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 3rd
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 |
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