2020 Labour Leadership Election

[LabourJersey]

What does everyone think the final result is going to be?

I'm going to take a punt and go

Starmer: 53%

Long-Bailey: 29%

Nandy: 19%

You think Nandy will do that well? I was under the impression she's many (most?) people's 2nd choice but not necessary people's 1st choice.

It does seem like Starmer will win but I would've guess RLB would break 35%

[brucejoel99]

What does everyone think the final result is going to be?

Pretty similarly, actually (right on the nose for Starmer & Nandy), though my guess adds up to 100

Starmer: ~53%
Long-Bailey: ~28%
Nandy: ~19%

What does everyone think the final result is going to be?

I'm going to take a punt and go

Starmer: 53%

Long-Bailey: 29%

Nandy: 19%

You think Nandy will do that well? I was under the impression she's many (most?) people's 2nd choice but not necessary people's 1st choice.

It does seem like Starmer will win but I would've guess RLB would break 35%

Not Blair2015 but such a result would certainly be consistent with where the polls have shown the race approximately is.

[Blair]

I went back and forth with Nandy; I'm aware that I'm in a bubble of people who would vote for her (right wingers who think Keir is a traitor is for going near the Shadow Cabinet) but equally I think she had the most growth in the campaign & was likely to hoover up among people who were going to back Jess.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I went back and forth with Nandy; I'm aware that I'm in a bubble of people who would vote for her (right wingers who think Keir is a traitor is for going near the Shadow Cabinet) but equally I think she had the most growth in the campaign & was likely to hoover up among people who were going to back Jess.

There's also a certain percentage of members out in the provinces who, whether Left, Right or Centre, are understandably bitter about one or two things and wish to cast a vote based off that; you can see this even in the CLP nominations.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If anybody wants the 5,000 word version of this...

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/03/sensible-radical

It's a good article and is worth a read. However, I do have one major point of disagreement: the suggestion that Miliband, Corbyn and Starmer are all, at some fundamental level, quite alike ideologically. I would argue that they are all very different: Miliband is a post-Marxist social democrat, Corbyn is a perfect representative of the New Urban Left*, Starmer is what used to be known as a libertarian socialist; a tradition with deeper roots in the Labour Party than often assumed - there was more than a small element of it to Bevan, for instance.

_{*It was 'new' in the 1980s...}

[Lord Halifax]

Sure Corbyn was a problem for Labour overall but there was good to come out of his leadership, jettionsing it altogther is not a good move.

Oh, if Starmer wins then most of the past five years and all of the past three will go straight in the bin. His worldview and political priorities are just not compatible with the direction that Labour ended up taking under Corbyn, not in the slightest.

But it wouldn't be a simple matter of moving 'to the centre' or 'to the right' or whatever. Labour Party politics is much more complex than that. The thing about Starmer is that though his factional positioning is murky (he pretty clearly dislikes factionalism), his politics are anything but.

How would you characterize it? What's his priorities?

[Leading Political Consultant Ma Anand Sheela]

I went back and forth with Nandy; I'm aware that I'm in a bubble of people who would vote for her (right wingers who think Keir is a traitor is for going near the Shadow Cabinet) but equally I think she had the most growth in the campaign & was likely to hoover up among people who were going to back Jess.

She has a very odd coalition, doesn't she? Simultaneously appealing to people like you, the provincial members Al mentions, a few Very Real Concerns types, and the few Young Labour people I follow on Twitter who argue endlessly about the meaning of the term 'soft left'.

Personally, I could never get past her tolerance of the tedious grifter Ian Warren.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

How would you characterize it? What's his priorities?

At a pretty fundamental level Starmer does not trust large bureaucracies (whether State institutions or private corporations) to look out for the interests of ordinary people and marginalised groups, and his politics are largely concerned with regulating and reforming the behaviour of the former in order to protect the latter. This is why he took the DPP post, for instance. He isn't interested in power in an abstract sense, but in a concrete one; maybe that's why he has no time for factionalism.

[CumbrianLefty]

Sure. In that case I did vote for Corbyn and then became a convert to the opposition. 😉

People on here who know me from "another place" will confirm the correctness of that statement.

I would appreciate such claims being taken in good faith as a general rule, thanks

[Blair]

I went back and forth with Nandy; I'm aware that I'm in a bubble of people who would vote for her (right wingers who think Keir is a traitor is for going near the Shadow Cabinet) but equally I think she had the most growth in the campaign & was likely to hoover up among people who were going to back Jess.

She has a very odd coalition, doesn't she? Simultaneously appealing to people like you, the provincial members Al mentions, a few Very Real Concerns types, and the few Young Labour people I follow on Twitter who argue endlessly about the meaning of the term 'soft left'.

Personally, I could never get past her tolerance of the tedious grifter Ian Warren.

Oh I can't stand her personally; to the give the essay no-one asked for I think she showed a complete lack of leadership over Brexit. I spent most of 2019 screaming whenever Caroline Flint came on TV but at least she had a credible & logical position; she supported remain but her constituents wanted Brexit & the only deal going was the one that was put before MPs. You either voted for the Deal or you worked to get to a route which lead to a second referendum.

Nandy, Snell & co did this stupid charade of saying 'we want a deal... but not that deal...here's my superficial amendment to that deal... oh wait I can't possibility back this deal... but we can't block Brexit.'

There were at least 20+ Tory MPs who showed more political courage than Nandy did over Brexit; and this isn't a case of me being an unrepentant remainer- I just think it showed a great deal about how her leadership would be.

To take another example: immigration. She keeps rightly saying that people in her seat of Wigan dislike freedom of movement and says the Labour Party should 'listen to their concerns'... but then proceeds to offer absolutely no solution to the issue of immigration other than to pivot it to buses. It's the classic 'ah I see you hate immigrants, well really you hate how bad investment is in transport system'

No, frankly a large chunk of the british public have & always will hate immigration; whether it was Afro-Caribbean Immigration in the 1950s, the Kenyan Asians in the 1960s, the Sub-Continent countries in the 70s and so on and so forth.

I might be on the right of the Party but I've always been pretty militant in terms of being pro-European and pro-migrant.

The feeling I get is is that if Nandy was the MP for Hammersmith (where she was a councillor) she'd have a completely different public opinion on these two issues; where as for all their faults both Keir & even Jeremy would have had the same politics if they were both MPs in the Midlands or the North-East.

[Blair]

How would you characterize it? What's his priorities?

At a pretty fundamental level Starmer does not trust large bureaucracies (whether State institutions or private corporations) to look out for the interests of ordinary people and marginalised groups, and his politics are largely concerned with regulating and reforming the behaviour of the former in order to protect the latter. This is why he took the DPP post, for instance. He isn't interested in power in an abstract sense, but in a concrete one; maybe that's why he has no time for factionalism.

And to add onto this argument a major reason why Starmer's leadership will be interesting is that he's the first leader of the opposition who hasn't had the bulk of their career in the party; in fact it's remarkably rare looking back at post-war politics.

It was always clear from his work as Shadow Brexit Secretary & his obvious effort to have to mention his backstory (he first mentioned it heavily at Party Conference in 2019) that he isn't a traditional politician- of course there's an alternative universe where the young barrister Steer Karmer became a junior minister in the New Labour years.

On that point the one thing that I still find hilarious is that the right of the party organised around an ex-Trot human rights lawyer (albeit with links to the party) whilst the left organised around an ex-corporate solicitor who doesn't appear to have done anything of note before 2015.

[CumbrianLefty]

To be strictly accurate, *some* of the right of the party (where else is Nandy's support mostly coming from?) And of course, not *all* the left is supporting RLB either.

[Blair]

To be strictly accurate, *some* of the right of the party (where else is Nandy's support mostly coming from?) And of course, not *all* the left is supporting RLB either.

Ah well it's the part of the right which knows how to win; rather than the holds outs. Of course as I've said other times the right of the party has at least what 4 factions?

I'd say 95% of the organised left is supporting Long-Bailey; all of the momentum/UNITE backed intake from 2019 are backing her along with the people who've profited from Corbyn in the PLP.

The only major defections have been from Laura Parker, who irrc was national coordinator for momentum and from the TSSA union- both of these are largely because of Keirs support for remain.

And since I'm using this thread to post my extended rambles or info about the leadership race- another good NS piece about Starmer & his ideology (as people were asking)

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/03/keir-starmer-labour-leader-unity-change-policy

The QC Gavin Millar described his friend to me as an old-school European red-green. When I put that description to Starmer ahead of a campaign event in York earlier this month, he did not dissent. His ambition then was to see the Labour Party broaden its base to represent the liberation movements that had emerged as political constituencies in their own right over the course of the 1970s and 1980s: feminism; environmentalism; LGBT rights. Those politics, he says, have not changed.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Nandy's support doesn't really track conventional factional alignments at all, which is fascinating because it isn't random either. You have people backing her (whether officially or 'will clearly vote for...') who you'd never have thought would end up on the same side in an internal election, but there's a logic to it.

[Intell]

If I were in the UK, I'd be a Burnham/Corbyn/Nandy voter- don't know how much of those exist.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If I were in the UK, I'd be a Burnham/Corbyn/Nandy voter- don't know how much of those exist.

Quite a few.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Anyway, just for completeness, a few comments on the underlying ideologies of the other candidates. Long Bailey is the opposite of Starmer: one can see immediately where she stands in factional terms, but exactly what she stands for or why she stands for it is entirely unknown. It is possible that she doesn't really know herself; this is the case for a pretty high number of politicians and explains some of the odder career trajectories around. Nandy, though, is easier to place: her politics are representative of what might best be phrased as Labour's historical Left; Bevan, Crossman, Castle and so on. We routinely use the phrase 'Old Right' to describe a particular strain of Labour politics, probably we should considering a similar phrase for Labour figures of her type - certainly makes more sense than 'Soft Left' which is an increasingly meaningless term that obscures more than it clarifies.

[CumbrianLefty]

Nandy's support doesn't really track conventional factional alignments at all, which is fascinating because it isn't random either. You have people backing her (whether officially or 'will clearly vote for...') who you'd never have thought would end up on the same side in an internal election, but there's a logic to it.

Though one notable thing is that nearly all the early Phillipsistas seem to have migrated to her.

[Blair]

Anyway, just for completeness, a few comments on the underlying ideologies of the other candidates. Long Bailey is the opposite of Starmer: one can see immediately where she stands in factional terms, but exactly what she stands for or why she stands for it is entirely unknown. It is possible that she doesn't really know herself; this is the case for a pretty high number of politicians and explains some of the odder career trajectories around. Nandy, though, is easier to place: her politics are representative of what might best be phrased as Labour's historical Left; Bevan, Crossman, Castle and so on. We routinely use the phrase 'Old Right' to describe a particular strain of Labour politics, probably we should considering a similar phrase for Labour figures of her type - certainly makes more sense than 'Soft Left' which is an increasingly meaningless term that obscures more than it clarifies.

Yes; I've always felt it was a useless term because it's such a broad catch all- it seems to describe what a large chunk of where the Labour membership seems to be (more public spending & less overseas intervention as the two main ones) rather than any formal ideological grouping in the PLP or the party.

The wikipedia page has Rosie Duffield, Emma Hardy, Owen Smith, Sadiq Khan, Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and Emily Thornberry on it- which seems to show how much of a useless term it is!

[Hnv1]

If I were in the UK, I'd be a Burnham/Corbyn/Nandy voter- don't know how much of those exist.

Northern moderate trade unionist.

[CumbrianLefty]

Voting closes in less than an hour, result announced on Saturday.

[brucejoel99]

https://twitter.com/George_Osborne/status/1245359671952781313

[Intell]

https://twitter.com/George_Osborne/status/1245359671952781313

This seems like the kind of endorsement that will shift my 2nd round preference from Starmer to Long-Bailey.

[brucejoel99]

https://twitter.com/George_Osborne/status/1245359671952781313

This seems like the kind of endorsement that will shift my 2nd round preference from Starmer to Long-Bailey.

He makes a decent point, in fairness:

Democracy only functions properly if the country is offered a credible alternative, and when it comes to fighting this disease, strong democracies are better equipped than one-party states and dictatorships

And considering it's well-known that Osborne hates BoJo, it's not like this is him playing some sort of 5D chess to help the Tories or anything. I think he'd be delighted to see Labour actually challenging BoJo, & eventually being able to force him out of power.

[Intell]

https://twitter.com/George_Osborne/status/1245359671952781313

This seems like the kind of endorsement that will shift my 2nd round preference from Starmer to Long-Bailey.

He makes a decent point, in fairness:

Democracy only functions properly if the country is offered a credible alternative, and when it comes to fighting this disease, strong democracies are better equipped than one-party states and dictatorships

And considering it's well-known that Osborne hates BoJo, it's not like this is him playing some sort of 5D chess to help the Tories or anything. I think he'd be delighted to see Labour actually challenging BoJo, & eventually being able to force him out of power.

I don't support archetypes of austerity whose policies kill people. I don't like BoJo but imo BoJo>>>>Osborne and all of these moderate kill the poor tories.