Who Am I Going to Vote for in the Labour Leadership Election?

I voted for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader last year, and unlike the MPs who nominated him at the time, I stand by that decision. Not that I thought Corbyn was the ideal candidate. I had concerns about him and especially the team surrounding him, and still do. For me it was as much about the hopelessness of the other candidates as it was about Corbyn’s intellectual purity. The question now is whether Owen Smith is really any better than them.

First, let’s look again at the options I had a year ago when choosing a leader for my party.

There was Andy Burnham, who, to be fair, has done a solid job of campaigning on certain niche issues, especially those pertaining to the Northwest of England. Fittingly, he has this year launched a campaign to become Mayor of Greater Manchester, which I hope will be successful.

But as a national figure, the man who came fourth in the previous Labour leadership election in 2010, behind Ed and David Miliband and Ed Balls, had a lot to prove in 2015. Other than the Hillsborough campaign, which culminated too late to have a positive impact on his leadership bid, he is, I think, best known for his achievements as the star striker of the Labour Party football team.

To his credit, he’s in favour of renationalising the railways and abolishing tuition fees, although he did vote in 2004 to raise the tuition fee cap from £1,125 to £3,000. He is also tainted in left wingers’ eyes by his role in the Blair government. He consistently voted for the Iraq War and against an investigation into it.

WHO ELSE?

Andy Burnham came second in the 2015 leadership election, with just under 20% of the first preference votes, which tells you something about the quality of the other candidates. The only one I can remember without googling is Liz Kendall, who tried to sound like she would appeal to the anti-immigrant working class by saying she would consider taking away tax credits from EU citizens working in the UK, but in practice only ever appealed to a narrow fringe of nostalgic Blair-worshipers on the right wing of the Labour Party. She got 4.5% of the first preference votes, a number which some Blairites adopted immediately afterwards as a bizarre badge of pride. I have not heard anything about Kendall since that election.

Wikipedia reminds me that the only other candidate who didn’t pull out of the race was Ed Balls’ wife, Yvette Cooper, which is an opportunity to reflect on the very shallow gene pool from which Labour draws its talent.

WHO’S WHO

Besides the Miliband brothers and the husband and wife team of Balls and Cooper, notable figures in the Labour Party today include twin sisters Angela and Maria Eagle, Tony Benn’s son Hilary and his granddaughter, Emily, Neil Kinnock’s son Stephen, Jack Straw’s son Will and John Prescott’s son David.

We expect this from the De Pfeffel Johnsons and the Rees-Moggs of the world, but how is this acceptable in a democratic socialist party?

The fact that Stephen Kinnock is also married to Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Prime Minister of Denmark, only adds to the impression that New Labour is gradually morphing into some sort of feudal European aristocracy, a situation which Emily Benn, the eldest daughter of the 3^rd Viscount Stansgate, can presumably readily identify with. It is only a matter of time before Euan Blair returns from exile to pull a sword from a stone and rightfully claim the throne.

Could this be the metropolitan Westminster élite that ordinary voters hate so much?

OWEN WHO?

On the subject of “ordinary”, and perhaps as part of an effort to distance Owen Smith from this Westminster élite, much has been made of the contender’s status as a “normal” family man with kids.

This instantly called to my mind our new Prime Minister Theresa May’s pledge to defend “ordinary working class families”. What do May and Smith mean by “ordinary” and “normal”? Why not defend all working class families, not just ordinary ones but strange, minority, peculiar and queer ones, not to mention people who are unlucky enough not to have a family at all?

Is it possible that May, because she is prohibited by unwritten rules from actually saying “straight white working class families”, used “ordinary working class families” as a substitute?

So Owen Smith is not gay. I’m over it. But he’s also normal, or typical, in another way: He is an MP who used to work for the media and in public relations. And another thing that annoys me about parliamentarians from all parties, besides the fact that they all seem to be blood relatives of each other, is that they have increasingly only ever worked in PR, advertising, the media and politics.

For instance, before David Cameron was elected to parliament, he had worked directly for the Conservative Party and as a director of corporate affairs for a TV network.

And even if they didn’t work in media and PR, they were hardly outstanding in their fields.

When Cameron resigned we narrowly avoided having Andrea Leadsom foisted on us by Tory activists. She got a 2:2 in politics at Warwick University, felt the need to exaggerate her banking career and was described by civil servants that she had worked with as “the worst minister ever”.

So I was very pleased when Rosena Allin-Khan, a doctor with no apparent kinship to an existing or former Labour MP, was selected as the Labour candidate in the Tooting by-election recently, and went on to win. I’d also like to see more teachers, engineers and scientists in parliament.

But at least, unlike Leadsom, Owen Smith had the ability to get to the top of his profession. Having studied history and French at the University of Sussex (I couldn’t find out what grade he got) he spent time as a radio producer at the BBC, before working his way up to head of policy and government relations at Pfizer.

He is also positioning himself much further left than other leadership candidates have, even offering to write a new version of Clause IV, although some of his previous statements cast a shadow over his ideological purity, or perhaps just his judgment. While he was hardly alone in giving private finance initiatives the benefit of the doubt, and has since said they were a failure, he really should never have supported them.

SAVING WHAT?

Having said all that, Corbyn’s leadership isn’t working. Even those MPs who were enthusiastic when he was elected, including Smith, have now turned against him.

I have little time for the right wingers who have been trying to undermine Corbyn from the very beginning instead of respecting the outcome of the leadership election, at least for a year or two. I don’t understand the timing of their failed coup, given that they had no credible alternative leader lined up, and there was no real prospect of an early general election. I don’t know why they took such offense at John McDonnell for calling them “fucking useless” plotters, because he is demonstrably right in that regard. I am glad that Corbyn and his supporters have forced the rebels to back a candidate who is proposing investment, not cuts, and focusing on tackling inequality.

I haven’t made my final decision on who to vote for in this latest leadership election, but I am swinging toward Smith, in part because I don’t want the party to split. I’d rather the historical British socialist party survived as a major political force. But if, once it is saved, it continues to evolve further into an incestuous, interwoven dynasty of intermarried PR types and political careerists who support policies because they sound good and perhaps deliver a hospital but have no idea how they will work in the long run (hospitals closing under the burden of badly negotiated and unnecessary PFI contracts), I may not be so bothered about “saving” it next time.

Photo: Flickr/70023venus2009