Labour Together
Labour Together, initially known as Common Good Labour, is a British think tank closely associated with the Labour Party. Founded in June 2015 with the initial aim of bridging Labour factions, it switched its focus to opposing the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and later supported Keir Starmer in the 2020 Labour Party leadership election. It works to measure public opinion and develop political policy. The group supported Labour in the 2024 general election, as well as for a second term in government.
It is regarded by The Guardian, Politico, The Times, and Business Insider as a highly influential group upon the Starmer-led Labour Party, and seen as an "incubator" of its 2024 manifesto. It has sought to resemble the centre-right think tank Onward.
Between 2017 and 2020, Labour Together failed to declare £730,000 of donations from businessmen and venture capitalists, despite claiming at the time to have fully declared its funding. In early 2025, the group had to make redundancies, with up to 15% of staff leaving. In July 2025, Jonathan Ashworth stood down as the organisation’s CEO.
In September 2025, Alison Phillips, former editor of the Mirror, became CEO of Labour Together.
History
2015–2017: Formation
The organisation was set up in June 2015 by John Clarke, a former Blue Labour director, under the name Common Good Labour, following the Labour Party defeat in the 2015 general election and the resignation of its leader Ed Miliband, intending to learn lessons from Miliband's defeat. MP Jon Cruddas, in an attempt to prevent the wider party from fracturing, gathered other MPs including Steve Reed and Lisa Nandy to form the group. Clarke resigned less than a year after establishing the group, allowing Cruddas, Reed and Nandy to step forward as leaders. Labour Together during this time has been described by The Guardian as "initially such a broad church," with members such as former national coordinator of Momentum Laura Parker, as well as Miliband himself. As described by Steve Reed MP "Labour Together is the new unity project open to everyone in our party. It's for supporters of any of the leadership candidates, for people who know that what unites us is bigger than what divides us."The group involved members from both New Labour and Blue Labour, and by October 2015 had also recruited Chuka Umunna, Tristram Hunt and Maurice Glasman. Cruddas commented on the group's formation in The Observer that same month, stating that "in the 2015 leadership election we surrendered the argument on devolution. Labour is stuck in an unpopular, outdated politics of taxing and spending and using state control", and that this had placed Labour "into a situation in which a Tory chancellor looks more in tune with our Labour councils in the north than the Labour party itself." Labour Together existed alongside other groups associated with the moderate centre-left such as Labour for the Common Good.
On 31 May 2016, Nandy officially announced the launch of Labour Together, chaired by Cruddas. Before the launch, on 25 May, the group announced a "communities fund" for donations as well as an academy with the aim of teaching party members about campaigning, organising and leadership. The group received initial funding from Nevsky Capital founder Martin Taylor and Trevor Chinn, the latter of whom was appointed as Labour Together's director after donating £10,000. Members often met in parliament or at the House of St Barnabas. The group received initial funding of £75,000 to cover early research and its first staff member, growing to approximately £150,000 over three years. By the time of the 2020 Labour leadership campaign, the group had received about half a million pounds in funding. During this period, Labour Together was led by Luke Murphy.
2017–2020: Support of Keir Starmer for Labour Party leadership
In 2017, Morgan McSweeney took over as director of the organisation at its offices in Vauxhall, responsible to a board which included Reed, Nandy, Cruddas and Chinn. The purpose of the group was to remove Jeremy Corbyn from the leadership position "by any means necessary". This was primarily achieved by exploiting the issue of anti-semitism.McSweeney wrote in an early confidential strategy paper, that the group would cultivate “seemingly independent voices to generate and share content to build up a political narrative and challenge fake news and political extremism.” The group worked with former Labour advisors to investigate online antisemitism by finding and publicising posts on social media associated with left-wing politics.
They also launched a "Stop funding fake news" campaign targeting websites they considered alt-left or alt-right, which included identifying articles they deemed to contain racist or fake content and contacting advertisers on these sites.
Internal documents from the period, later obtained by The Guardian, showed Labour Together's strategic assessment of the party's situation. A document sent to prospective donors warned that the "Hard left will divide our party, condemn us to electoral defeat, attempt to drive out democratic socialists and corrupt our moral purpose in the interest of ideological aims".
Labour Together relaunched with an unofficial purpose to dissuade moderate MPs from starting a breakaway group after the success of Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership election, as well as to obtain control of the party from its left wing. It obtained new funding from donors opposed to Corbyn's leadership, with the donations being reported to the Electoral Commission until December 2017, when the organisation largely stopped reporting them. The Times has stated that after this point, "Labour Together was starting to raise money on a scale and at a speed rarely seen in British politics." Further donations were made in 2018 by Paul Myners, Clive Hollick, Simon Tuttle, Sean Wadsworth and Richard Greer.
Labour Together polled party members on their policy priorities, splitting members into "instrumentalists", "idealists", and "ideologues". The group decided that a successor to Corbyn would need to appeal to all of the "instrumentalists" and over one third of the "idealists", and would need to have served under and backed Corbyn, eventually picking Keir Starmer.
Some members of the group backed Starmer in the 2020 Labour leadership election, endorsing McSweeney to be his campaign director, with whom Starmer won the leadership with 56.2% of the vote. During the campaign, Labour Together raised £160,000 to fund a cross factional Election Review, and its financial supporters donated £205,000 in total to Starmer, which amounted to 30% of Starmer's cash donations over the campaign's course. These donations were not declared and the group claimed not to back any candidate until after 2022, at which point its public statements began to state that it "played a key role in Keir Starmer's leadership campaign." Starmer immediately appointed McSweeney as his chief of staff, making him the most senior adviser in the Labour Party. Hannah O'Rourke, former advisor to Tristram Hunt, took over as acting director.
2020–2022: Election review, Electoral Commission investigation
During the 2020 Labour Leadership Election, Labour Together convened a cross party review of 2019 Election convened by its acting director Hannah O'Rourke. The review was led by 15 Commissioners from across the party. "We intentionally designed our review so that our whole movement can feel part of it, because the process of constructing a project that involves all our traditions is as important as what we conclude." The analysis was drawn from the combined insights from over 11,000 survey responses from Labour members members, supporters, and former voters, alongside more than 50 in depth interviews with activists, organisers and party staff, Labour candidates and MEPs across the UK. It was supported by submissions from groups across the movement including Momentum, Progress, Labour Business, English Labour Network, a Labour LGA councillors’ survey, Labour's Community Organising Unit and affiliated Trade Unions including Unite. The review was described in Labour List as being "welcomed by party across factions".The Election Review concluded that for Labour to win the next election, it would need to win over "hero voters" and the red wall, who in the 2019 general election had voted for the Conservative Party.
In December 2020, O'Rourke filed a series of donation reports that, from 2017 until 2020, had not been filed within 30 days as required by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. Labour Together was investigated by the Electoral Commission from January 2021 for failing to declare over £800,000 of donations within 30 days, £730,000 of which was not disclosed when McSweeney was director. McSweeney had falsely asserted in a January 2019 meeting in parliament that donations were being declared fully and promptly. The investigation became public in February 2021, when Business Insider revealed that only £165,000 of the £970,492 donated between October 2015 and January 2021 had been declared within the specified period. O'Rourke stated that this "administrative oversight" was "entirely unintentional" and asserted that "we are now fully transparent and compliant with regards to our donations, and are cooperating fully with the Electoral Commission to assist them in their ongoing inquiry." Following this, the Electoral Commission stated that "admin error" was not a reasonable excuse, and fined Labour Together £14,250 in September 2021 after finding it had committed over 20 offences under electoral law, including disclosures with incorrect information and a failure to appoint a "responsible person" for declaring funds.
Continuing its cross party work, in early 2022 Labour Together published Labour's Covenant: A Plan for National Reconstruction, authored by Jonathan Rutherford. The work was the culmination of a project that involved over 100 policy advisers, academics, journalists and think tank experts, along with Labour mayors, councillors and MPs, from across the party, to discuss Labour's political renewal. Ten working groups produced over 50 papers in over 40 webinar discussions.