The ‘soft left’, particularly within the Labour Party, is a term much like the Internet: everyone uses it but nobody really knows what it is. It’s assumed as encompassing everything that isn’t the ‘hard left’ or the ‘Labour right’. But in the swings between Corbyn and Starmer, the soft left has regained traction.

This paper by Eric Shaw, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Stirling, aims to define this more clearly by tracing the history of the soft left as a grouping within the Labour Party, its fortunes and misfortunes over the past half-century, its re-emergence in the mid-2020s and the trajectory is remains on. All of this comes together to answer the question: what is the soft left?

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