A Re-Cap of the Labour Leadership Contest So Far

Amazingly, the Labour leadership contest is still going; farting along like a bout of food poisoning - it is unpleasant, it is pretty boring, and you just want it to be over with. But for those of who haven't been paying attention or for those of you who have been paying too much attention, I though I'd give you the summary of how each of the candidates is doing from the perspective of a cynical armchair analyst:

Andy Burnham: It is a complete mystery to me why Andy Burnham bothered with his run for the leadership. He's got precisely nowhere, and despite his claim to be the working class candidate (yes, you're from Liverpool, Andy, but you're hardly Nye fucking Bevan, are you?). In fact he's rendered himself largely indistinguishable from the already beyond bland Miliband sprogs. Well done, Andy, you've become the least charismatic Miliband despite not actually being part of that family.

Diane Abbott: Now, forgive me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Diane Abbott meant to be in the Labour leadership contest in order to make the left-wing case? Because if she was, then I really do wonder what has gone wrong. Because after the brief glare of publicity after Miliband Major patronisingly gave her a way into the contest, we've hear nothing from Abbott. Nada. Zip. Silence has fallen. Which leads me to believe that the left-wing of the Labour party have nothing to say. Which may well be the case, but I don't think John McDonnell would agree with that one. And he must be fucking fuming, since he stood aside to let Abbott into the race.

Ed Balls: Listening to the rhetoric of the Balls camp is wonderful; they all talk about how he's the one that the Tories are afraid of. Whereas the exact opposite is actually true. Balls is the one the Tories want. He's an utterly repugnant individual who would be the one most likely to lead Labour to electoral oblivion - no mean feat, given he is running against Diane "racist hypocrite" Abbott. Balls may have been the one who has been taking the fight to the Tories, but that has achieved remarkably little and revealed only that Balls is a nasty little attack dog; incapable of espousing a positive view of the future and only capable of throwing poisonous barbs at the other parties. Whatever Balls may be, he most certainly isn't an electable leader. And it looks like he'll prove this by not being elected leader.

The Miliband Brothers: I lump them together because they're hard to tell apart. But I think I've found a way. David, with his faintly pained expression and little tuft of white hair, resembles a baby badger with constipation. Ed Miliband appears to have a head that looks like an overcooked baked potato with hair crudely stuck on it. This is the best way to tell them apart, IMHO, since there's been nothing in the campaign so far to aid with it - despite the fact that Badger Boy and Potato (now, there's a pitch for a TV show for kids, right there) have been running against each other. This week, there seems to have been greater attempt to put clear divides between them, and it appears the Badger Boy is the continuity candidate who doesn't mind change while Potato is all about change but won't do away with continuity with the past. Clear? Thought not. Personally, I just wish they'd get the hell on with it and decide which Spawn of the Miliband they want as leader.

Of course, with a long campaign to choose a leader, you're bound to get some fatigue - each primary season in the US drags on, for example, even if it is actually quite exciting. However, this contest has not only never caught on fire, it has been almost completely devoid of incident, event and anything that might provoke something resembling interest for the casual observer. The most memorable thing about this contest is the McDonnell jibe about Thatcher - and that came from someone who didn't become a candidate before the contest even started. Despite having five candidates in this election, there's no-one with personality and no-one with ideas. It speaks volumes about the moral and intellectual redundancy within the Labour party that a Miliband will almost certainly be elected their leader - neither Badger Boy or Potato are leaders, but then again, Labour doesn't appear to have any leaders - or ideas - left in it now.

The Labour Party: Patronising Paternalism

The more I think about Diane Abbott's elevation to the status of Labour leadership candidate, the more it bothers me.

They'll be some who treat this as a triumphant breakthrough for women (despite the Tories having had a female Prime Minister decades before the Labour party allowed Abbott onto their ballot paper) and for ethnic minorities. We have a black female candidate for the Labour leadership. What a mighthy step forward.

Except, of course, it is not. Because Abbott's elevation to the status of real-life Labour leadership contender has next to nothing to do with her ethnicity, her gender, or her ability. The reason why she is being able to run for Labour leader is because an aging white man dropped out of the contest, and because a middle-aged, middle-class white male decided to nominate her.

And why did Miliband Major effectively let her into the race? Sure, to make the leadership contest look more diverse in part. But also because he - and the other candidates - just don't see her as a threat. In many ways, it is easier for Miliband Major - and the other three - to have Abbott in the race than it is to exclude her. For all their talk of having a wider debate, this looks like tokenism - they have a black, female candidate, so there can pay lip service to a very nebulous idea of inclusion as they canter towards crowning a middle class, middle of the road white male as Labour leader.

I have no doubt - not a shred of doubt - that the Labour party will promote Abbott's presence on the ballot paper as proof that they are progressive. That is, of course, utter shite. As this action shows, the reality is that they are the party of smug, patronising paternalism.

John McDonnell: Failure

I think we should all take a moment to consider John McDonnell, who has withdrawn from the Labour leadership race the battle to get onto the ballot for the Labour leadership election. In particular, I think we should consider just how shit he is.

He ran against Gordon Brown back in 2007. Actually, sorry, that's not true. He tried to run against Gordon Brown in 2007 but he was so shit that he couldn't even get on the ballot paper back then either. Even though another left-wing candidate dropped out of the race in order to help him.

And now he's failed to get on the ballot paper once again. He's dropped out of the contest to allow Diane Abbot to get on the ballot paper - even though the evidence would seem to suggest that even if all of his supporters back Abbot, she still wouldn't get on the ballot paper*...

In short, it is difficult to conclude anything other than that McDonnell's campaigns for the Labour leadership were at best optimistic, and at worst just a total waste of time.

*According to the Labour party, Abbott has 11 nominations, McDonnell (according to the BBC) had 16. So the most McDonnell's supporters could give Abbott is to raise her total to 27 nominations - meaning that if she does make it through, it will only have been in part due to McDonnell dropping out.

John McDonnell: Crass Idiot

LabourList commenting on McDonnell's assassination "joke" with considerable understatement:

John McDonnell says he was on the GLC - and that if he could go back in time and do one thing, he would visit the 1980s and "assassinate Thatcher". The wisdom of such a statement really has to be questioned.

I think we can go further than that. I think we can roundly condemn McDonnell for his atrocious comment. It would seem a crass thing to say among friends in a pub: to say in a public hustings surrounded by your rivals as you campaign for the leadership of Britain's Opposition party seems to be idiotic in the extreme.

But in a sense it explains something for me: how McDonnell consistently fails to manage to get on the ballot paper in Labour leadership contests. His words are very revealing - he is an old school Labour party member, a tribal thinker still fighting the battles of the 1980s - the era when the Labour party consistently lost elections. He'd be a total liability as Labour leader simply because he doesn't get modern politics - either what the Labour party should be fighting in this day and age (the Con-Dem coalition, rather than a woman who hasn't been Prime Minister for twenty years) or how modern politics works, and that a crass comment and/or a bad joke can get across the country almost instantaneously.

LabourList should not only question the wisdom of McDonnell's comment, they should also seriously question the wisdom of John McDonnell the politician and John McDonnell the man.

Share the Wealth, Share the Nominations

There is something really rather pathetic about contenders in an election begging their rivals for help, but that's exactly what is happening in the Labour leadership contest. Here is a video containing the risible Diane Abbott complaining about Miliband Senior getting lots of nominations (which is the point, surely, at this stage of the election), and here you can see the begging e-mail from McDonnell to the other candidates - clearly, he's realised that the best way for him to get on the ballot papers is if someone else does it for him.

Maybe they're right; maybe the Labour party does need to have a broad selection of candidates to choose from. But I can't help but think that if McDonnell and Abbott (and possibly Burnham and Balls) can't get the support from their fellow MPs to get on the ballot paper, then that sends out a message about their credibility. And I also reckon that relying on the goodwill of your rivals to get you on the ballot paper maybe placing too much faith in their philanthropy. The Milibands are in this to win it - they're even prepared to run against their siblings. I can't see either one of them helping out a floundering rival.

And even if they did, what would be the point in that? If Abbott/McDonnell can't even get the support from their peers, how the hell are they going to get the support of the party members? And in the highly unlikely event that either one of them gets on the ballot paper and wins, what sort of a leader are they likely to be? After all, they can't turn to Cameron and Clegg at the next election and say "look, you're both going to get more votes than us, so how about we share those votes in order to make things fairer, eh?"

It is typical of the complete lack of reality of the Labour left that they are seriously proposing this. More than anything now, the Labour party needs someone who can win an election. Not someone who needs fucking charity just to get them on the ballot paper.

"Left-Wing" Labourism: An Infantile Disorder*

I reckon some left-wing members of the Labour party are probably rubbing their hands with glee - for the first time since 1994, there are actually some left-wingers in the party proactively vying for leadership. After nearly 16 years of the left-wing camp of the Labour party being in the wilderness (that's longer than the Tories spent in opposition, fact fans) there could actually be a left-wing Labour leader. Crazy yet exciting times, if you're one of those people who still believes in socialism despite everything that has happened to utterly discredit that particular ideology.

Of course, the idea that we are about to see a left-winger as Labour leader is rather undermined when you see which left-wingers are running. John "I Can't Even Get On the Ballot Paper" McDonnell and Diane "I'm Prejudiced Against Finnish Nurses" Abbot hardly represent a modern version of Nye fucking Bevan, do they now? The best bet for one of those actually winning is if the vote for the third-rate neo-Blairites is evenly split between Miliband/Miliband/Balls/Burnham - something which seems unlikely, since both McDonnell and Abbot in the contest might also split the left-wing result, and at least two of those four will probably back out and support one of the other candidates before we get to September. As things stand, there's more chance of Gordon Brown being the new Labour leader than there is of the left-wing contenders. And Brown isn't even running.

But actually it isn't just the candidates that is going massively undermine the left-wing in this election. It is also the fact that the left-wing, historically, have been both an embuggerance and an embarrassment to the Labour party. Probably the high-point for left-wing Labour was when they had a passionate, articulate and eloquent spokesperson in the form of the aforementioned Nye Bevan. And you know what? Bevan ended up resigning as a Minister, and never hitting the top spot. The Labour party favoured the far more moderate Hugh Gaitskell. And when Tony Benn became the figurehead of the Labourite left, he never managed to achieve any meaningful level of power, and when he became too influential, he helped force the Gang of Four out of the Labour party, and thus started the process that led, earlier this month, to the political successors of the Gang of Four going into coalition with the Tories.

The only time a representative of the Labour left actually led the party is when Michael Foot became the worst Labour leader in living memory (barring, arguably, Gordon Brown), and led to the first Thatcherite landslide. From that point on, the Labour party realised that their left-wing was something to be expelled or ignored if the party ever wanted to form a government again.

It is true, historically speaking, that the Labour party is a movement of the left. But parties evolve and change. The Labour party has found a formula that allowed it to win two landslides and one very comfortable election victory in a row - and that involved turning its back both on socialism and on being left-wing in any meaningful sense of the word. It involved running to the centre ground which is where the most credible candidates for the Labour leadership now sit. The generation of Labour MPs who feared deselection by the lefties in their local constituencies has been replaced by a generation of Labour MPs who associate political power and political influence with the Blairite consensus - with the middle ground. The Unions may be to the left of Blair, but they also associate the left-wing of the Labour party with the sort of defeats that led to Thatcher's administrations - those administrations that led to the hobbling of the unions. They'd rather have a moderate yet tamed Labour leader who could be Prime Minister than a left-wing one who will lead the party to electoral oblivion. The time of the left-wing - their dubious heyday - is over.

The next Labour leader will probably be a Miliband, and he will be instinctively focussed on the centre ground. Which makes sense, in electoral terms. A full-on left-wing leader could see the Labour party in opposition for another generation. Labour's short-to-medium term future is trying to regain the centre ground. It certainly isn't in selecting a quaint, yet completely out-of-time, leader like McDonnell or Abbot.

*Yep, I'm paraphrasing Lenin. So sue me. And anyway, he wouldn't have rated McDonnell or Abbot either - albeit for very different reasons.