Sensible discussion on Labour Leadership hopefuls

lemongrove In my view, there are a number of reasons why Labour lost this election:

Corbyn put forward a radical set of policies from the outset, and from thereon he was characterised by almost every part of the mainstream media as unpatriotic, stupid, dishonest, hypocritical, anti-Semitic, and anti-business. Every day brought new accusations and a deluge of ridicule.

The Labour Party, to a greater extent than other parties, was split between remainers and leavers and Corbyn's honesty in refusing to align himself with either side, instead saying he would try and get a better deal which would be put to a further referendum for the people to make their decision without his championing of either faction, pleased neither leavers nor remainers.

Many people profess to be uninterested in politics and, in fact, characterise most politicians as untrustworthy, greedy and useless. They like simple answers, and welcome supposed simple solutions. Johnson's sloganizing (and refusing in many instances to face robust questioning - the media, in the main, facilitating that strategy) appealed to those who just wanted Brexit over and done with.

Historically, the mainstream media has always attacked Labour, whomever its leader may be. They did it with Foot, Kinnock, Brown and Miliband - but Corbyn in particular espouses policies which the rich and powerful would not stand for - eg stronger regulations relating to finance, employment rights, health and safety, environmental protection, etc, etc. Blair was the only Labour leader to be given an easy ride. His willingness to cosy up to Murdoch paid real dividends to his leadership and the party in the short term. But reducing regulation of the finance sector and gambling industry, and the invasion of Iraq resulted in long term and serious damage - international turmoil and the economic crash of 2008 - the fall out from which continues to this day.

janipat in regard to your post @18:59 today, with the Tory party holding an eighty seat majority in the House of Commons there is no possibility whatsoever of Britains first past the post electoral system being replaced within the lifetime of this government, probably five years.

Therefore there is no point in even considering any possibility of electoral reform in the United Kingdom as it is not going happen.

However, with Brexit now most definitely about to take place, I have no doubts that far more pressing problems than electoral reform will most definitely occupy political minds over the next decade.

Keir Starmer has announced he will stand to be the next leader.

Interesting Iam

As this point in time my first choice vote will be placed in the box adjacent to Rebecca Long-Bailey. She has placed an enormous amount of effort into building a firm relationship with grassroots activists in the Labour movement and that should be rewarded.

However, Lisa Nandy is proving to be a strong contender in my view, as she was one of the few on the 13th of December to openly and forthrightly address the media outlining precisely why she felt Labour had lost the election. That Lisa Nandy did while many who had contributed to the defeat in undermining Jeremy Corbyn stayed within their residences with their phones switched off.

Lisa Nandy when announcing her intention to stand for the Labour leadership today also acknowledged the problems and deep division there are within the Parliamentary Labour Party MPs.

The above I feel will.draw much respect in the broader Labour movement, especially among the trade union activists. If Nandy expands on that to advise on how she would resolve those problems as Labour leader she could well be "on a winner", and in that could be the persons that keeps the broader movement and the Parliamentary Labour Party as one.

An enormous task, but as Nandy develops her leadership campaign perhaps we shall see how she plans to carry that out.

Eloethan I don't dispute what you've written, but that's where we are. The Labour Party is always going to be up against the media and needs to outwit them.

There's no denying that some big economic changes are needed, but they're going to be almost impossible to sell to the voters, mainly because they don't understand them. It's been engrained forever that a national budget is like a household budget.

I honestly think many Labour supporters still fail to understand the cultural divides which the country faces. Some of these are about immigration, freedom of movement and communities and others are about minority rights and identity politics. There are many others. They're not hard to spot even on GN.

Farage and his ilk did a lot to prepare people for thinking about cultural, "metropolitan" elites and the mentality which dismisses MPs, judges, civil servants and "experts" as worthless. He actually did a lot of the groundwork for the current Conservatives. He's a weasel and will undoubtedly scuttle off to the US, but he's done his damage.

Having said that, Labour needs a coherent, positive, aspirational alternative and it's nowhere near having anything like that. It needs to address the natural "conservatism" and patriotism of many working class voters and give them back some pride in their communities and their country, which Johnson's rhetoric is doing.

More than anything, it needs to be voted into power, so that it can achieve the transformational economic changes the country needs.

I agree with Your paragraph Grandad1943 about Lisa Nandy. I watched that interview that night as the early results came in, and heard her acknowledge that the Labour Party had let its own people down, when bigger fish remained silent.

She seems an open and honest able young woman and I would willingly have voted for her and it’s people like me who are centre right that will be swayed to vote Labour again if she wins the race.

So, will it be Starmer or Long Bailey ?

I think it will be long bailey, I think the discontent with momentum has not yet reached the level where the balance would be tipped. It's interesting to watch what is happening with the lib dems at the moment, internally there appears to be people willing to voice concern about their election campaign and general direction and it feels as if those voices are growing stronger.

The more I read and think about it, the more I really don't see a future for the Labour Party in its current form unless:

a) somebody truly charismatic and innovative, who can forge some new narrative entirely, is found

or

b) the Conservatives do something truly outrageous.

Brexit was (and is) very visible and presented the Labour Party with a "no win" situation, but it's only a symptom of what's being going on in the Labour Party for decades.

The Labour Party has always been quite a broad "church" and has been a place for people who object to conservatism. On the one hand, there are social liberals, mainly in London and the big cities. They tend to be younger, maybe students, and concerned about freedom of movement and identity politics. There are also "traditional" Labour Party voters, who are more socially conservative and have bought into the idea that freedom of movement has increased immigration, which has but downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on public services.

The unions have a tradition of being protectionist - understandably. Its their leaders' role to protect jobs and to preserve what they have.

There's a very obvious clash point. It's impossible to have liberalism and freedom of movement, unless traditionalists are compensated with higher investment to preserve their communities with better infrastructure and public services and, crucially, more and better jobs. If the better jobs are to be accessible to those who already live in a place, there needs to be better education. Older workers, whose industries have already gone, have probably missed the boat on better education.

There's an almost irreconcilable culture clash within Labour. The Conservatives are now faced with the challenge of keeping their new voters on board, but I think Johnson is aware of that challenge and I think he'll probably throw out some "sweeties" to his new voters. The new Conservative voters are also bound to the old ones by a strong sense of patriotism, which I think we'll also see promoted.

The situation for Labour could possibly be overcome by a strong thinker, prepared to put ideological thinking on the
back burner. I'm not convinced that any of the leadership contenders fit that bill. Labour needs to come up with a very strong positive message, which will win votes, which means that it needs a new strategic team and it needs to stop slinging mud internally.

Jess Phillips seems to have leaned nothing. She won her seat but with massively rejused majority. I was stunned to hear her on Marr saying even though she sits in a leaver seat in Birmingham she still believes we would be better off remaining in EU and if she is made leader would campagne to re-join EU. Basically sticking two fingers up to her own constituents and insisting she knows best and would bulldoze past her constituents and majority of UK who voted. I was very dispointed to hear her say this as it shows she is not even in tune with her own constituents, so would be unlikly to be in position to bring country together.

This, from Janet Daly in the Sunday Telegraph puts it better than I can:

“Labour is, in fact, in a remarkably similar state to the Democrats in the United States: too many candidates for leader and none of them with any clear idea of who their party is supposed to represent any longer.

In the last general election, the Corbyn leadership made almost exactly the same mistake as Hillary Clinton had in her presidential race: it took its core voters for granted – because it had no idea what to say to them – and cultivated an ultra-metropolitan obsession with identity politics and bourgeois guilt. Result: the abandonment not just of whole swathes of the population who had once believed themselves to be represented by parties of the Left, but of a proper national argument about political solutions.”

newnanny I watched the interview too and it's not quite what Phillips said.

She has every right to think that the UK would be better off staying in the EU and to continue thinking that. That doesn't mean that she's going to campaign from now on to stop us leaving or to support rejoining from 1st February.

What she said was that if things are going well, she'd be happy to admit she was wrong, but if they're not going well, rejoining the EU would be an option which she would support.

As none of us has a crystal ball, we don't how the world will have moved on in a few years or whether the political situation will be different.

Janet Daly has a point. That's what I meant in my previous post about Labour being in an almost impossible situation.

Yes I agreed with your post growstuff then read JD and it resonated. As I say, she’s more articulate than me!

… and me!

Not sure of any of Labour leadship hopefuls
Ian Lavery is forthright and woukd be a good match for Johnson. PQ

Any of the Labour woman as deputy leader.
Any who backed Jeremy Corbyn

I don't like Jess Philips MSM and the Spectator are pushing for her trying to pick our leader No Blairites not her never supported the twice elected leader said she woukd knife him in the front.

@chelleryn99
Lots of people are anxious about the union money story in relation to Ian Lavery. Just to say it's important to put the story in context and this article does. Please have a read.

twitter.com/chelleryn99/status/1213604550697013248?s=20

I watched Andrew Marr's interviews with Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips and was impressed by both. They both answered without prevarication or waffle.

I read above that Grandad at the moment is supporting R L-B but in a way I think that she is too much like Corbyn. Neither have much of a sense of humour and are both lacking in charisma.

I joined the LP after the first leadership vote because I thought that Corbyn was a breath of fresh air and seemed to speak the truth. I've watched some of his speeches on television and he did come alive (not in interviews though).
He was much maligned by the right wing press (and also often criticised by the Guardian and the Mirror) so much so that many people will never trust him.

Whilst I decry the choice of Johnson as PM, he does have some sort of charisma and he gives the impression of being enthusiastic and that has obviously appealed to many voters. Three middle aged men in the Midlands, living away from home and working on zero hours contracts told a tv reporter that they were going to vote for Johnson because he would make things better for them. And that is what the future LP leader will be up against.

growstuff ??

There are two things that should cause a little concern about KS:

1. He was a complete disaster when DPP. The reforms he introduced into the CPS were awful and have had to be unpicked since then. He nearly crippled both it and the criminal bar.

2. Whatever your view on Brexit, he has not exactly been a success in his role. If Brexit was the primary reason (or one of) for Labour's disastrous election result then he must bear responsibility for it as much as Corbyn.

As for Jess Phillips, the last time Labour members elected a leader (twice) she spent every day undermining him. Now she’s asking for them to vote for her? Can’t see that going well!

Where are you getting your information about Keir Starmer and the DPP from, Ug? I don't for one minute believe that they are the product of your extensive knowledge of the workings of the Criminal Justice system.

A link would be appreciated.

The NEC will meet today to decide the rules , as it is now far left will they make it more difficult for new members to vote .

Those named so far , no one gives me hope the party will
move from the far left.

Keir Starmer is still refusing to comment on his decision not to prosecute John Worboys for 75 further sex assaults.

It falls to Guido to point out how extraordinary it is that a man with such a dire record as Director of Public Prosecutions is talked about as one of Labour’s best talents.

The below could have ended his career several times over:

Decided not to prosecute John Worboys for 75 sex assaults

Yet spent four years failing to prosecute 23 Sun journalists

Insisted on prosecuting Paul Chambers for making a light-hearted joke on social media (the infamous Twitter joke trial)

Failed to build a case against Jimmy Savile and forced to apologise after being damned by report into failings

Repeatedly championed the innocence of convicted murder who later admitted that he was actually guilty

Failed to prosecute police officer who killed newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson

Ordered the CPS in Wales to drop the prosecution of a primary school teacher who had been accused of sexting a 16 year old boy, who went on to commit suicide

Damning report into Starmer’s tenure at the CPS showed it was performing well below the necessary standard, with the report attributing part of the blame to a ‘overload of initiatives’ from the CPS’ national leadership

Survey of CPS staff found that just 12% of them thought that the organisation was being well managed under Starmer’s leadership

Accused of reopening a spurious sex abuse case involving a friend of Tom Watson – the accused was cleared in an hour

Chose not to prosecute two doctors accused of carrying out abortions on grounds of gender

I know you don’t like GF MaizieD but these damning indictments do seem to stack up!

Care to refute any?

Paul Delaire Staines is a British right wing political blogger who publishes the Guido Fawkes website, which was described by The Daily Telegraph as "one of Britain's leading political blogsites"

The Sun on Sunday newspaper published a weekly Guido Fawkes column from 2013 to 2016. Wikipedia