The lost world of the British Labour Party? Community, infiltration and disunity

Forward Thinking
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Abstract

Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s notion of the ‘imagined community’, this article examines the evolution of the British Labour Party’s sense of self as an organisation. Accordingly, the analysis interrogates the interrelated elements of history, culture, identity and party structure. It is argued that Labour has moved substantially from the collective class-based notions it once used to define its politics and effectively demarcate its boundaries. In place of these, an increasing focus has been placed on giving the party’s political practices an outward-looking, diverse and more individualistic focus. Consequently, Labour’s difficulties during the leadership election of 2015 and since are rooted in the combination of this prolonged push to build a new movement beyond its traditional borders and the persistence of historically grounded tribal concerns about the vulnerability of the party to infiltration.

Keywords

British politics Labour Party Movements Party identity Disunity Party organisation 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the University of Sussex and funded by the ESRC (Grant No. ES/J500173/1). I would like to thank Emily Robinson, Paul Webb and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this article.

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Copyright information

© Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.School of Law, Politics and SociologyUniversity of SussexBrightonUK

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