Understanding Labour’s Leadership Election Rules

The source of this confusion is unclear, but it appears to be a mix of a few factors.

Given recent events, there is much confusion over the Labour Party’s rules about a leadership challenge. The source of this confusion is unclear, but it appears to be a mix of a few factors.

First, some commentators have not paid sufficient attention to important changes to the Labour Party rulebook over the past decade. Although internal party procedures are not in themselves headline-grabbing, the failure to scrutinise them both when they are proposed and then when they are in effect is a regrettable shortcoming in British political journalism.

Ed Miliband’s 2014 Collins Review fundamentally changed the democratic basis of electing (and ejecting) Labour leaders. Very few properly understood this at the time; although, I do have the satisfaction of having been a delegate to that special conference and being one of the very few people to speak against it in the conference debate. In spite of some adjustments, Labour still basically has the same rules bequeathed to it by Ed Miliband.

The second source of misapprehension is the recent instability in the Conservative Party. Over the past decade, commentators have been far more preoccupied with the Conservatives’ rules for removing a leader. As a result, there is an assumption that Labour’s procedures are basically analogous. They are not.

The third source of confusion is Labour Party folklore. It is often said that Labour does not remove its leaders, as if this is some kind of unbreakable norm within the party. It is true that the last successful formal challenge of a Labour leader was over a century ago – when Ramsay MacDonald narrowly unseated John Robert Clynes in the wake of the 1922 election.

However, this is not the same as saying Labour never has leadership challenges. Hugh Gaitskell, Neil Kinnock, and Jeremy Corbyn were all subjected to formal challenges. George Lansbury was forced out of the leadership by the trade unions. Tony Blair was arguably pressured to jump before he wanted due to PLP discontent.

The Corbyn challenge is the most relevant for our purposes because it took place in the post-Collins framework. Following the 2016 EU referendum, Labour MPs hostile to Corbyn’s leadership tried to force Corbyn to resign as leader. They tried this, first, by resigning from the frontbench, in an effort to make it impossible for Corbyn to put together a shadow executive. In the end, Corbyn was forced to cobble together a frontbench in which some MPs were double-hatting shadow ministerial roles, some shadow offices were left vacant, and in one case a reluctant octogenarian backbench Labour MP was dragged into the Shadow Cabinet.

When this didn’t work, the next move was to stage a ‘vote of no confidence’ in Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. There is no such mechanism in the Labour Party rulebook, unlike the Conservatives. So, this was a purely symbolic vote that was, in effect, ultra vires. Corbyn lost this vote 172 to 40, but it had no impact on his leadership. Corbyn called his opponents’ bluff and refused to resign.

The next step was to stage a formal challenge of the leader. On 11^th July 2016, Angela Eagle announced her intention to challenge Corbyn for leader. The following day, the National Executive Committee met to decide the procedures for the contest. Under Labour’s rules, 20% of MPs and MEPs were needed to nominate a challenger, but it was ambiguous as to whether this requirement extended to the incumbent leader. When Tony Benn challenged Neil Kinnock in 1988, Kinnock collected nominations, but the NEC determined this was voluntary. They clarified that the incumbent leader does not need to collect nominations. Labour’s amended rules today make this point in writing.

The NEC gave MPs one week to nominate challengers to Jeremy Corbyn. Owen Smith, who was more obviously from the ‘soft left’ than the ‘Labour right’ Angela Eagle, announced his candidacy. On the day before nominations closed, Eagle, who had fewer nominations than Smith, withdrew and announced her backing for Smith.

From 20^th July until 24^th September (a needlessly drawn-out period of time), Corbyn and Smith competed for the Labour leadership before the Labour membership, registered supporters, and political levy-paying members of affiliated unions. As is familiar, Corbyn easily won this contest, with 62% of the vote, a 2-point increase in his support from the previous year when he was first elected leader.

This experience has been used by some commentators as further evidence that Labour does not remove its leaders, but the political circumstances in Labour today are quite different from what they were in 2016. Above all, Jeremy Corbyn always understood that under Labour’s rules, his leadership was safe so long as a majority of members supported him. There is no mechanism for Labour MPs to remove a Labour leader unless the membership wants them to do so. This is a key difference from the Conservative leadership rules where it is impossible for members to save an incumbent leader, even if they wanted to do so. If the Conservatives had used Labour’s rules in 2022, I am quite sure Boris Johnson could have stayed as prime minister.

On the other hand, if the Labour membership is against the leader, then the Labour leader is supremely vulnerable to removal – much more so than under the Conservative rules. If the membership want the leader defeated, then a majority of Labour MPs (on their own) cannot save him. Under Labour’s rules, as discussed, it takes just 20% of MPs to nominate a challenger. Once that person is nominated, the role of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) comes to an end, and the fate of the leader is decided by the membership.

This means that a backbench faction of MPs could, plausibly, identify a leadership challenger, nominate that person, and force the incumbent Labour leader (and, in this case, Prime Minister) to fight for their political life in front of Labour members and levy-paying members of affiliated unions (registered supporters have been removed from the process).

As it stands, this is not good news for Keir Starmer. Polls have shown that he has a negative approval rating from Labour members and is one of the most unpopular members of his own Cabinet. The nomination of backbencher Lucy Powell in the current Deputy Leadership contest also showed that he does not have sufficient authority to block MPs from nominating a challenger.

This mess is a consequence of Ed Miliband’s deeply flawed party reforms. The Labour Party needs to reconsider the whole process by which the leader is elected. My own preference would be to remove the membership’s role entirely and leave the decision to MPs. In return, I would demand that MPs be subjected automatically to re-selection and that the role of the NEC in picking parliamentary candidates centrally is substantially curtailed.

However, it seems unlikely that either members would be happy to relinquish their power over voting for leaders, and it seems unlikely that the NEC would surrender their authority in the selection of parliamentary candidates. So, a lower-hanging reform would be to introduce a formal ‘vote of no confidence’ mechanism. Rather than empower just one-fifth of MPs to force a contest before the membership, use a vote of no confidence to raise the threshold initially to 50%, before opening nominations for candidates which then, in my view, safely be lowered to 15%.

In the past decade, the Conservatives showed this country that the internal rules and procedures of party leadership can have profound consequences for the direction of not just a party but the country. The same is true for Labour. It is time for political journalists and Labour politicians to apprise themselves fully of the rulebook.

Dr Richard Johnson is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author (with Mark Garnett and Gavin Hyman) of Keeping the Red Flag Flying: The Labour Party in Opposition since 1922 (Polity, 2024). He is a founder (with Gabriel Osborne and Gautam Kambhampati) of Labour for the Constitution. He is the co-host (with Lee Evans) of the podcast ‘Since Attlee and Churchill’.