Aditya Chakrabortty says Labour civil war is colliding with voter revolt

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Illustration: Thomas Pullin/The Guardian theguardian.com

Aditya Chakrabortty theguardian.com

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Aditya Chakrabortty writes that Westminster’s latest Labour infighting is unfolding against a backdrop of worsening living standards and a collapsing two-party vote share, according to The Guardian.

He centres the piece on Labour’s internal power struggle around Keir Starmer, describing how MPs and would-be successors are consumed by leadership manoeuvring even as voters signal broad hostility on the doorstep. Chakrabortty points to recent elections in which only one in three voters backed either of the two main parties, with the rest casting what he frames as protest votes—an arithmetic that turns factional positioning into a substitute for governing capacity. The column ties this political drift to a run of shocks—Covid-19, inflation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the US and Israeli war on Iran—that have repeatedly reset household budgets while parties offer little more than slogans. He cites forecasts that the average food bill could be markedly higher by autumn than at the start of the last cost-of-living crisis, and he argues that the electorate’s anger is not a mood but a response to years in which living standards have barely improved since the banking crash.

The wider pattern he describes is institutional: parties that once acted as broad coalitions now operate like closed shops, with promotion ladders and internal discipline shaping behaviour more than voter demands. When MPs fear losing power to Reform, the column suggests, they reach for symbolic positioning—flag-waving and immigration rhetoric—because it is cheap, fast, and legible, even if it does not fix housing access or health outcomes. Chakrabortty also points to a bleak public-health marker: a baby born today can expect to spend less of its life in good health than a baby born a decade ago, a statistic that sits awkwardly alongside political time spent on leadership speculation. In his account, Reform and the Greens benefit from the vacuum created when Labour and the Conservatives cannot translate long-running problems—housing scarcity, stagnant pay, deteriorating services—into a credible plan that survives internal party warfare. The result is a politics where the measurable realities are household bills and housing ladders, while the energy is spent on who controls the party machine.

Chakrabortty’s piece returns repeatedly to the same contrast: MPs trading threats and names, voters reporting dislike, and a country described as heading into yet another economic crisis before the last one has faded.