The hard left continuity Corbyn candidate in the Labour Party leadership election, Rebecca Long-Bailey, makes a telling intervention: ‘You can’t just put on a nice suit, be suave and think that’s a route into Downing Street’. And she warns Labour not to pick an ‘establishment’ leader like Keir Starmer. The absolute state of it. So, let’s look into it a bit further.
Starmer an ‘establishment’ leader? How so? He passed his 11-plus and went to a voluntary aided Grammar school. He then went to university, later become a highly successful lawyer and ultimately Director of the CPS and Director of Public Prosecutions. Long-Bailey concludes that having worked hard, having a brain the size of Canada and been hugely successful, places Starmer in the establishment. And she says it as if it’s a bad thing to succeed. What a signal that sends out to young people making their way through life. Do well in life and you can’t be in Labour. Honestly.
Starmer was the son of a toolmaker and a nurse. Presumably, he wasn’t a member of the establishment back then, until he succeeded in his chosen career. I am guessing that Long-Bailey does not regard wealthy privately schooled comrades such as Seumas Milne, Andrew Drummond-Murray and Momentum owner Jon Lansman as part of the establishment she dislikes. They’re better kinds of multimillionaires, presumably?
Long-Bailey tries to make it personal by saying, ‘You can’t just put on a nice suit, be suave and think that’s a route into Downing Street’. Well, no, not in itself, you can’t. But Labour has already tried the unkempt scruffy old man with a white beard and that didn’t do too well, did it? This is the level of debate in the people’s party today.
I am still to make up my mind between the excellent Lisa Nandy and Keir Starmer to begin the fightback after the disastrous Corbyn years. I am leaning towards Starmer but there is still time for Nandy to take the lead. If one of them wins, and Labour also elects a sensible deputy leader, which rules out Dawn Butler, Richard Burgon and increasingly Angela Rayner, Labour may have a chance of reducing the Tory majority at the next election. But only if it steps away from four and a half years of Corbynism. A complete break or it’s not worth carrying on.
