9 Questions to Ask of the Labour Leadership Election Candidates
With the Labour Party leadership election underway, here are 9 questions every Labour member should be asking when they think about which candidate to vote for.
Perhaps too often, people in the party automatically support the candidate that they think best represents their faction or is just the least bad option. I think members need to start voicing what we expect, demand even, from the new leader. Labour is Europe’s biggest political party and we should be a people-led movement. No candidate should assume support from any section of the party. I think the following questions are essential in helping us think about what we need in a new party leader.
- Can they win a general election?
There’s a tendency in politics to label some people as electable and others unelectable. The self-appointed ‘Electability-Overseers’ in the press point out the apparently obvious as to who is which. In reality, this is an attempt by some (usually on the right) to circumvent any actual debate. The fact is that social democratic parties across Europe, led by centrists, have lost elections very badly — including in Britain as well — Labour got 29% of the vote in 2010.
The rest of these questions here are an attempt to figure out, what does it mean to be electable?
