London: The exhausted Labour leadership contest takes a bucket-and-spade holiday on August 14, with all four candidates agreeing to an uneasy truce on hustings — but probably not hostilities. It’s clear everyone could do with a bit of a rest, not least because they need time to sit down, scratch their heads and ask how on earth things got to where they are.
Jeremy Corbyn, the veteran socialist, is still ahead — and not just in published polls, but in the returns all the campaigns are seeing. With private data putting him far ahead of the next candidate, Andy Burnham, even dry insiders believe there is a 50/50 chance of Corbyn winning. Labour staffers, fearing they may get the sack if he really does win, are dazed and miserable. Meanwhile, the candidate for the faction that claims it knows how to win elections, the Blairite Liz Kendall, is in last place. Whether or not Corbyn wins the leadership, one thing is clear: Blairism is finally at death’s door.
Blairites tend, rightly, to mention the three elections their hero won when critics ask if they know what they’re talking about. But to win a general election, you need to win your party’s leadership election first. And those keeping the New Labour flame alive aren’t doing so well at that.
Kendall herself talks to a membership she wishes existed: one that believes Labour should support some welfare cuts and Britain should live within its means. But when she made that last, seemingly innocuous point at a hustings in Brighton recently, she was booed. It would be a huge ask for any candidate to move the established political convictions of a party electorate during a leadership contest, and she has clearly failed.
The Blairites seem genuinely surprised by the way the party membership is acting. It is as though they have failed to notice the way it has shifted over the past decade.
Blair never won the membership round to supporting his project for the long term. As far back as 2008, the party’s middle-class, middle-aged members were starting to drift away and be replaced by younger, more metropolitan and more left-wing members. That leftward drift was then intensified during Ed Miliband’s leadership, and again after this year’s election. But it seems most MPs were blissfully unaware of the changes. It was not “moronic” of Labourites to nominate Jeremy Corbyn to “broaden the debate”, even though they didn’t support him, but it is a damning indictment of the parliamentary party’s understanding of the membership that they thought this would be just a wizard wheeze, rather than something that members hungered for. Labour handed membership data to the four candidates shortly after the ballot paper was finalised, and only then did they all really start to understand the character of the people they were trying to woo.
Leading Blairites accept they haven’t been as organised as the left of the party. A number of new left-wing Labour MPs have a paid Unite organiser co-ordinating their activities, and the unions are well-financed and savvy. The centrist Progress faction simply hasn’t caught up.
Indeed, the modernisers seem rather retro, stuck in a late 1990s groove. Kendall even managed to repeat almost verbatim Blair’s speech about the contest in an article for the Observer recently. More thoughtful Blairite MPs point out that even a playbook as successful as the 1997 one does need updating. It should, for instance, recognise the rise of nationalism as being as important a sentiment as a yearning for a strong leader and trustworthy economic policies. Blair’s successors need to show they have added their own wisdom to his. At the very least, they need to find a new name: the media will always tag them with the toxic “Blairite” until they offer a new identity.
By arrangement with the Spectator
