Caitlin Prowle

11 min read18 May

If you’re a progressive in your 20s, why would you support the Labour Party over Zack Polanski’s Greens right now? Caitlin Prowle, an ex-aide to Yvette Cooper and former GMB political officer who recently became the Co-operative Party’s assistant general secretary at just 28 years old, thinks she has the answer.

“The thing that makes Labour unique – genuinely unique – and irreplaceable by the Greens or anyone else is the institutional structures and the institutional relationships we have with the trade unions, the co-op movement, socialist societies and members.

“It’s really important that someone starts looking at those relationships now, in light of what’s happened. Because when you talk about values and being a Labour Party, it starts there. It starts with those relationships. It starts with the reason we were founded.”

The timing of this exercise is less than perfect, she admits: “It’s not ideal to have to do this in government while running the country – this is stuff that should have been addressed in opposition.”

But the Labour Party has been plunged into crisis following its terrible results in the May elections. At the time of writing, nobody has supplied the 81 names necessary to challenge the Prime Minister, but Andy Burnham is hoping to re-enter Parliament, and there is widespread doubt that Keir Starmer could survive the next scandal anyway, let alone fight the next general election.

If – or, perhaps more realistically, when – a leadership change takes place, the Co-op Party would probably issue an endorsement: “Where it’s a Co-operative MP, we will often provide support.” Andy Burnham, like most mayors, is officially Co-op and has pursued that agenda in Manchester, where he set up a credit union, for example. Assuming he is selected to stand in Makerfield, the party is expected to seek to have him do so as a Labour and Co-op MP. If he won, then secured the top job, he would be the first Co-op prime minister.

Wes Streeting is not in the Co-op MP group; nor, more surprisingly, is Angela Rayner, although she has done significant work with Co-op. Two-thirds of Labour MPs are Co-op members on a personal level but far fewer stood for Parliament under that joint banner. While there are budgetary reasons for keeping the parliamentary group small, as its members get financial support from the independent sister party, The House understands that Co-op does have plans to enlarge it soon.

In classic Co-op fashion, Prowle does not go in for personal attacks, preferring instead to issue the gently damning statement: “There is broad agreement that things can’t carry on as they have been.” She refrains from indulging in speculation about any leadership change but would “welcome” a new “boldness and bravery” from those currently in charge.

The heart of the problem, she believes, is that Labour has been going about appealing to voters the wrong way round: trying to map the party onto voters’ values, instead of proudly promoting Labour values in a way that could pull voters in.

“Let’s think about what Labour Party values are for 2026 and let’s start applying those,” she says, adding that many of the policies enacted by the government will already fit that mould – what has been missing is the storytelling.

“You want to be able to say the reason we did free school meals is the same reason we did the Employment Rights Act – it’s because we believe in fairness, and we believe that an accident of someone’s birth shouldn’t be the thing that determines their life outcomes,” Prowle explains.

“You could add five to 10 other things onto that and tell a story about it, but I think the Labour Party has become disconnected from the labour movement, and I think the movement is what gives you that golden thread of values, or it should.”

Why has Labour not been able to communicate that golden thread? The obvious answer for many is that Keir Starmer is not a confident storyteller. From her experience working as a political adviser to a cabinet minister in opposition, Prowle reckons the problem goes deeper than that.

“There was a real sense of fear and looming responsibility that we had this poll lead, we had this opportunity that people had been waiting a decade and a half for, and we were terrified. We were terrified to lose it and ruin it. And I think they have taken that approach into government,” she says. In fearing how voters perceive Labour, “we’ve lost our perception of ourselves and what we’re supposed to be”.

As a Labour lifer from Pontypool, an ex-mining valleys town in south Wales, the historic loss of the Senedd hits hardest for Prowle. Labour being reduced to barely a stump, with just nine Members, has left her “completely heartbroken”.

“There has been a failure from UK Labour, and I’d even say UK politics in general, over many, many decades to pay attention to what’s happened in Wales. If people had paid a bit more attention to it five years ago, we might be in a different place,” she says.

“People want the Labour Party to look and talk and feel like the Labour Party. A lot of the time our voters in Wales and across the country have just been a bit confused about what we’re trying to tell them about who we are and what our offer is.”

Flame-haired and chatty with an infectious laugh, Prowle is well-known as a mover and shaker in Labour circles. When I first met her, she was just 20 years old; full of enthusiasm and more than able to start a conversation in an empty room.

Prowle hails from a “classic Labour family” filled with lifelong party members on both sides; former miners and steelworkers; councillors, teachers and nurses. Her parents still live in the same house that she was brought to as a baby. Neil Kinnock is, naturally, a family friend.

Attending a Welsh-speaking school (typical in north Wales but unusual for the south) from nursery to GCSEs, the focus was music and sport rather than academia. There, she learned singing and harp, which she assumed would be her life’s work. “When people say to me now, ‘You’re really young to do your job,’ I think about when I was 12 and being paid to sing at weddings.”

Leaving her tight-knit community to study music at Oxford on a choral scholarship, family and friends at home were delighted – until she quit university within three weeks. “I absolutely hated it,” she recalls. There were few others from state school in her college and the academic approach to music didn’t appeal. “I dropped out, and it was awful. My family were devastated. The school community were devastated as well.” She thought her life was “ruined”.

Her local MP Nick Thomas-Symonds, an Oxford grad, now Paymaster General and Cabinet Office minister, was “a bit of a mentor” through this time. He sent Prowle, who was working in a perfume shop, a Co-op Party organiser job. To her surprise, she got it and worked for the party through the 2017 locals, then the snap election, before moving to London for a social policy degree at LSE.

“People want the Labour Party to look and talk and feel like the Labour Party”

“I barely went,” she says of her second uni. “By that point, I was so ingrained in the political operations of the Co-op Party.” She worked through the 2019 election too, soaking up all the knowledge she could on policy and campaigns: “It was proper cut your teeth stuff.”

At LSE’s Labour club, she was confronted with the vitriolic factionalism that the party’s culture can inflict on members, which was particularly acute during the infighting of the Corbyn era. Everyone was forced to pick a side. “It felt so counterproductive to everything that a movement is meant to be. And it was hostile as well – nasty.”

One night, she emailed Lord Kinnock for advice, though she hadn’t seen the former Labour leader since she was a child. The subject line was “Labour factionalism”.

His reply, which Prowle has shared with The House, started with the valuable advice: “Don’t worry, certainly not at 02.18am. You are in LSE to learn and succeed and enjoy yourself. Don’t let anything or anyone get in the way of that, least of all a bunch of self-indulgent half-wit bullies who fancy themselves as ‘socialists’ but clearly have no concept of comradeship.” Then he warned, using a line that has stayed with her, against people who “prize power in the party over power for the party”.

Once she graduated, Prowle worked in Parliament for the first time – first, for Welsh MP Nick Smith; then for Yvette Cooper, who was chairing the Home Affairs Select Committee. Cooper was soon promoted to shadow cabinet and Prowle, aged 23, was her political adviser for two years. “Totally inexperienced for it, I must have been the youngest pad.”

Working under a 1997 intake MP – and alongside figures with big reputations, like fellow pad Damien McBride – was another steep learning curve. Cooper has “the most incredible work ethic”, Prowle notes, and staff are expected to keep the same working hours as her. “People who have worked for politicians trained by Gordon Brown say they’re all the same in this regard.”

“Sometimes we do things because we’re the Labour Party” was a key lesson Cooper imparted. “Doing things that are rooted in Labour values was really central to the way that she worked. I feel very sad that I feel a lot of the time that view has been lost a bit in government,” Prowle says.

Finally, she experienced the last leg of the labour movement’s trifecta, by leaving to become a political officer at the Labour-affiliated GMB – a trade union with deep roots in industrial Wales. During her time there, the union was still dealing with the aftermath of having been found “institutionally sexist” by Karon Monaghan QC in a landmark report.

Did she experience the kind of sexism described in the report? “Not with union officials, but I think with union members. It’s old-school trade unionism, where the women are there to take the notes, maybe, if they’re lucky…

“I really wanted to be really creative and ambitious in it, and I think there’s a long way to go before your average trade union member feels that a woman in her 20s is the person to be a leader in the trade union movement.”

Reflecting on the “defensive culture” within unions, she says: “They’ve got to fight to survive a lot of the time – even now, when they’ve got, in theory, a supportive government and an institutional relationship with government, they still struggle with membership. They still struggle to get the industrial wins that they need for their members.”

“It’s old-school trade unionism, where the women are there to take the notes, maybe, if they’re lucky”

Then Cooper rang to ask for her return, thinking a general election would come later that year. It was called on Prowle’s second day back in the job. After working through the 2024 election, she returned to Co-op.

Despite having a tattoo of the word “soft” (because her family motto is “stay soft to the hardness of the world”), Prowle does not like the label ‘soft left’. Nonetheless it is how she is best described in Labour terms.

“I’ve still got no tolerance whatsoever for Labour factions. We at Co-op party level don’t partake in it at all,” she explains. Of course, the Labour left would say those who describe themselves as non-factional are usually on the party’s right. “I’m sure they would, which is wild to me. I think the Co-op Party is the radical face of the labour movement.”

She points to community right to buy, which has just been passed in legislation, as an example. “It sounds so boring. I cannot, for love nor money, get journalists to write about it,” she admits. But it means when a local pub closes, instead of a property developer or chain like Wetherspoons taking over, the community must be given the chance to raise the funds and buy it.

“We are basically anti-private ownership of anything, because we think that things should be owned by the people who use them and people that love them.”

Co-op has secured other wins from government, including £1bn in investment in community-owned energy, thanks to Ed Miliband. This allows members of a community to own shares in their local energy project, which usually involves selling energy to the grid before reinvesting the profit – towards lowering people’s bills or in infrastructure. “That is government rejecting the existence of private ownership of energy,” she says proudly.

The party’s ‘Community Britain’ campaign was a direct response to Reform UK “doing localism and communitarianism and talking about bringing power back to people locally”. As The House reported last year, their councillors were helping to run foodbanks in Wales. “I thought, ‘That’s Labour values. Why aren’t we doing that?’” Prowle says.

“All these big questions about immigration and divisions and neighbours turning on each other – it happens far less in places where there are physical spaces for people to spend time together. It sounds soft and unserious, but it happens to be true.”