Less reassuring, however, is the appointment of Matt Pound – former national organiser for the right-wing Labour First – to Starmer’s campaign team, a move hardly likely to dissuade the PLP right that he could be dragged further in its direction once installed as leader. By recruiting former Corbyn advisers including Simon Fletcher and Kat Fletcher, Starmer is doubtless aiming to reassure the left about his intentions. It would suspect, fairly or not, that Starmer is less committed to the left-wing policies which some rightist Labour MPs wasted no time in attacking as the election results were pouring in last month. The most right-wing rump of the PLP would be encouraged by a Starmer win. The bind Labour finds itself in is that anyone advocating such a programme can expect to be vilified in Britain’s overwhelmingly reactionary press. The popularity of existing party policy, as the recent polling already noted has indicated, is not the issue. The unfortunate reality is that a substantial proportion of the PLP is likely to be either outright hostile to any left-wing platform, or lacks the will and determination to reliably defend it in opposition and carry it out in government, in the face of the relentless press attacks these policies would inevitably attract. Contrary to common misperceptions, there are very few Labour members who relish internal factional warfare purely for its own sake, and Labour members could be forgiven for being tempted by someone who comes along apparently offering them most of the policies they want, and the chance to implement them, without even more years of upheaval and aggravation. The implication is that Starmer would be able to take the current Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) with him, reconciling them to these left-wing policies by providing them with a more conventionally acceptable and presentable leader – a sharp-suited former Director of Public Prosecutions at that – than Corbyn.Ĭlearly, there are plenty of people in the Labour Party who might well be receptive to such a pitch. What is the core of Keir Starmer’s pitch for the Labour leadership? It is, essentially, that as leader he would uphold the bulk of present Labour policy, using something like the 2017 manifesto as his baseline. But there are major problems with it, not the least of these being that a sizeable minority of Labour MPs have no intention of making the kind of compromises Starmer appears to be asking of them. This, to be sure, is an appeal which might hold some allure to Labour members – among them many erstwhile supporters of Jeremy Corbyn – especially those still disorientated and demoralised after last month’s election. Hence the different tack taken by Keir Starmer in his leadership campaign, positioning himself as the unity candidate working to bring Labour’s draining four-year civil war to an end and take the party back into government on a left-wing programme at the next time of asking, presumably in 2024. Regardless of this, support for existing Labour policy remains strong among the party’s rank and file, shortly to be voting for a new leader, and the prospect of any drastic retrenchment from the current manifesto is unlikely to be favourably received. Some aspiring leadership candidates have toured the TV studios volunteering to abandon high-profile policies from the 2019 manifesto – not because they’re unpopular, which they aren’t, but implicitly bargaining with the media and offering them the chance to set the boundaries of Labour policy in return for more favourable (or just less vituperative) coverage. Now the Labour Party is facing up to the question of how to respond. These heightened expectations make the scale of the defeat that materialised, and another five years of Tory government, all the more bruising. Since the election of 2017 all the talk had been about what a socialist-led Labour government would do in office, and although a Commons majority always looked unlikely, many Labour members will have at least fancied their party’s chances of forcing a hung Parliament. It’s fair to say that most probably weren’t expecting to be beaten as badly as we were. December’s general election was undeniably as a hammer blow to Labour activists.
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