Tomorrow, the ballot papers for the Leader and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party will be sent out, and like many I have been weighing the options with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man reading the menu for his eve-of-execution meal.
Here’s the thing. When the leadership election was triggered by Ed Miliband’s post-defeat resignation (premature, in my view) we all knew who some of the runners-and-riders were likely to be. Yvette Cooper had, by all accounts, agreed to stand aside at the last leadership bunfight to enable her husband to (unsuccessfully) run. With him having had his very own Portillo moment, Yvette’s candidacy this time around was inevitable.
Andy Burnham, also unsuccessful last time, was an early favourite, and – until Jeremy Corbyn crashed the party – Andy was looking the most left-wing candidate on the slate. He had won plaudits at last year’s party conference for his impassioned defence of the NHS, and his rallying cry to campaign for it – and so he had surely teed himself up nicely to be the champion of the heart and soul of Labour in this race? Yet while Corbyn has undoubtedly stolen much of Burnham’s thunder, Andy also managed to trip himself up before the race was barely underway by his incoherent flip-flopping on the Welfare Reform Bill.
Then there were the Bright Young Things. Chukka was (briefly) promising, and then came Liz. What to say about Liz? I am a member of Progress, I believe in a progressive, broad-appeal politics that ultimately is about winning power, about genuine influence, and about improving the lives of all. Yet I am first a member of Labour – the movement and not just the party – and I cannot condone the idea that a tough line on welfare (for instance) is an inevitable “must have” in our manifesto in order to be electable. Welfare cuts of the order proposed – and I am sad to say largely supported to date by the PLP – is leading to actual destitution, family breakdown and child poverty. If this is a price we are prepared to pay in order to be popular, then what is Labour for?
So on to Jeremy.
I was at the Special Conference in the spring of 2014 when Labour agreed its new electoral processes for selecting a leader. Speakers on the left – a tiny minority of the delegates that addressed conference that day – cautioned that there could be unintended consequences of having “registered supporters” not members, of removing electoral bloc votes, of reforming the union link. I, with the majority, voted those reforms through (and stand by that decision.) At the time, that position was – we were told – the ‘progressive’ thing to do: one member, one vote; building a broader support base at community level; widening politics. Now some of those same progressive voices are in panic, frantically rowing back on the very reforms they argued for, and even calling for this election to be halted because lo-and-behold the partyhas registered more members and supporters (over 600,000 at the last count) and it increasingly looks as though the majority of those are about to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
One by one, Labour grandees and Labour MPs are queuing up to tell Labour members and supporters not to be so childish, not to be so “moronic”, as to consign the party to “electoral oblivion” and vote Corbyn. The party appears not to be in the mood to heed them.
To discern why few are listening is not too hard. Corbyn is the distinct candidate. He is the stand-out, the one apart. His politics are palpably different, and right now different is good. When I was knocking on doors in the run-up to the General Election, of course I got the usual challenges about our relationship with the SNP, our record on the economy, and about Ed – but the most common (and by far the most depressing) was, “you’re all the same.”
While Andy, Yvette and Liz debate degrees of cuts, shades of reform, nuances of policy – Jeremy talks of ending the austerity that balances the books on the backs of the poorest, reinstating protections for workers, defending and rebuilding public services. Ambitious, yes – naive, possibly – but it is bold and it is clear, and it is different. The alternative is just more of the same, with tweaks.
I grew up with Michael Foot as leader. A true socialist, a great mind, a compassionate man – and utterly unelectable at a time when Thatcher’s Falklands campaign, a royal wedding and the soaraway Sun had the country at its jingoist peak. Do I fear Corbyn could be Michael Foot all over again? Yes. But I equally fear that Burnham, Cooper and Kendall will be unable to lead the party to victory. I simply cannot see where the “you’re all the same” argument gets nailed under the leadership of any of them.
Labour’s problems are far more deep-rooted than just the identity of its leader. (A theme I am sure I will return to in other posts.) If Labour wants to recover from the 2015 defeat to win victory in 2020 then I am frankly not hugely confident that anyone on the ballot paper this time around will achieve that. So given that we all accept that the scale of the task of winning in 2020 is colossal, I have resolved that I for one would rather campaign on what I believe to be the values, to be the heart and soul, to be the decency of the Labour Party than on the sterile pragmatism of our recent past. I would rather go down (yet again) with a real fight, than a whimper.
I would rather have had a broader slate of candidates – but I don’t. I would like to have been truly convinced and inspired by just one progressive, passionate reformer – but I haven’t. This whole debate and campaign has been a failure of the progressive wing to inspire or to convince. With “Red Ed’s” departure, I believe many thought the leadership debate would see an inevitable return to the right, and the anointing of an heir to Blair – the only question was which one?
It was arrogant, it was complacent, and it has failed to mobilise to form a coherent message in the face of a truly popular campaign. The fact that all three are determined to fight to the end, none seeing the value of standing aside in order to allow a more unified and consistent progressive campaign shows that perhaps personality and career interest still has too high an emphasis in the minds of many within the parliamentary party.
And so, though colleagues may call me childish, moronic, naive, to my enormous surprise, I am a progressive that shall – in hope, in despair, or in both – be voting for Jeremy Corbyn.
