Labour Leadership Contest - I Don't Really Mind Who Wins

I'm not a Labour Party member so I don't get to vote for the new leader.  I'm not especially fussed about the result.  I quite like nearly all the candidates.  The only exception is Richard Burgon who I think comes across as narrow minded and way way too partisan.  I really like Emily Thornbury who has a nicely sassy attitude.  But I think all the other non-Burgon hopefuls are pretty good.


There was a time when I'd have been inclined to discount the left candidates because I thought that they would repel the voters.  The result of 2017 has discredited that theory.  But I'm still of the opinion that a broad range of views is good for a political party and above all I'd like to see the brothers and sisters behaving a bit more fraternally.  I wouldn't have picked Corbyn as a leader myself, but I thought it was the height of folly to actively undermine him.  He'd won convincingly and it would have been much better to have given him full support.

I thought that at the time that MPs were doing their best to force him out of the job, but if anything I underestimated how damaging it was.  Where we find ourselves now is that it turns out that a left wing programme is not only nowhere near as unpopular as previously supposed.  But it also isn't enough to win.  So it's pretty clear that the Labour Party needs to forge a new set of policies that can win over more people.  Blair's centrist approach was fine at the time but it isn't 1997 any more.  My feeling is that it is time to drop the geometry.  Left and right don't really matter as much as coming up with a plan that people like.   This is likely to be a synthesis of left and centre.  It doesn't matter much where the new leader starts from because if they are going to succeed they are going to have to move to a new position.

I actually have quite a good feeling about the Labour Party right now.   I think the combination of nearly winning followed by a good kicking is a good experience.  They obviously have it in them to pull off a handsome victory and more importantly to make a good job of running the country.  So long as they work together I can imagine them coming up with something interesting and worth a hopeful vote.