Having suffered further setbacks in the most recent local council elections, can Labour adapt and mould a future for British socialism? Or will a pillar of our democratic party system for nearly a century fall by the wayside and be resigned to the history books?
For Labour supporters across the country, headlines on Friday morning made for grim reading. As results from the previous days elections came through, Keir Starmer's worst fears will have been realised - that he may be just as unelectable as his predecessor.
Since the disastrous 2005-10 era of Blair and Brown, Labour has been preoccupied with figuring out which direction to turn, lurching about the political spectrum more than your racist granddad after a few pints down the pub.
Following Blair's slick and later nauseating charm, and Brown's stony-faced monotone, we first got the wrong Miliband, then an aging socialist well past his sell by date in Jeremy Corbyn, and now Keir Starmer, who seems the political equivalent of Ed Sheeran's music - about as exciting as a digestive biscuit.
So where did it all go wrong? After the series of disasters in the latter half of the noughties, namely the Iraq War revelation (that it was about oil after all), and the 2008 financial crisis, the Tories have gone from strength to strength and consolidated power. Currently polling about 7% ahead of Labour, Cameron, May, and now Boris have managed to fend off all attempts to remove them, and despite a few close calls (one of which was from Nigel Farage), and seemingly countless scandals, they have survived in office - and are now beginning to thrive.
In truth, Labour has been a pretty terrible opposition for the past 11 years. The number of opportunities missed to put the Tory leadership to the electoral sword is quite incredible - they couldn't do it in 2015 after five years of crippling austerity (the Lib Dems picked up the blame for that), nor in 2017 when May was at her weakest and half her own party wanted her gone, or in 2019 amidst all the floundering about on Brexit and an attack from the far-right.
This is because Labour has been in even more turmoil than the Tories - divided between the established, traditional socialists like Corbyn, and New Left Blairites like Starmer, marred by accusations of anti-Semitism, and deemed economically untrustworthy. The leftward swing under Corbyn, for example, led six centrist Labour MPs to break away and form a rehash of the SDLP, which flopped in under a year.
The party now seems to be moving back to the centre, with Starmer clearing out the dusty shadow cabinet of anyone too close to previous leaders, namely Annaliese Dodds, Angela Rayner, and Nick Brown. The major promotion, that of Rachel Reeves to Shadow Chancellor, is hardly an inspiring one - she was dubbed 'snoring boring' by one Newsnight editor - though her predecessor Annaliese Dodds was never a match for Rishi Sunak either in terms of the all-important optics.
What Labour desperately needs is a proper leader, someone to unite the party, energise voters, and ultimately win a bloody election. Boris has done all these things - he may be ridiculous, and outlandish, and almost definitely corrupt, but he is popular. That is what Labour have been missing ever since Blair. Poor old Tony was never the best politician - indeed he made possibly the worst decision since Thatcher decided to deregulate the financial markets (which, ironically Labour ended up suffering for when Brown took the blame for the financial crisis which was worsened by that very policy) in joining Bush in Iraq - but he could talk for England, and people wanted to listen to him.
Nobody, conversely, wanted to listen to Ed Miliband, a sandwich-eating buffoon (or so the media portrayed him), or even Corbyn, albeit much better, still wore his glasses at the exact angle which made it look most like he'd just had a stroke. But I can tell you for sure no one is listening to 'Captain Hindsight' Keir Starmer. There's nothing seriously wrong with him, he's just...unremarkable. Bland. It leaves the door open for a more media-savvy and charismatic opposing leader to tear him apart at the polls, which Boris has thus far. It's harsh, and it's terrible, but this is how electoral politics works. Now more than ever, with Twitter braced to jump on any unfortunate event or slight misjudgement, and with the other side preaching like a Televangelist who's just been visited by God, politics is the ultimate personality test. Fail it, and you've lost before you even start.
So what needs to change? They can start by giving Keir the sack - his approval rating is 26% and he hasn't even done anything wrong yet, compared to Boris' 46%, despite multiple allegations of corruption, rampant cronyism, and a pandemic handled about as well as the Trial of the Chicago 7.
The PR department can therefore follow him - whoever has been in charge of managing the media over at Labour HQ needs to be shown the door ASAP. I understand the fuck-ups with Corbyn - anti-Semitism is pretty much impossible to spin, especially when the party itself is clearly not doing enough - but you cannot let a leader get taken apart as easily as Keir Starmer has been.
In terms of Starmer's replacement, in my opinion, they need to be three things: not white and male, under the age of 50, and have charisma in buckets.
The first is an issue not yet touched on - Labour, despite supposedly being a progressive party, are still yet to have had a leader who is not male and white. Even the Tories have had Thatcher and May, and while neither are exactly feminist icons, it is absolutely criminal that there has not been a female Labour leader. What is even more shameful is that chances are, Rishi Sunak will be the first PM of colour in this country, and that Priti Patel will likely be his Foreign Secretary. If Labour can't beat that standard of ethnic diversity, they may as well give up now.
The second is a given - old leaders are always perceived as boring, out of touch, and lacking the vigour to lead a country as great as ours apparently is. John Major is the classic example, and Corbyn suffered a little from this effect too, though his relative liveliness somewhat counteracted it. Either way, Labour needs some youthful energy to reignite the flame.
The last is the absolute most important. Nowadays, people have to be able to watch 10 second clips of a leader and think they seem trustworthy and intelligent, but at the same time human, interesting, and not a robot like all the others. That's what people love about Boris - he's a character, not just another grey, monotonous bureaucrat who reads the FT and sleeps in a suit every night.
Policy comes second, but it is still important to the party image; Labour need a vision, a sense of how it wants Britain to be in 5 or 10 years time. I would always make the key talking points education (a Blair favourite, of course), the environment, and inequality (as well as picking apart the Tories, of course). They need to be laser-focused on exposing every potentially damaging action Conservative ministers have taken in the last 12-18 months. I'm talking corruption, cronyism, taking too many holidays, anything which says abuse of power. Frankly, they shouldn't have any shortage of material in that department. I'll be going into greater depth about Labour party policy in the coming days.
Who, then, could be a contender to lead Labour forward into a better future for the party? A quick look through the current Shadow Cabinet produces little to write home about - Angela Rayner seems out of the question given she just got the sack as party chair; Rachel Reeves and Annaliese Dodds are out - not exciting enough; Emily Thornberry is just too unlikable; Jess Philips too controversial; and everyone else is either too junior, too old, or too male. Except perhaps one - Lisa Nandy.
She ran against Keir Starmer in the last leadership contest, coming third, and is regularly rolled out in front of the media on Question Time and elsewhere, generally holding her own. She's young enough (41), has a fair amount of experience in the cabinet and currently sits as the Shadow Foreign Secretary - one of the four great offices of state. Originally from Manchester, her parliamentary seat is in Wigan, definitely making her more appealing to northern voters, many of whom have been lost in recent years to the populism of the right. While she may not be the kind of staunch leftist that Corbyn was, she is not too close to the centre ground to be confused with the likes of Blair, which could draw a broader base of support - especially young people and women, given the right policy set.
Though she may not be perfect, in my opinion Lisa Nandy is the Labour Party's best hope of winning back power in 2024, or hopefully earlier if some of the considerable volume of shit being thrown at this government actually sticks. If not, we will have to suffer five more years of Conservative government, which would total 19 years by its end. That's longer than Thatcher and Major combined. God help us if we have to suffer that.
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