An Ideological Vacuum: Why Labour Is at Greater Risk of Losing Voters to Progressive Parties Than to Reform UK
Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar survey what the fall of Mandelson and McSweeney will mean for Starmer's Government, and ask: is a Labour revival possible?
Sometimes you strike lucky. It doesn’t happen too often for the left but when events go your way, it’s crucial to take advantage. The latest revelations in the Epstein files, the forced resignations of both Morgan McSweeney and Peter Mandelson and the result of the Gorton and Denton by-election have severely hobbled the Labour right, giving progressives a rare opportunity. Potentially, they open the ground for a renewal of social democracy.
The much-quoted Peter Mandelson line about New Labour being “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, so long as they pay their taxes” was the quintessential expression of Blair’s Third Way. In a pithy phrase, it summarised the essence of New Labour. Across the corridor of power, McSweeney was a “one of us” Blue Labourite, advocating illiberal policies on family and immigration. Because Mandelson had become the fulcrum of the unlikely alliance of the old Blairites with Blue Labour that has dominated the Starmer government, their joint fall leaves an ideological vacuum at the heart of Labour.
Decline and Fall
The two men were not identical: one a globalising pro-European the other a narrow nationalist. But these contrasts did not undermine their marriage of convenience within Starmer’s Labour. The obeisance before the City and the tech bros; the deregulatory assault on planning; the grovelling to the Trump administration; the pandering to the far right in rhetoric and policy; and, above all, the ruthless determination to eliminate any segment of the Left from Labour influence were key elements of this alliance. And as Mandelson’s protégé, McSweeney had been the key proponent of Mandelson’s elevation as UK Ambassador to Washington.
Mandelson’s predilection for hobnobbing with the rich and powerful was well-known but the Mandelson/Epstein email trail mobilising financiers against his own Government (ironically, on the issue of paying taxes), was the logical endpoint of Mandelson’s full-throated endorsement of ‘the filthy rich.’
The revelations left McSweeny hopelessly compromised and obliged to resign his post, while Mandelson, shamed and attacked by the Prime Minister, was obliged to announce an end to his Labour Party membership and seat in the House of Lords This was quickly followed by a resounding defeat for Labour in the Gorton and Denton by-election, where, having blocked the candidature of Andy Burnham for the seat, Labour were thumped by the Greens, who gained their first-ever by-election victory and pushed Labour into a humiliating third place behind Reform UK.
The election result confirmed that you cannot easily extinguish the Left from British politics. You can marginalise those forces within Labour but, as the Labour leadership is painfully learning, they don’t disappear. Rather they pop up somewhere else. Your Party may have committed suicide, but the Greens have not. Along with Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party, they are willing to offer different types of social democratic politics in a modern style and non-managerial language. And former Labour voters are increasingly willing to back them.
“Nowhere Else to Go?”
Polling evidence is not uniform. Dylan Difford’s analysis of May 2025 British Election Study figures shows that, while 800,000 Labour votes have defected to Reform, more than twice that number have moved to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. A March 2026 report by Persuasion UK is a bit less optimistic for the left, calculating that for every ten 2024 Labour voters lost to Reform, 16 have switched to progressive parties (Green, LibDems, Plaid, SNP). Nonetheless, of remaining Labour supporters, 55% are open to moving leftwards and only 21% to the right. What is clear is that to whatever degree, Labour is at greater risk of losing voters to progressive parties than to Reform.
There’s no doubt Labour has faced formidable difficulties in its public relations. It has found it virtually impossible to persuade the public of its achievements – increasing public spending by around £50bn, upping public sector pay, presiding over rising private sector wages in real terms, not least by increasing the minimum wage.
Virtually no-one knows these things have happened, partly because of the vituperation of the mainstream press but also because the Government has chosen to foreground those measures which indicate that they don’t intend to behave like a Labour Government at all: abolishing the winter fuel allowance, cutting disability benefits and reneging on its promises to reinstate welfare payments to couples with more than two children (all of them u-turned, of course, but after the damage was done).
At the same time, under McSweeney’s influence, the Government has highlighted asylum and migration issues, echoing the language of the far right – Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech – and proposing draconian changes to asylum rules and migration regulations. The consequences of this master strategy have been for Labour’s polling figures to drop from 45% in May 2024, prior to the general election, to 18% now.
Is a Labour Revival Possible?
The big unknown is whether Labour can retrieve its position. The journalist Owen Jones thinks it is too late: “In my view, Labour cannot be saved: it must be replaced.” Labour’s withered connections to the trade union movement; its declining influence in local and devolved governments; its shrinking and ageing membership base; and the huge, public disappointment with the performance of the Starmer Government certainly leaves it severely exposed. A change of Prime Minister will not alter the fundamentals: only a change of political direction can do that. What would this entail?
Firstly, and crucially, it has to re-commit to the philosophy of social democracy. Here, New Statesman editor Tom McTague hits the nail on the head: “The Epstein files are a reminder of the guiding purpose of social democracy itself”, which is “to democratise economic power through the ballot box. And today, we can even add to this mission a new and even more existential goal: to save liberal democracy from oligarchic authoritarianism… The Labour Party has to return to its original mission, namely to exert political control over the market to protect the interests of ordinary people. In a world of global capital, tax havens, multinational corporations – and the shadow world of power brokers revealed in the Epstein files – the purpose of social democracy should be obvious.”
Such a shift would give Labour a defining purpose and clear political story. It would end the decades where New Labour leaders and followers have been more than happy to indulge themselves in the world of oligarchic power, completely overlooking the political and civic consequences of this de-regulated world running riot. As Michael Sandel observes, politicians like Mandelson utterly failed to recognise the sheer power this neo-liberal polity gives to oligarchs and bankers.
The Third Way was not a new right-wing version of orthodox social democracy; it was a complete break from it. Instead of social democracy’s traditional recognition of the conflict between capital and labour, the Third Way saw no contradictions between the two. Instead, it envisaged relaxed engagement with business and compliance with its world. In the 1990s with the world economy booming and the optimism generated by the ‘end of history’, a benevolent globalisation scenario seemed plausible.
The financial crisis of 2007-8 blew this utopian optimism apart. Yet Labour and its sister social democratic parties in Europe have largely been unable to change track. Listening to and cultivating vested business interests became the priority and the cultural norm. These parties lost their moral compass, and their leaderships became embedded in a cosy oligarchic world. Once on this track, it has been extremely hard to wean themselves off it. It starts with ‘freebies’ (Starmer’s suits and spectacles); relies on business donations; indulges ex-ministers taking cushy jobs; and ends up with the excesses of Blair and Mandelson.
This is not a new argument. At the time of the first Blair government, solidly centre-right social democrats like the former deputy Labour leader Roy Hattersley and leading French figures such as Pascal Lamy were fervently opposed to Third Way-ism. In his autobiography, Robin Cook reported on an exchange in October 2002 between Lamy, former French finance minister and later head of the World Trade Organization, and Mandelson, then European commissioner for trade. Lamy explained the key dilemma that he saw facing social democracy. “Historically, the success of social democracy in the past century was to promote a compromise between labour and capital, between the state and the market and between commercial competition and social solidarity. Globalisation has unhinged the balance by taking away all the domestic levers by which we maintained the compromise”.
Mandelson responded: “Globalisation offers all the best the world can offer. We must not sound as if we believe there is a tension between labour and capital, or competition and solidarity.” To which Lamy replied: “Yes, but that is what I believe.”
A Social Democratic Revival?
There, in a nutshell, is the gap between social democracy and the Mandelson/Blair Panglossian alternative. In the last two decades, the concentration of oligarchic wealth and power has grown exponentially, and the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Paul Marshall and Vincent Bollore have shown themselves increasingly eager to intervene in politics. Which makes the case for focussing on addressing wealth inequality all the more central to any progressive movement.
Secondly, if Labour centrists and traditionalists – those in the Roy Hattersley, John Smith, Gordon Brown tradition – want to keep the Labour Party together, they’ll need to break their Faustian pact with ‘the filthy rich’. It also means ending the expulsion culture of McSweeney and Mandelson and accepting that the Labour Party is a genuinely broad church in which the left has a legitimate and welcome role. (Throwing former leaders out of the party being, after all, how they used to do it in the Soviet bloc). Current Ministers such as Bridget Phillipson – who identifies Hattersley’s Choose Freedom as her key reference text – and Wes Streeting will need to commit to a broad church approach.
Thirdly, it also means ditching Labour tribalism. We no longer live in an era where a single party has a monopoly on progressive politics. Veteran pollster Peter Kellner is clear that “the only chance for a progressive Government after the next election will be a multi-party coalition.” This means breaking from the crude Labour tribalism that seeks to denigrate other progressive parties rather than focusing on their main dangers on the populist right.
Fourthly, as Tom McTague recognises, Labour would have to confront the kind of difficult decisions it has so far preferred to avoid, most notably whether the interests of global capital can be tamed by a single state alone or only done through European cooperation. In the new world order it is becoming increasingly clear that the UK has a binary choice: either pursue close relations with Europe or be Trump’s poodle.
It remains uncertain whether there are sufficient forces and clear-eyed political leaders to promote a social democratic Labour revival, especially given the hollowing out of the trade unions. Can new coalitions be assembled and new policies challenging inequality developed? Can organisations such as Mainstream and Compass help to build a pluralist and progressive culture that enables a renewed Labour Party to play its part in rebutting the populist right and constructing a progressive future for the country?
The fall of Mandelson and McSweeney leaves the space for a social democratic renewal. But it’s an open question whether this will occur within or beyond Labour or, more likely, by a combination of progressive forces finding new ways to work together.
Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar’s revised and updated second edition of The Little Black Book of the Populist Right is now available, published by Byline Books
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