In Defence Of The "Your Party" Rows: Why Raucous Labour Politics Used To Be Something To Celebrate

It’s tempting, in an age of polished conference stages and rehearsed party messaging, to view public rows as a sign that a party is falling apart. But if you step back into Old Labour’s political memory you see a different story altogether, a tradition where argument, heat and theatre were how members fought over what the party actually stood for. Far from being dysfunction, those fights were often democratic pressure, noisy, untidy, but generative, and a sign of authenticity.

Take the 1970s. The decade produced some of the most visible clashes between rank-and-file activists, union members and the parliamentary leadership. The so-called Winter of Discontent (1978–79), a wave of strikes across public services that left rubbish piled in the streets and hospital services stripped back to essentials,  exposed not simply a government’s failures but a movement wrestling publicly with how to balance wage demands, inflation control and industrial power. The spectacle of strikes and public dispute made obvious the difficult choices Labour faced, and why those choices mattered to ordinary people.

Push further back and the pattern repeats. Labour of the 1950s and 60s was famously factional. Bevanites and Gaitskellites clashed fiercely over nationalisation, nuclear weapons and the soul of Labour. Aneurin “Nye” Bevan — architect of the NHS, even resigned from the postwar government in 1951 over prescription charges, crystallising a genuine ideological split about what social reform should look like and who should pay for it. Those weren’t cosmetic quarrels, they were clarifying moments about policy, principle and political identity.

Public rows served several useful democratic functions. First, they forced political choices into the open. When policy is debated only behind closed doors, voters and activists are deprived of the chance to test arguments and mobilise. Second, visible conflict signals engagement: it shows that members care enough to challenge leadership decisions.

That rawness can be unsettling, but it’s also the opposite of the tepid consensus that comes from top-down management and message control. Third, the theatre of dispute acted as a corrective to complacency. When leaders faced a row on the conference floor or on the picket line, they were made accountable to a broader constituency than their inner circle.

History also shows the risks, which are real. Public rows can be weaponised by opponents, give the impression of paralysis, and damage a party’s electoral credibility. The lesson of the 1970s and the splits that followed is not that rows are always good, but that their presence often reflects a living political culture wrestling with real problems.

The challenge for Your Party is to keep the energy of disagreement without letting it calcify into permanent factional paralysis. A messy but honest debate beats a staged consensus that masks real division.

There’s another reason to defend the row: it connects politics to people. In an era when communication is increasingly image-driven, with edited videos, pre-approved questions, social-media-safe quotes, the raw, unedited moments of the past feel startlingly authentic. The old conference clashes, the union meetings that ran late into the night, the MPs forced to answer uncomfortable questions from their branches, these linked decision-making to lived experience in a way that slick PR rarely does.

The "Your Party" rows are comparable to the Common Market conference fights over Europe or Callaghan’s 1976 conference moment when economic reality collided with party expectations. Each shows how argument has always been part of Labour’s democratic muscle. Readers who instinctively mistrust spectacle will still recognise the point, these fights have consequences, and sometimes they push parties to change for the better.

The lesson from history is clear. Don’t treat visible dispute as mere chaos. It’s politics being done in public, imperfect, noisy, but brilliantly authentic. The trick is to celebrate argument that seeks to resolve policy and sharpen principles, while condemning rancour that merely entrenches positions. If we want politics to feel real again, we should be ready to say that sometimes a row is the healthiest sign a party can show. Far better than the stage-managed theatre of modern politics, glossy, orderly, and utterly devoid of substance.

UPDATE: Today Zarah Sultana has dropped her legal threat in a bid to reconcile with Corbyn 'for the sake of the party' It might just be alright yet...