While it was already understood that the party had lost members, the scale of the haemorrhage is enormous – Labour lost a fifth of the membership, the largest drop in members in recent history. The loss of almost 70,000 members meant that, throughout 2025, one Labour member quit the party on average every eight minutes. Party members aren’t simply another metric on a spreadsheet or an annual report – they are the backbone of the Labour Party. Burnham is achieving levels of approval among the party membership and wider public that Starmer could have only dreamed of – and LabourList understands that the figures reported yesterday are not a reflection of the current party membership. Rebuilding Labour’s grassroots must now rank alongside rebuilding its standing with the wider electorate.