So, it’s been a long and hard decision, but I’ve made my
mind up as to who I’m voting for in the Labour leadership.
As boring as it is to do this, I want to run myself and you,
dear leader, through my thought process because over the last few months I have
almost voted for three of the four candidates, and the decision I’ve come to is
not the straightforward one that some might presume.
When the contest started I was broken. My rationale that ‘nobody
who voted for Gordon Brown wouldn’t vote for Ed Miliband’, providing us with a
decent base of support going into 2015 was fundamentally false. And all I
wanted to do – and still all I want to do – is to get Labour to win. We win
when we have a good media presence. We win when we look like and sound like the
people we represent. We win when the Party is together, when the Fabian middle
classes and policy brains unite with real working people and radicals to form a
pragmatic, sellable vision of a compassionate modern Britain. In short –
whoever gets my vote has to tick all those boxes.
So that rules out Liz Kendall. Liz Kendall was divisive from
day one, and not the pragmatist that we need. I would even say that she is the
only candidate in the election failing to put aside an ideology for the good of
the Party and electoral success. It started by alienating the unions, it
continued by alienating our membership – her support for Tory welfare reforms
is boggling, damning the consequences for her campaign, the Party and her (and
my) constituents. Her ideology prevents us from reaching out to young and
middle class voters, she doggedly refuses to cut tuition fees on arguments that
are over a decade old. Moreover, her lack of any ability to judge the mood of
the Party, the electorate in THIS election, gives me no confidence in her
ability to roll with the punches over a gruelling five years. Her attitude
throughout the contest has been nasty and personal (the only candidate whose
official campaign has been less than comradely), which belies a contempt for
the ordinary membership that makes the idea she will devolve any power to
communities suspect at least. I wasn’t
opposed to giving her a fair hearing, as fresh face, but she won’t give me one,
so she’s fallen at the very first hurdle.
Ironically, it makes her the least like Blair. He was
elected as a uniting, pragmatic figure, she’s really not a worthy heir, dogged
as she is by a pre-crunch ideology which blindly supports a stagnated
status-quo never designed to be a permanent economic settlement. Those
pre-conceived ideas have to change in a society, let alone an economic system,
that’s so different from 1997.
So in my quest for a different, unity candidate, I moved to
Yvette Cooper. I thought she was the most likely candidate to appeal to those
wooed by Kendall, maintain unity and prepare the Party. I don’t think she’s an
impressive parliamentarian, I don’t think she’s an inspiring leader – but I do
think she’s solid. She’s intellectual, efficient and a behind-the-scenes
operator. If anyone can prepare the way for a new hope to lead us into 2020,
and if anyone would be gracious enough to know their limits and ensure orderly
transition, it’s Cooper. She can whip us into shape.
However, as the campaign has gone on, I’ve been less and
less and less impressed. She doesn’t look or sound like a normal person and her
media personality is the opposite of engaging. I’ve not had a single piece of
correspondence from her telling me what she actually believes in, other than she
reckons the Labour Party is just plain great. A competent caretaker needs to
look after poll ratings as well as the PLP so we also need her connecting and
engaging with real people’s real concerns, which is exactly what Michael Howard
did, and exactly where Kinnock and Smith took us. As Shadow Home Secretary she
presided over some pretty dog-whistle policies over immigration, but failed to
land a punch on Theresa May, a politican now, miraculously, renown for her endurance,
instead of her incompetence.
The last Labour opposition failed spectacularly to be savage
– we failed to get any real scalps despite standing opposite the Omnishambles.
And Cooper has to take a good share of the blame for that; instead of
positioning the Home Office as the pitched battle between the two women destined
to lead Britain’s major parties, our response to an incompetent, bigoted administration
was muted, caveated opposition. That isn’t going to set us up for a winner.
Finally, one of my biggest reservations, which totally
killed my support for Cooper, is the Balls issue. I don’t think it’s good for
the Party, or, more importantly, for women, to have a leader seemingly destined
for failure defined by her hitherto more-high-profile husband. We are already
being scrutinised over the increasingly dynastic appearance of our candidates
(Straws, Dromeys, Benns and Blairs), and this is not a good look. It’s not a
necessary one either, when there are potential woman leaders for the future
from across the spectrum of the parliamentary party unencumbered by such
baggage. So, Yvette, it’s a no from me. But I like you, a lot, and want to see
your brain throbbing at the heart of our next cabinet.
So I’m left with the two men, and instinctively I’m happy
with both of them. They speak my kind of politics; one has a track record of a chameleon-like
media presence, the other has used social media more adeptly than any other
mainstream British politician. One sounds relatively normal through his media-friendly
non-threatening accent; the other couldn’t look less like a ‘biscuit cutter’
politician. Both are open to all wings of the party – the ideological socialist
has proudly coalesced with the Party through thick and thin, realising that our
party is a social-democratic one, and openly welcoming all leadership
contenders into a potential cabinet. He’s been the very expression of
compromise. The other has shown an incredible degree of awareness as to attitudes
of this electorate – the Party membership and supporters - while having a
political career that’s shown him be allies with every wing.
So I’m now looking for something extra; the ‘x-factor’.
Something inspiring and exciting which will reach out to the people we need to
speak to. I want somebody who can engage with the aspiring, but squeezed,
middle classes and support small business. I need a candidate who can sell
policies for society’s poorest by speaking to the solidarity that sustains our
society – who knows that the reason the comfortably off support the NHS is more
to do with the care for their vulnerable neighbour than it is to do with
themselves. We need a leader who doesn’t just respond to calls to an EU
referendum with a ‘do we want one or not’, but wants to set the agenda as to
what the re-negotiations should all be about.
The interesting, different, inspiring candidate that does
all of the above and more is Jeremy Corbyn.
It is right to say that our loss in May wasn’t to do with
being ‘not left wing enough’. It was to do with looking ineffectual, responsive
and uncertain – and destined to government by coalition as a result. Our
failure to set the agenda over the last eighteen months of the last government,
due largely to our inability to set out a clear vision, and merely engaging in
the politics of managing the state we’re in in a kinder way than the Tories,
was simply not good enough. What was rejected was the politics of the average
and the mediocre – and although I think Burnham is politically adept enough to
handle that well; I’m not sure he’s grasped the scale of the problem.
In fact, most of the parliamentary party haven’t – they nominated
Corbyn because they imagined he was a joke to be dismissed, like other paper
candidates in the past. I’m not sure I quite trust the political acumen of
those in the PLP already moving against a Corbyn leadership – they didn’t even
seem to understand the electorate this selection was being fought over. Fair
enough to get somebody on the ballot who you won’t necessarily support, but if
you wouldn’t be prepared to serve under them, that is a total abuse of the
gate-keeping power reasonably accorded to our MPs. MPs get asked first so we
can have stable leadership for a few years, knowing that all are credible, not
so they can deride their comrades or patronise the Party.
Watching Corbyn’s Marr Show interview the other week was a
pivotal moment for me. If you take away the labels and baggage that the
political class and increasingly irrelevant right-wing media accord to him –
here was a man with a bold, inclusive, social-democratic vision for Britain.
Ending tuition fees, and supporting high-tech, small scale manufacturing in the
private sector is a direct plea to the entrepreneurial middle classes in the
regions. Rail re-nationalisation is supported, consistently, by a plurality of
Conservative voters, the squeezed middle need the child care and social care
provision that he has a vision for. These are unity policies for the Party and
for the country that will totally wrong-foot the Tories. No wonder Zac
Goldsmith this week lectured his party to not be quite so gleeful.
Does a Corbyn leadership fill me with worries? Of course it
does; you’d be a fool if it didn’t. But frankly if it is a mistake, we can afford to make a mistake
like this this time around, because for the first time in British history we
know we have this government for a set period of time. When we elected Ed, and
every leader before him, we didn’t have fixed term parliaments, and the
coalition, certainly until 2013, could have fallen apart at any point. It’s not
possible for a Prime Minister to rob an electoral advantage eighteen months
into a parliament where the Labour Party has collapsed into disarray – we have
at least two years to be radical and be different. A mistake, however, that looks like
any other politician is much, much harder to replace, rectify or explain.
Corbyn’s plans to modernise and democratise the Party, as well as reform this
failed new method of electing a leader, are the best things to be doing with
this time. Let’s see how some genuine social-democracy goes down with the electorate
and, if it’s just not sellable, we can look again. We have a party packed with
talent, irrespective of their personal politics (Dawn Butler, Keir Starmer, Ian Lavery,
John Healey, Tristram Hunt, Rachel Reeves) and they will be in a much better position
to take the reins in two years or ten years rather than now.
I think Corbyn’s policies can win us an election, and change
the shape and direction of British politics. It’s wrong to say his policies have
been rejected because no party has actually put them to the electorate ever
before. These are policies for a multicultural, entrepreneurial post-Thatcher
Britain, responding to green issues, high technology and globalisation, not
some re-hashed ‘80s thinking. He is the MP for Islington North – a place which
has seen the best and worst effects of the last thirty years, so he really does
get modern Britain in a way very few on the left actually do.
However, if Corbyn’s policies are to be trashed, and the
Labour party under him as a result, then it must be trashed on the terms of our
opponents, not by our own fatalism. One of the greatest lessons of 2010-5 must
be that we talked ourselves from a party bidding for a majority, to one that
looked like it was cruising toward coalition. The snide comments of the
Progress right about how we were simply relying on deferred Liberals were a big
part of this, as well as electing a doomed leader in Scotland who was
completely at sea as to why his Blairite past was an electoral liability. I am
so deeply angry with senior figures not serving the membership by listening to
the vision we want, but instead organising shadowy meetings behind closed doors
– or Alan Johnson, whose leadership of the
Party could have saved us from defeat in May, delivering Corbyn and his
supporters a lecture on responsibility. That really is the lowest level of
hypocrisy from a politician I hitherto respected and wanted to lead my Party.
So this was a long post, but a hopeful one. It was Attlee,
Wilson and Blair changing the political discourse that made this Party what it
is. It was Thatcher, Churchill and Disraeli that did it for the Tories. Corbyn
is the heir to that radical, pragmatic tradition – he is our Thatcher; whereas
Cameron, Osborne, May and Johnson are little more than Callaghans or Heaths.
Vote Corbyn – oh and Stella is pretty great too.
