Who should be the next Labour leader?
This Labour leadership race feels like it has been going on forever. I mean, when this race began, we could go outside, and now we can’t. Life comes at you fast, as they say.
However, this weekend it will finally end. On Saturday a new Labour leader will be announced via an online video, I believe, to maintain social distancing. Then, finally, the race that began when Labour lost the general election in December will be over. There’s just one last thing for me to do: vote for the candidate I want to be Labour leader.
I’m optimistic about a Labour Party led by any of these candidates. Of the three candidates still in the race, I don’t think any of them would be a terrible leader. They would all bring something interesting to the role.
Conversely, there is no candidate that has really impressed me. None of them have seized this race as an opportunity to show that they embody the future of the Labour Party. No one has transcended this race and captured the interest of the general public.
I don’t feel as confident casting my vote today as I did when voting Jeremy Corbyn in 2015. I guess, this means that whoever wins has the opportunity to rise above my expectations and become a greater Labour leader.
So, without further ado here are the candidates in the order in which I voted for them:
Number 1: Rebecca Long-Bailey
I decided to put Rebecca Long-Bailey first mainly because of her work on Labour’s Green New Deal, an excellent piece of policy-making that is exactly what the country needs. It may sound silly to say that the looming environmental catastrophe is the biggest challenge facing the country during an outbreak of a deadly disease, but I have every confidence that Covid-19 will subside and the current state of emergency will end. The damage being done to the environment is permanent and it threatens many more lives than coronavirus. There isn’t going to be a vaccine against rising sea levels. Well, apart from being rich.
Long-Bailey has been a tireless campaigner for the things I want most from a Labour government from a Universal Basic Income to enhanced workers’ rights. She is a confident media performer, able to handle a tough interview, as she has shown during the Corbyn leadership. I have great confidence that Long-Bailey would be a capable Labour leader.
Number 2: Keir Starmer
It was a difficult decision as to who I was going to put second on my list of preferences. What convinced me to put Keir Starmer second was his 10 pledges. Let’s be honest, Starmer has been the front runner in this contest since quite early on, and he’s very likely to win it. He could have coasted to victory saying little and making few commitments to what his time as leader would be like. However, he didn’t do that. He unveiled 10 decent, left wing pledges that are all things I agree with, from social justice to devolution. Although his pledge on the environment falls short of a commitment to a Green New Deal, Starmer is promising action on this key issue.
Starmer was director of public prosecutions and in that time showed that he cares deeply about human rights and protecting the vulnerable. These are the qualities we want from a new Labour leader. Starmer’s political instincts may be closer to Ed Miliband than to Corbyn, and it’s frankly ridiculous that Labour will have had two leaders called Kier before one woman, but I still think Starmer has solid left-wing principles and will make a good leader.
Number 3: Lisa Nandy
Of all the candidates, Lisa Nandy is most willing to wrestle with why Labour lost last year’s general election and why Labour’s support had been declining in our traditional heartlands for a while. She has produced the outline of a plan to engage with former Labour voters in the North and Midlands. I have my doubts that Nandy’s political instincts are compatible with what many former Labour voters want (she’s properly closer to me than to them; she’s been a strong defender of freedom of movement, for example) but she does have the most concrete plan out of the three candidates.
I put Nandy last in this list, but that doesn’t mean I think she would be a bad leader. She has passion for her consistent and the Labour cause. She’s a capable media performer and has ideas about how to lead the Labour Party forward. If she has become a rallying point to those most opposed to Corbyn’s leadership, then it’s because these people don’t understand what Nandy stands for. I also want to be clear that I’m not putting her last because she decided that Labour should get Brexit done because it’s what her constituents wanted.
The winner in the room
At this point I should address the elephant in the room, which is that listing the candidates in my order of preference seems a bit moot when the polls show that Starmer is likely to win by a huge margin. His closeness to Corbyn and his pro-EU stance sit neatly at the centre of the overlapping area of the Venn Diagram of what Labour Party members like. That, and the fact that he’s a white man in a suit who can give a good speech, means that lots of people think he’s a naturally gifted leader.
As I said, I don’t think Starmer will be a bad leader. He has good left-wing principles, he looks good on TV and his background as a barrister will serve him well during Prime Minister’s Questions. I’m not sure if an ex-human rights lawyer, who sounds posh (whether he is or isn’t) and has a constituency in London is the best person to win over the people who resented the London establishment so much that they voted first for Brexit and then Boris Johnson, but I am prepared to be proved wrong over this.
If Tories are able to paint Starmer as a soft, bleeding-heart, metropolitan toff, and no-one who thought Brexit was a good idea will vote for him, then which voters are Labour planning on going after? I don’t know, but what I’m worried about is that Starmer doesn’t know either.
The Labour Party under Starmer
If Starmer wins, which he probably will, I want him to remember that his party is a broad church and the radical left is a valid part of it. It would be a huge mistake to put us in a box and ignore us. Starmer has preached unity through the years of division. Now is his chance to show that he can bring the party together. A good start would be giving Long-Bailey and Nandy senior positions in the shadow cabinet.
Starmer isn’t my first choice for leader, but as I said, any of the three candidates would be a capable leader. I agree with Long-Bailey more than the others, but I’m prepared to keep an open mind and see what the eventual winner of this endless contest actually does with the leadership. If Starmer can unite the party and take the fight to the Tories, then Labour stands a chance of winning again. If he can’t then we’ll be looking at any more years in the wilderness that can’t be blamed on Corbyn.
"File:Official portrait of Rebecca Long Bailey crop 1.jpg" by Chris McAndrew is licensed under CC BY 3.0
