The elusive ill-defined characteristic of "electability" - The Labour leadership - 26 February 2020

The Labour leadership and deputy leadership ballots are being sent out this week, so here are my views on the candidates, for what they're worth.

The leadership looks like a two horse race between Rebecca Long-Bailey and Keir Starmer.

Starmer's main selling point seems to be this elusive ill-defined characteristic of "electability", and what it seems to boil down to is that he's a male from within the establishment class.

Aside from Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May's lamentable Thatcher tribute act, almost every Prime Minister in living memory has come from the mould of private/grammar school boy, who went on to receive an Oxbridge/Russell Group University education.

People struggle to see people who don't fit this mould as Prime Ministerial because they don't believe the British public have the capacity to accept anything different.

This isn't to say that young intelligent women can't be successful political leaders, just look at Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, and Sanna Marin in Finland (who is the youngest world leader of all at just 34).

When people insist that Starmer is the only "electable" candidate, what they're essentially saying is that they believe the British public are so socially conservative that they'd rather have a bumbling idiot from the elitist establishment class in power than a young intelligent woman.

I'd prefer to see Long-Bailey win the leadership contest, but it's not like Starmer would be the complete disaster some people are painting him as. He's less of a committed democratic socialist than Corbyn and the Labour Party membership, but he's also not stupid.

There are plenty on the right of the Labour Party who would love Starmer to drive away the huge party membership built up under Corbyn's leadership, and turn the party back to dependency on big money donations from millionaires, but Starmer would be an absolute fool to listen to strategic advice from the people who drove away millions of voters during the "Progress" era, gave us Labour's lamentable election losing "austerity lite" campaign in 2015, and who absolutely destroyed Labour's Scottish heartlands.

Starmer would certainly move away from some of Corbyn's more left-wing policies, but he'd be an absolute fool to drive away the mass membership he'll absolutely need in order to have any chance of overcoming the overwhelming media bias in favour of the Tory party.

Long-Bailey has been portrayed as "the Corbyn continuity candidate" but this is pretty damned unreasonable.

Yes she stood by Corbyn and worked tirelessly to stop the party collapsing into absolute chaos during the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup, while Starmer sided with the democracy-hating coup plotters like Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie, and Margaret Hodge, but Long-Bailey is her own woman with her own policies.

Anyone portraying her as an empty cipher for more Corbynism is being a misogynistic dick by denying that she has her own political agency.

Anyhow, if anyone comes close to representing "Corbyn continuity" it's not Long-Bailey at all, it's Richard Burgon in the deputy leadership election who has a number of excellent policies, like open selection of Labour Party MPs, a commitment to public ownership, and a strategy of improving levels of political education in the UK, which has declined to such an extent that shocking numbers of people on either side of the political divide are now incapable of defining even rudimentary political terms like "socialism" or "capitalism".

If you want to prevent the political right from completely destroying Corbyn's vision of a democratic socialist Labour Party that will stand up for ordinary people against corporations and billionaires, with much greater internal party democracy to provide more power to the party members, then Long-Bailey and Burgon are the two to vote for.

However it's also important to use your votes in the NEC elections to elect genuine socialists to run Labour's internal party democracy.

If the right-wing orthodox neoliberals get their hands on the party's internal democracy again, it won't really matter who the party figureheads are, because the NEC will do everything in their power to attack and undermine them, just like they did for the first three years of the Corbyn leadership.

As with all aspects of politics it's no good just voting in the high profile elections every few years, it's vital to stay informed and engaged. If you want the Labour Party to represent the interests of people like you, rather than serving the interests of millionaire donors and the entitled "jobs for life" brigade in the Parliamentary Labour Party, you need to inform yourself about who is standing in the NEC elections too, and vote accordingly.

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