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?
I can’t remember who said this, but they argued that the British people now expect their Prime Minister to look like a Tory, even if they aren’t one. Simply being posh, southern and, preferably, male apparently makes someone more ‘electable’. That should make us all very uncomfortable.
2. Can they unite the Labour party?
If anyone can? People look book at Blair and Brown and say, look they united the party. And it’s true, while their opponents in the party deeply disagreed with them, they accepted their legitimacy — that they won the election. But some people never accepted Corbyn as the leader, despite him winning twice, and they would never accept any left-wing leader of the party. Some critics seriously say that because a left-wing leader won’t be accepted as legitimate — by them! — that they can’t be a successful leader. It’s hardly democratic to give a faction of the party a ‘legitimacy veto’.
