Labour: the party of celebs, archbishops and technocrats

May 28, 2023 by

by Mick Hume, spiked:

The New Statesman’s ‘left power list’ is an unflattering selfie of Labour’s new elite.

The weekly New Statesman magazine has long been the house journal of the Labour Party. So when its staff and contributors compile their inaugural ‘left power list’ of the ‘50 most influential people shaping Britain’s progressive politics… within Labour and across the wider British left’, it should provide a reliable snapshot of how Labour sees itself now. Since the magazine introduces its power list by excitedly noting that Labour under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership is now ‘expected to return to government for the first time since 2010’, these are presumably also the powerful people it expects to run and shape the nation.

Remarkable, then, that the Labour ‘selfie’ produced by the New Statesman’s power list should be so unflattering. The picture that emerges is of a narrow, shallow, middle-class leftist elite, largely living in a different country from the people it aspires to rule over.

Much of the list is made up of faceless Labour Party technocrats – MPs and officials most of whom you might never have heard of, alongside the well-known-but-suspended Jeremy Corbyn – and a few trade-union bureaucrats. But the compilers have tried hard to liven up these stiffs by sprinkling the list with the contemporary stardust of celebrity, including everybody from TV presenters to footballers and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

‘We define power’, declares the intro, ‘as the ability to change policy or to change minds: to shape political opinion and debate.’ Their list suggests that the power struggle Labour envisages will be fought by a few think-tank wonks and podcasters rather than the old big battalions of the labour movement, with their chosen battleground resembling Twitter rather than the real world.

Here are just a few of the self-consciously ‘starry’ selections included in the left power list:

Read here

 

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