Now one candidate, in a shock move, has chosen to drop out of the race. Jess Phillips admitted she performed poorly in the Guardian the day after the first hustings — or public meeting for candidates to address voters — on Saturday.
Phillips exiting the race may help Keir Starmer, the current favorite: Starmer appeals far more to members on the right of the party than Rebecca Long-Bailey, who is viewed as the continuity Corbynite in the race. But Starmer still has a long battle. Traditionally, the favorite at the start of a leadership race doesn’t win. In 2010 and 2015, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn were not considered front-runners but went on to win over members of the party and affiliated union members.
In many ways, Starmer has a tougher job than Long-Bailey to get elected. The former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, who received a knighthood from the queen for his work, has to appeal to the party’s right and simultaneously avoid alienating the left. He has focused on attacking inequality in areas such as street homelessness, food banks and National Health Service waiting times — all of which are noble aims but designed to appease the left of the party while returning to the more cautious and centrist era of pre-Corbyn leaders.
Phillips dropping out may give him a boost: Polling has put her in third place, and she has made a career of criticizing Corbyn and his allies. But Lisa Nandy, a candidate with a clear policy program that complains Labour has focused on cities when towns are where the party should be working to bring back voters, could also scoop up Phillips’s supporters.
For Long-Bailey, the battle is different. She was the architect of a radical policy to introduce more cooperative ownership and nationalization, promising green jobs in areas that have been deindustrialized and left with high unemployment. The left of the party, especially young members who joined after Corbyn was elected in 2015, are firmly behind her, with Momentum — the Corbynite campaigning group — endorsing her with a vote of 70 percent. Yet she also has to court the union vote, convincing them that she is the candidate who will ensure Labour sticks to its roots and fights for workers’ rights. Ed Miliband’s shock win, beating his brother David Miliband, the favorite, was down to the votes of union members.
The current focus for candidates is passing the next threshold: the very confusing process of securing certain nominations. Candidates need nominations from either 5 percent of constituency Labour parties (out of 33), or “at least 3 affiliates (at least 2 of which shall be trade union affiliates) comprising 5 per cent of fully paid up affiliated membership.” The 620,000-member-strong GMB union has just backed Nandy, who also received a nomination from the National Union of Mineworkers — a largely symbolic move, since it only has around 100 members. If a candidate manages to secure an extraordinarily high number of nominations from constituencies, they could feasibly knock out other candidates who haven’t managed to secure the backing of the biggest unions.
The voting process also makes the race unpredictable. Voters number their ballots, expressing first and second preferences and so on. Corbyn won in the first round, but Miliband won by beating his brother in the fourth round. Polling last week showed that currently, Long-Bailey could win in the first round, even though Starmer picked up many second and third preferences. Many people can vote, too: full members, supporters who pay £25 for the right to vote in the ballot but don’t fully join the party and members of affiliated unions who are not party members. The electorate is huge, and all candidates will be attempting to appeal to very disparate groups, hoping that even if they don’t fully win them over, they can at least be given a high preference.
That means the coming months will be entirely unpredictable. Candidates will unveil potential policies while trying to bring an extremely divided party together to back one person. If history has taught us the front-runner never wins, Labour will have its first non-acting female leader. Who wins will determine the future of the party: Long-Bailey will likely continue with the core tenets of Corbynism, but Starmer is more likely to steer Labour back toward a light form of Blairism.
This election is fundamentally a choice between a cautious retreat to centrism or the continuation of radical socialism. In the interim, the battle over Labour’s next direction will continue.
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