcare, and because public systems were a superior expression of collective action. That was the Labour idea in practice: not merely winning office, but changing the structure of life.

Labour also encoded socialist ambition in its constitution. Clause IV, adopted in 1918, committed the party to common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. You can debate how fully Labour ever lived up to that promise. But the point is that the party once spoke the language of class transformation openly, and it invited members to see themselves not as an audience but as the authors.

The long drift: from representation to professional capture

Over decades, Labour changed its theory of victory. Under Neil Kinnock and then Tony Blair, Labour moved toward disciplined message control, systematic media alignment, and active reassurance of business power. Clause IV was rewritten under Blair in the 1990s, symbolising a deeper shift: from socialist transformation to managed accommodation. The party did not just moderate policy. It professionalised its entire conception of politics.

That shift had a class dimension. Research highlighted by the House of Commons Library and related analysis has long tracked a decline in MPs drawn from manual and trade union occupational backgrounds compared with earlier decades. In their place rose lawyers, advisers, researchers, and communications professionals. The parliamentary party increasingly looked like the professional middle class, then spoke to the working class as a target demographic rather than as a base with agency.

The change mattered because a movement party does not survive on election day alone. It survives on belonging. When the people who run the party are not drawn from the lives it claims to represent, the party develops a different reflex: less persuasion inside the movement, more control from the centre.

The Corbyn interruption and the backlash

In 2015 the membership tried to reverse the drift. Jeremy Corbyn did not win because the parliamentary party wanted him. He won because members wanted Labour to sound like Labour again: public ownership, anti austerity economics, and a politics that treated inequality as structural rather than cosmetic. Membership rose to record levels around the end of 2019. Labour became, briefly, recognisable as a movement party again.

The backlash was immediate and multi layered. The parliamentary party revolted, including the 2016 vote of no confidence. Coordinated resignations followed. Media hostility intensified and became a permanent weather system. Internal party management hardened. The gulf between membership sovereignty and parliamentary control was no longer an argument. It became the central conflict.

When Labour lost in 2019, the defeat was used to settle the conflict. The lesson drawn by the party centre was not simply that policies needed adjustment. It was that the movement needed to be contained.

Labour Together: the infrastructure of consolidation

This is where Labour Together matters. If you treat it as a think tank, you miss the point. Its role, as documented in our Telegraph Online investigation Shadows Behind Closed Doors: How Labour Together Rose From Defeat to Power, is better understood as organisational infrastructure: donor networks, polling and data capacity, message framing, and personnel continuity that bridged opposition and government.

That infrastructure has a paper trail. The Electoral Commission records that Labour Together was fined a total of 14,250 pounds for offences including failure to deliver donation reports within 30 days, inaccurate reporting of a donation, and failure to appoint responsible persons within 30 days of accepting donations. The Commission describes late reporting linked to donations totalling around 740,000 pounds. These are not rumours. They are regulatory findings.

Labour Together is also central to the story because of its relationship to power. Morgan McSweeney previously ran Labour Together before becoming a senior aide to Starmer. The point is not personality. It is design: the organisational logic that won Labour power was built around central authority, discipline, and controlled selection. That logic may win elections. It also tends to treat members as a risk surface.

Membership collapse and the working people exit

While Labour professionalised, its membership base shrank. LabourList reports that Labour membership fell from a peak of 532,046 at the end of 2019 to 333,235, a decline of about 200,000 since the end of the Corbyn era. Another LabourList report described membership falling further after the 2024 election, with net losses continuing into early 2025.

This is not an abstract statistic. It is the movement draining away.

Polling shows the same drift in the electorate. YouGov analysis of Labour defectors after the 2024 election found that those leaving Labour were more likely to be classed as living in working class households, less likely to hold a degree, and more likely to have voted Leave. That is the party losing the people it historically existed to organise. The slogan might still say Labour. The social base is walking.

Socialist and labour movement media have framed this as ideological hollowing: Labour governing as a centrist managerial force, while working people experience living standards pressure, insecure work, and public services stretched to the bone. You do not need to agree with every editorial line to see the structural point: a party that stops speaking as a labour movement eventually stops being treated as one.

Rule changes and the narrowing of member power

The change is also visible in the party machinery. Labour has formal rules in its published rulebook that define the authority of the NEC, constituency parties, selections, and governance. The practical question is how those rules are used. Reporting and internal party debate in recent years has focused on thresholds and procedural levers that shape who gets on ballots, how selections are managed, and how much discretion is held at the centre.

LabourList reporting on leadership nomination thresholds, for example, captured a long running internal argument: whether rule changes strengthen parliamentary gatekeeping at the expense of member choice. This is not a technical dispute. It goes to the core of whether Labour is a membership party or a Westminster elite party with a membership subscription.

February 2026: the exposure event

By early February 2026, Labour Together was no longer an inside baseball subject. Reporting in the Guardian described allegations that Labour Together hired APCO Worldwide to examine journalists who were investigating its funding, with the claims originating in Democracy for Sale. The constitutional significance is not that a political organisation sought to defend itself. It is that the instinct, when scrutinised, appeared to lean toward information control rather than open transparency, at the exact moment Labour was governing.

Then the personnel shock arrived. Morgan McSweeney resigned as chief of staff. Whatever the internal calculation, it was widely read as the centre of the machine taking a hit.

Almost immediately, a separate vetting scandal detonated in public. The Guardian reported that Matthew Doyle, a former senior aide to Starmer and newly appointed peer, lost the Labour whip after revelations that he had supported a friend, a former councillor later convicted of possessing child abuse images. Starmer told parliament that Doyle did not provide a full account before the peerage was granted. This matters because it cut directly into competence claims: the party that justified central control as necessary for professionalism and discipline was suddenly facing public questions about its own vetting and internal checks.

Female Labour MPs were publicly demanding cultural change and structural fixes. The story was no longer simply factional. It was about whether the party centre could be trusted with the authority it had accumulated.

Trade unions and the movement that once owned Labour

It is not only members. Trade union leaders have also signalled deep dissatisfaction. The Guardian reported blunt warnings from Unite general secretary Sharon Graham that the government needed to decide what it stands for and who it stands for, and framed internal leadership turmoil as inevitable if Labour remained detached from working people. LabourList has also reported that affiliated union leaders have called for Starmer to resign. Meanwhile, debate continues inside unions over political strategy, including whether Labour still functions as the movement’s vehicle or whether new forms of representation will emerge.

This is what ideological hollowing looks like in real time. It is not just a left wing argument. It is the labour movement questioning whether Labour is still its party.

The question Labour cannot dodge

Labour Together helped build a model that restored Labour to power by centralising authority, disciplining candidates, and presenting an image of control. The model was sold as necessary after 2019. It may even have been necessary to win. But it carried a cost: the party began to treat its own base as a liability and its own purpose as a branding problem.

February 2026 did not invent the crisis. It revealed the contradiction. A party founded to represent working people has become a centre managed structure that struggles to tolerate scrutiny, struggles to hold its own appointees to account, and struggles to keep its members inside the tent.

Labour can survive as a parliamentary brand. The harder question is whether it can survive as Labour: a party for working people, built on member agency, class identity, and socialist purpose. If the party cannot answer who it stands for, voters and members will answer it for them.