Meanwhile, in Westminster, another group of Labor MPs has emerged this week. The Joint Efforts Group has launched a Fabian Society ideas booklet on areas including climate, foreign policy, cost of living and defence. The MPs involved have identified it as a “broad centre” project – unusually they seem to be placing that “broad centre” not in the context of the Labor Party but of the country.
Since Labor came to government, any self-appointed group/grouping of Labor MPs has been quickly thrown around by us journalists as a way of dividing up Labor MPs for the purposes of political analysis and identifying potential conspiracies against the leadership (see coverage of the relaunched Tribune group, the revived Blue Labor group and the recently formed Main group).
The Joint Effort seems to have avoided this possibility. In an article today launching their pamphletfive of the MPs leading the effort – Liam Byrne, Anna Gelderd, Andrew Lewin, Luke Murphy and Jeevun Sandher – adamantly declared: “We are proud of this Government and our Prime Minister”.
They go on to set out what they are against: “These are the values our opponents stand against with their embrace of ethnocratic division and plutocratic Thatcherism. Their values would make us weaker by dividing us further and further. They would drive us away from like-minded allies in Europe and leave us more dependent on crazy allies who decriminalize fossil fuels and fixate abroad. friends, neighbors, and those who sit by the bedside of our loved ones while they suffer would make our nation weaker because they don’t think we accomplish more together than we accomplish alone.
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Crazy fossil fuel dictators, mass deportations and Thatcherism. While the divisions in Labor look wider than ever, they have pretty well defined what everyone in the party is against and the basis on which a UK Reform campaign is most likely to be fought at the next general election. Is this the start of the faction against the Labor faction?
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; get it every morning by subscribing to Substack here
(Further reading: How to laugh in ropes class)
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