Big beasts of Labour’s past descend on the North West as the “Battle for Birkenhead” continues in earnest.
The selection contest, which pits two sitting MPs in Alison McGovern and Mick Whitley against each other, is for the new enlarged seat of Birkenhead in Wirral, Merseyside, and comes amid the broader rejig of Britain’s electoral geography by the Boundary Commission.
The Commission has redrawn the political map of the Wirral Peninsula, with the number of seats in the area cut from four to three. McGovern’s present seat of Wirral South is lost to electoral history as her constituency is split between the new seats of Ellesmere Port and Bromborough (40.3 per cent of McGovern’s seat), Wirral West (38.9 per cent) and Birkenhead (20.8 per cent).
McGovern has now launched a bid to be the new MP for Birkenhead, where she is facing off against Whitley, presently the MP for the seat of the same name. The new Birkenhead constituency keeps 100 per cent of Whitley’s territory with that 20.8 per cent slice of Wirral South appended. McGovern stresses that the ward of her constituency being attached to Whitley’s seat includes her hometown.
McGovern’s Birkenhead bid comes after a previous ruling that stated MPs could only stake a claim to another seat that had 40 per cent or more of their old constituency moved to another one was changed by Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC). The updated ruling means that an MP with any wards moved to a new constituency can choose to challenge one of their parliamentary Labour party colleagues. One party source told Politics.co.uk that this decision, made at the start of this year, was “not contentious at all” and was agreed with no seat in mind.
The process for managing a contest between two competing sitting Labour MPs is also different to the party’s standard selection process after the NEC resolved at a meeting on 23rd May to streamline such contests. Typically, general election candidates are chosen following a hustings event with the in-the-room count topped up with absent postal votes. But for a contest between two sitting Labour MPs, the voting will all be done by post, with hustings taking place earlier in the process. In Birkenhead, postal votes from the Constituency Labour Party (CLP) will need to be received by 14th June, after which the count will be held and the winner announced on the 16th June.
The result is a stand-off between two sitting Labour MPs, both of whom have legitimate claims to the territory they seek to represent and reasons to feel aggrieved by the process.
The Wirral West question
In a recent article for LabourList, in which Whitley laid out his pitch to be the Labour candidate for Birkenhead, the MP says: “I’m surprised and disappointed that the NEC has allowed this contest to take place”.
Whitley’s point is that the neighbouring MP in Wirral West, Margaret Greenwood, has announced she is standing down — a development which, in theory, frees up the area for the seatless McGovern. Politics.co.uk understands that Whitley allies on the NEC pushed for McGovern to run in the Wirral West constituency. Nonetheless, the Labour source quoted above insists that the central party cannot pick and choose where a candidate seeks to run. And, in any case, Greenwood’s decision to stand down in Wirral West is said to have taken NEC figures by surprise. She emailed the Labour leadership on May 22nd announcing her intention to stand down.*
On that same day, in an open letter to her constituents, McGovern had already indicated her intention to stand “for the new constituency which merges parts of Wirral South and Birkenhead and which will include my home”.
Birkenhead’s key battlegrounds
Naturally, in a selection dispute between a frontbencher and backbencher the question of seniority is likely to arise. Whitley is 71 and was the oldest MP to be elected for the first time in 2019. But McGovern, while only 42, has represented her Wirral South seat since 2010, serving on the frontbench in a variety of capacities. Presently she is the shadow minister for employment, having been appointed to the post by Keir Starmer in December 2021.
There is also no hiding the fact that Whitley and McGovern have entirely disparate political profiles, coming from two separate wings of the party. A former trade union organiser and merchant sailor, Whitley is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group of left-wing Labour MPs and he backed Rebecca Long-Bailey in the 2020 Labour leadership election.
McGovern, on the other hand, supported Owen Smith in his failed bid to replace Jeremy Corbyn in 2016 and backed Jess Phillips in 2020. She also previously chaired Progress, a think tank widely seen as on the right of the party and now rebranded as Progressive Britain following a merger.
Of the two candidates, it seems to be Whitley who is most embracing the race’s ideological elements. On the campaign, he has drawn attention to his support for striking workers. He says: “As the cost-of-living soared I made sure that striking workers knew they had my support. I joined the picket lines. I believe that a Labour MP should always stand in the front ranks”.
He adds: “I genuinely believe socialist policies can begin to fix our broken country and bring back hope to Birkenhead”.
Bad blood in Birkenhead?
There is also the question of how or whether the constituency’s sui generis recent electoral history will impact the contest.
Whitley won Birkenhead seat with a 17,705 majority in 2019, replacing and defeating Frank Field — now Lord Field of Birkenhead — the former MP who in 2018 resigned the Labour whip after 40 years as the area’s representative. Field’s resignation, which he blamed on antisemitism and a “culture of nastiness, bullying and intimidation” in the Labour party, came after he had lost a vote of no confidence by the local Birkenhead party the previous month.
Whitley resoundingly won the subsequent selection process. Backed by the campaign group Momentum, Unite the Union as well as shadow cabinet members including John McDonnell, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Dan Carden, he won with 224 votes compared to his nearest challenger who accumulated 116. At the time, Corbyn-sceptics cited the exclusion of Theresa Griffin, then MEP for the North West region and chair of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, from the selection shortlist. The decision was viewed as being firmly factional. A Labour source says there may be some “resentment” of Whitley in the erstwhile Corbyn-sceptic corner of the CLP as a consequence.
One reading of the “Battle for Birkenhead”, therefore, is that it is a microcosmic illustration of the ideological contest which continues to rumble on inside Keir Starmer’s Labour party. It is another instance of party selection processes becoming keenly implicated in the party’s factional dynamics; figures on the Labour left have long-accused the leadership and its allies on the NEC of isolating and overlooking potential inter-party opponents.
The Battle for Merthyr Tydfil and Upper Cynon
In this way, the “Battle for Birkenhead’s” key dividing line reflects that of the recently resolved contest in Merthyr Tydfil and Upper Cynon, which saw Labour MPs Beth Winter and Gerald Jones contest the new seat.
On Wednesday, it was declared that Jones, a shadow minister for Wales, had won the contest — after which, Winter, a member of the Socialist Campaign Group like Whitley, released a statement saying the selection process was “not a fair contest”. She complained that “unacceptable obstacles” were placed in her way.
Momentum accused the party’s leadership of “taking a sledgehammer to the democratic rights of local Labour members in order to purge socialists and instal loyalists” in the aftermath of Winter’s defeat.
The frontbencher versus the backbencher
But while McGovern and Whitley’s ideological differences certainly feature in the campaign, both camps stress other dividing lines.
Whitley’s camp touts his record as a local MP, including his representations to the department for levelling up, housing and communities as he won additional support for the cash-strapped Wirral Council. His recent article for LabourList was entitled: “My hometown Birkenhead needs a backbench champion”.
Conversely, McGovern’s campaign highlights her frontbench position as a means by which she could make direct representations to the Labour leadership, with which, unlike Whitley, she is closely aligned. McGovern’s campaign calls the shadow minister for employment a “frontbench champion”.
Gordon Brown versus Mick Lynch
The McGovern campaign has also garnered the support of two former Labour leaders in Neil Kinnock and Gordon Brown. Brown, whom McGovern once served under as his parliamentary private secretary, recently visited the Birkenhead constituency.
The former prime minister told assembled activists: “I’m asking you to support Alison not just because she’s a great MP, and she is a great MP. And not just because she’s a great frontbench spokesperson for the Labour party, because she speaks on employment, she speaks on labour rights, and she speaks on poverty and all these issues”.
Whitley’s campaign boasts a series of endorsements among the local Labour party, as well as the support of Paula Barker, the MP for Liverpool Wavertree, and Margaret Greenwood, the outgoing MP for Wirral West. Mick Lynch, general secretary of the RMT, has also pledged his support, calling Whitley a “Working-class trade unionist who hasn’t forgotten his roots”.
The Battle for Birkenhead’s only hustings event, held on the 3rd June, was attended by around 80 CLP members. One wonders whether the lowish turnout (the FA Cup final was on the same day) might benefit Whitley’s campaign, given his established familiarity with activists in Birkenhead and the McGovern camp’s consequent desire to reach out as far as possible in the CLP.
A battle for Labour’s future?
In the end, given the scale of the boundary changes, the level of internal strife in the Labour parliamentary party has been relatively little.
But for a variety of reasons, in Birkenhead, the dispute arisen as a consequence of boundary changes could not resolved without an MP versus MP contest. It has led to a battle which is clearly implicated in wider disputes over the party’s present ideological trajectory.
It is no secret that Starmer’s team is managing the candidate selection process in minute detail. And so this result, set to be announced on 16th June, will be watched by Labour figures of all factions and all levels of seniority with serious interest.
- * This article was updated on 23 June to reflect that Margaret Greenwood, MP for Wirral West, emailed Keir Starmer – with Angela Rayner cc’d – on 22 May 2023 ahead of the NEC meeting on the 23rd to inform the Labour leadership she intended to stand down.
In a previous version the article read: “Greenwood’s decision to stand down in Wirral West is also said to have widely taken Labour figures by surprise, coming just one hour before May 23rd NEC meeting”.
