There is no doubt that the leadership election currently taking place is crucial for the future direction of the party. Despite repeated calls for unity an unnamed source reportedly told the Huffington Post that 50 MPs would quit if Rebecca Long-Bailey wins. For some, incentive enough to vote for her. The fact is though that the right of the party are calling for unity only as a means of silencing the left. They believe that they are on the verge of seizing control of the party from a left that is demoralised and divided. On both counts they may well be right.
As the contest hots up the leadership contenders have been busy giving interviews and appearing at hustings around the country. I attended the hustings in Cardiff a couple of weeks ago. Before I went I had pretty much decided that the best chance of maintaining a radical agenda would be to vote for Rebecca Long-Bailey who, despite some failings, is the candidate with the best left credentials. Nonetheless, as I had never attended a leadership hustings previously and I was keen to see the candidates in the flesh I turned up on a cold Sunday morning to see whether anybody could convince me that the party’s fortunes would be safer in their hands than RLB’s (to use the shorthand).
I do agree with Lisa Nandy (and Jess Philips) who said that the format was awful. There were around 300 of us in a room, others watching online, for a series of questions which each candidate had 40 seconds to answer. This meant there was no actual debate and on many questions all four pretty much agreed with each other. The selection of the questions seemed aimed at avoiding controversy, and yes we were in Cardiff but rather less on devolution would have allowed a wider debate around the variety of topics that members would surely have submitted. I watched somebody write a question on ‘involvement of foreign powers in Labour policy’ (what could he have meant?); and my partner submitted a question on justice for WASPI women. Neither were asked.
There was only one candidate who entirely failed to impress me and that was Emily Thornbury. She appeared desperate and for some reason reminded me of Anne Widdicombe, the Strictly contestant everybody knew was rubbish but kept in the contest because she was entertaining. Although she got one or two laughs, I was amazed that somebody who had occupied a front bench role during the past three years appeared to blame the election result entirely on the manifesto, although could not name a single policy she would actually drop. Most of her answers were about her. Bizarrely she claimed that she was uniquely placed to take on Boris Johnson because she had shadowed him as Shadow Foreign Secretary.
She was the only candidate who raised anti-Semitism as an issue, a move that misjudged the mood of members. I for one am sick of senior members of the party accusing members who have years of anti-racist activity under their belts of anti-Semitism. But equally as a senior member of the party for the past three years surely she cannot avoid criticism if indeed she is right that the party has failed to tackle the issue. In truth, of course, we have the most robust anti-Semitism procedures of any party in Europe, but that would never prevent our critics from saying we had not done enough. (For a good review of the “crisis” I would recommend reading Jonathan Cook.)
Lisa Nandy has since launched a new policy on anti-Semitism which she promoted by claiming “"One of the most shameful things I’ve ever seen was a group of Jewish women MPs at a parliamentary Labour party meeting begging the leadership to take seriously the need to adopt an internationally adopted definition of antisemitism.” What she doesn’t mention is that group of Jewish women MPs included Luciana Berger and Joan Ryan both of whom defected from the party (and one of whom was captured on video discussing money with an Israeli spy) and Margaret Hodge who compiled a dossier of people she wanted expelled the majority of whom were not even members of the party. The so-called internationally agreed definition has been heavily criticised including by Kenneth Stern who wrote: “Fifteen years ago, as the American Jewish Committee’s antisemitism expert, I was the lead drafter of what was then called the “working definition of antisemitism”. But starting in 2010, rightwing Jewish groups took the “working definition”, which had some examples about Israel, and decided to weaponize it..”
I found it odd the number of times that the word unity was used by both Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy, both of whom believed so much in unity they joined a plot whose express aim was to break Jeremy Corbyn as a man. They can’t have it both ways. This Damascene conversion to unity sounds pretty hollow, especially coming from Nandy who was unswerving in her failure to support the leader, the manifesto or members since 2016.
I have to confess that Nandy does come across rather well. She has a nice line in humour and, of course, represents Wigan which she seems to think gives her unique insight into the thoughts of working class northerners. Indeed, all four candidates made much of their humble backgrounds to the point where I almost expected Keir Starmer to say “I was born in a cupboard box” and for Emily Thornbury to retort “A cupboard box? Luxury. I lived in a shoe box until I was 35.”
Indeed, so keen were the candidates to convince us that they could empathise with the working class you have to wonder where people get the idea that the party is led by people with both feet firmly in the middle class. Perhaps given their humble beginnings we should sing the praises of a social system that has allowed such upward mobility.
The only issue on which there was genuine disagreement was when RLB raised open selection characterised by Lisa Nandy as “wanting to get rid of Labour MP’s rather than Tory one’s.” It’s rather curious that all four candidates went out of their way to talk about involving the members, no longer being Westminster-centric and democratising the party “from the bottom up” as Keir Starmer put it. But only one of them was prepared to let the members have a say in who represents them. No sitting MP in a safe seat will ever be challenged, it seems. That’s a bottom up democratic reform too far apparently.
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| Trainee barristers for Starmer outside the hustings |
Although the mood of the room seemed to be pro-Starmer, it was open selection that received the first spontaneous, speech interrupting applause. I do think MPs and the party bureaucracy are out of step with the members on this and it is a policy only one candidate is promising to deliver. If anybody but RLB wins my guess is that open selection will be off the agenda for the foreseeable future. Protecting sitting MPs job security is far more important, it seems, than democratising the party.
On other policies it was clear that RLB was rather more likely to defend the 2019 manifesto than the others. Both Thornbury and Starmer were part of a front bench that supported the manifesto but both said they wanted to jettison some of it. There is some ambiguity here because the only specific policy (and it wasn’t actually in the manifesto) mentioned was free broadband which apparently is the worst idea ever. But the criticism of this was accompanied by an accusation that Labour was not trusted. As one Wigan resident allegedly told Lisa Nandy “It’s our money, how are you going to pay for it.” Whether this is true the implication is that the only way to win votes is to promise to do nothing. A successful strategy adopted by Blair in 1997, but in very different circumstances.
Emily Thornbury claimed that although there was nothing in the manifesto with which she fundamentally disagreed what was needed were 5 pledges. She has clearly forgotten the Ed Stone, and also rather naively for somebody who is “political to my core” seems to believe that if all we did was promise to do whatever the Tories were planning that the media would not present Labour as profligate. All Labour politicians are caught in the trap of wanting to sound radical on the one hand, whilst on the other avoiding saying anything that will bring the wrath of the media down on them. The answer is usually to avoid the radicalism. Jeremy was clearly of a different mould.
Keir Starmer wanted us to believe that there was not a single issue that lost the election. He may well be right, but if he really wants us to believe that he is leadership material he could start by having the honesty to admit that it was a policy he pushed through conference that was responsible for losing 54 of the 60 lost seats. There may have been other factors but to fail to acknowledge the role of Brexit is encouraging the delusion that the only reason we lost was Jeremy Corbyn’s personal character. To be fair, none of the candidates felt it appropriate to put the knife into Corbyn personally, although Thornbury had already told one interviewer he was a 0/10 leader for failing to win the General Election as if the entire blame was to be his, and not shared collectively.
The elephant in the room, and this is also the case at many CLP nomination meetings, is the role of the mass media. The unspoken assumption is that Jeremy Corbyn received a bad press due to a failure on his part. The right of the party begun their lessons for the rest of us, by declaring that “you cannot just blame the media” and “we have to move on from Brexit”. But, by disallowing these from consideration we are left entirely unable to learn and thus to actually move on. Ignoring the role of the media in elections is akin to ignoring the role of weapons in war whilst trying to understand how so many people died.
Avoiding the role of the media is naïve. The Labour Party needs a strategy to overcome the media bias. For the right, and many people on the left seem to be buying into this, all that is necessary to do is to have the blandest leader possible who
will stand for very little and the endorsement of The Sun is sure to follow. If Keir Starmer is elected I will be taking bets on how long before his Trotskyist past or his record of defending “terrorists” as a lawyer is all over the front pages. The important point about counteracting the media is that they are not impartial observers, they are, and I don’t really like this word but I can’t think of a more appropriate one, the enemy.
It is clear that Lisa Nandy is the most enthusiastic endorser of what is best described as a return to Blairism. As I pointed out last week this would be a return to a politics that lost voters and seats and essentially squandered a majority to appease a Tory press baron with whom Blair had clearly struck a Faustian pact. At the hustings she was the only candidate not to unequivocally support public ownership, probably on the basis that we must be seen as the party of business if we are to win.
Keir Starmer is the bland, everybody’s friend, candidate treading a delicate balancing act between keeping the support of left members and satisfying his backers who are overwhelmingly on the right. He was the candidate who walked through the hall prior to the hustings saying “good morning” to members. It was not his hustings performance which damns him but the fact that not only has he signed 10 pledges presented by an outside group, but in keeping with those pledges promised to outsource our disciplinary procedures to an “independent” body. His emphasis on ensuring the ‘complainant’ is satisfied means that the ex-barrister, human rights advocate and Director of Public Prosecutions seems willing to turn justice on its head for a party he intends to lead and make the assumption of guilt prior to investigation with the onus on the accused to prove they did nothing. That so many people on the left of the party are going to endorse him because they think he is more electable than the other candidates shows how fragile the left is, and how the desire to win trumps all, but especially principles and rationality.
There is one little cameo moment that rather sums up Starmer. Toward the end of what, if I am honest, was turning into a pretty tedious event, the candidates were asked, in true Good Morning Britain trivia fashion, to tell us something personal. Rebecca Long-Bailey spoke about how her 7-year old son did not want her to be Labour leader because he wanted her to be a teacher in his primary school. It was a nice moment that went down well with the audience. Starmer watched this and immediately said “I have two 4-year olds who don’t want me to be leader”. Perhaps this was what he always intended to say, but it had all the charm of the person at a party who watching the guests being entertained by somebody insists on saying “I’ve got a funny story too..” and then hasn’t.
More telling perhaps was the moment candidates were asked about relationships with their own CLP’s. Both Nandy and Thornbury claimed to have great relationships “just ask them”, as if their CLPs were out in force in South Wales on a Sunday morning. But Keir’s answer was more illuminating, and at the time, inspiring or so I thought. He told how he had excellent relations with his CLP and the initiatives they took to involve new members. It was a good answer, so I was disappointed to read an interview with Labour List editor Sienna Rodgers, a member of his CLP who said in an interview reported in Camden New Journal “He’s not left wing. I find it genuinely unbelievable and a huge failing of the ‘Labour left’, that people are actually swirling this narrative of ‘he really wants to be more left wing secretly but he’s being held back as he builds this kind of broad coalition’. I think that’s absolutely laughable.”
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| Labour List Editor, Sienna Rodgers |
She added: “You only need to look at what he’s like in his own constituency Labour Party to know that he’s on the right of the party.” Asked what faction she thought he would be most connected to, she said: “I don’t think he belongs to any of them, it’s even a bit unfair to say he’s with the ‘right’ of the party, I just think that’s the way he has behaved. I think he is apolitical, I think he lacks politics and that’s the reason why members should be a bit wary.”
A couple of days later an open letter from members of Keir’s CLP started circulating on social media. A group of members wrote: “Time and time again, as left-leaning members we have been subjected to hostility and abuse, a symptom of the chronic factionalism in our CLP. Those that are close to Keir Starmer, rather than welcome involvement from the left, have actively prevented it.” They ended with this plea: “Therefore any socialist thinking about supporting Keir Starmer should think again and instead support a candidate that welcomes and supports socialist policies and encourages the active involvement of socialist members!”
Quite a different story to the one I was impressed by at the hustings. Far from being a CLP I would like to be part of, it turns out it would be more likely I would be bullied and marginalised. If you are on the left, especially if you are desperate for a Labour victory, you might be tempted to vote for a candidate who you have been convinced has the best chance of success. But, the problem with such an approach is that a candidate who wants to appeal to the left and right will inevitably find themselves sacrificing the left to appease the right. Lisa Nandy describes herself as “left-wing” but so does Jess Philips. She is, in reality, the continuity-Blair candidate who will pursue so-called ‘sensible’ policies to build an electoral coalition with mythical Tory-voting Labour voters. There is no doubt at all that she will close down criticism of Israel and support a purge of anybody who wants to defend the Palestinian people.
Keir Starmer may appear to be different from Nandy but in reality the only difference is that to quote Sienna Rodgers “Everything about Keir’s trajectory is calculated”. He does not appear to have any strong convictions, and certainly has not put his hands up and admitted that backing a second referendum, which he pushed through conference, was a large part of why Labour did not win in December. He is surrounded entirely by people on the right of the party, including Matt Pound, a member of Labour First the right-wing group set up by Luke Akehurst with the sole intention of ensuring Jetemy Corbyn did not become PM; and Ben Nunn who had previously been a lobbyist for a private healthcare company. He was nominated by a who’s who of anti-Corbynistas including: Hilary Benn, Ben Bradshaw, Yvette Cooper, Richard Corbett, Thangam Debbonaire, Marsha de Cordova, Angela Eagle, Maria Eagle, Andrew Gwynne and Seema Malhotra, all of whom, along with one Keir Starmer, tried to depose Jeremy Corbyn soon after he became leader.
Perhaps none of these MPs expect anything for nominating Keir. Perhaps they are all terribly sorry that they created the conditions which made Labour’s electoral chances so much worse than they might have been. But perhaps, and more plausibly, deals have been struck. Benn, Cooper, Eagle et al have been promised promotion to the Shadow Front Bench. Perhaps they expect to have much greater influence over future policy. Perhaps they think that it is high time all this left-wing nonsense was brought to a close. Perhaps like their ally Margaret Hodge they are of the opinion that ““the manifesto was one of the most reactionary documents I had seen.”
Who knows? But this much I do know. There is only one candidate for leader not distancing themselves from our manifesto, or our leader. There is only one candidate who seems to believe that socialism can be popular. And, crucially, there is only one candidate who believes that members should have a say in which candidate they give up their time and effort to campaign for. That is why, despite keeping an open mind (okay perhaps not that open) Rebecca Long-Bailey will get my vote for leader.
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