Well, it's arrived

I've passed the rigorous scrutiny (as has Clare) and my ballot is now ready to cast. The following just arrived by email.

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Dear Nigel,

You can now vote for the next Leader and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

You can vote online and your vote must be received by 12 noon on Thursday 10 September to count.

To vote, go to http://www.labour.org.uk/ballot2015 and enter the following two-part security code to confirm your identity:

Security Code Part One: ********
Security Code Part Two: ****

Once you have entered your security code, the website will give clear instructions on how to cast your vote. It takes just a few moments to cast your vote online, and you can do so at any time until the ballot closes at 12 noon on Thursday 10 September.

Vote Online Now

These elections are being run by Electoral Reform Services, who have been appointed by the Labour Party as the independent scrutineer for this ballot.

If you live in London, as well as voting for Labour's Leader and Deputy Leader, you can also vote to select Labour's candidate for London Mayor for the elections being held in May 2016.

On the online voting site, please rank the candidates in your order of preference. You do not need to use all of your preferences, but doing so cannot harm your first-preference candidate. Click here if you want to understand more about the voting system.

Thank you for taking part in these important elections,

The Labour Party
Sent by Electoral Reform Services

Who to vote for in the Labour contest?

This is proving a surprisingly hard question.

1. It's hard to disagree with the proposition that policies which:

• get the economy right
• apply a level of redistribution to maintain an effective state
• ensure social cohesion 

pretty much define the programme of a sensible political party. In the UK, this is called governing from the centre.

2. With a still-damaged economy, most people agree that the current priority is to clear debt-overhang, improve productivity, maintain growth and preserve social cohesion. Broadly that's where the Conservative Government has positioned itself and it's proved electorally sufficient.

3. When Labour was last in office, under Blair, it occupied essentially the same ground - albeit with less reforming zeal on public services. Blair won because the Tories had at that time narrowed their appeal to just their privileged friends and had lost the middle classes. The Tories continue to have the problem that the UK elite is culturally quite different from the mass middle classes; the latter typically find the former old-fashioned and rather repellant.

4. The brutal truth is that there is no political space right now for a successful Labour Party strategy, one which would be correct as in point (1) above (with Labourist nuances) but which would differ substantively from what the Tories are doing. That's why no one has come up with one.

5. The Labour Party in the fifties and sixties was the party of blue and white collar workers. Its powerhouse was the unions, while the TUC was a power in the land. The vast expansion of the middle-class in the sixties, seventies and eighties (fuelled by vastly increased university uptake) undermined the power and social weight of traditional organised labour.

6. Following these social changes (a testimony, by the way, to the success of capitalism in increasing all-round wealth) Labour politics moved to the Guardian agenda: identity politics and support for diverse 'victims and causes'. A rainbow coalition model always had the potential to destabilise the party: redistribution from those with wealth eclipsing any concern as to how that wealth might actually be produced in the first place (the not entirely trivial question of how a successful capitalist economy can be facilitated). The danger?  A fervent but self-limiting voting base, as Angela Eagle tried to point out in coded language the other day.

7. A party comprised mainly of a coalition of needy pressure groups is not that useful a project to safeguard the future of the UK. All parties tend to get captured by their natural backers despite the best efforts of their smarter leaders to undertake a truly national project. When that happens, it's vital to have a ready alternative. So when the reforming Thatcher government decayed to the ineffectual Major regime, we had a fresh-off-the-shelf Blair government to restore competence and re-address neglected concerns. The same will happen eventually with the Cameron-Osborne project.

8. OK, so we finally get to the point. Which is the least bad candidate to ensure that a future Labour Party will be fit for purpose?

• Jeremy Corbyn is the worst candidate, because his passionately-held beliefs have essentially nothing in common with policies and strategies which actually work. A Corbyn leadership will lead to a cul de sac* at which point the party will have to have the discussion alluded to above in far more desperate straits.


• Andy Burnham is not a good choice. All politicians are open to the accusations of hypocrisy and lack of principles, but Burnham seems to make an art form of it. I am inclined to believe he really is an unprincipled hypocrite standing on retrograde, statist and deeply-unhelpful policies.


• Liz Kendall has neither the stature nor the ideas to take the party anywhere. Blairism was a model of Labour centrism for the 1990s; Labour centrism for 2020 and beyond has yet to be defined and I can't see Kendall playing any role. To start with, arguing for Blairist continuity going forwards is the stupidest political stance imaginable in the current febrile state of party opinion.


• This leaves Yvette Cooper: machine politician, wife of Ed Balls, essentially invisible in this campaign. Three strikes there then. Paradoxically, electing a competent minder might be just what the party needs for the next few years. It has to wait out a Tory decline before it has a real chance of power again - and Yvette might be the one to take it there and oversee the new thinking required.

9. For deputy, one should vote for someone who can reach out to the membership and bring them along. Angela Eagle wouldn't be a bad choice; according to the latest polls, Caroline Flint might have a better prospect of heading off the malign Tom Watson.

(See what I did there? I ended up with three women candidates and their gender didn't even cross my mind until this exact moment).

--

* Adam Smith once wrote: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation" by which he meant that mistaken policies take a while to wreck a strong economy. But at best they don't help and in the worst case, over a period, wreck it they can. We should not indulge utopian fantasies masquerading as political programmes.

The Nice but Dim Party

Having each paid our £3 registration fee as Labour supporters, we were invited to come and hear Angela Eagle (candidate for deputy leader) in Bath this evening. In my lazy way, I had imagined a vast hall, with perhaps a thousand people from across the south-west, but it was not to be (see pix below).

Angela Eagle (deputy Labour Party leader candidate)

About fifty turned up in the end, at Friends Meeting House, Bath

In the end, about fifty people turned up at Friends Meeting House. I would say that it was about 2:1 women, and that the men were of that pleasant, agreeable type who make you welcome at parties. If the meeting had been a person, it would have been a forty-to-fifty-something woman brimming with empathy for the disadvantaged and fired up with moral fervour for Jeremy Corbyn, whose leftist inspirational campaign exactly captures her mood of trampled-upon values.

As Matthew Parris observed in a Times piece a few days ago, Mr Corbyn articulates with passion and conviction the genuine worldview of rank-and-file Labour Party supporters - this view is wholly based on emotion and values and they do viscerally believe it.

Faced with this squirming mass of barely-suppressed outrage, Angela in general copped out. Describing herself as 'soft left', she refused to put forward any strategy or policies for Labour going forwards. In her view it was too early in the election cycle for policies and she claimed to want to create a Labour Party where ideas bubbled up from an actively-involved membership. Her contribution was big on generic values (niceness, by and large) and demonology of the hated and uncaring Tories (George Osborne appears to be demon-in-chief, Cameron scarcely got a mention).

Angela made one brave attempt to distinguish between a political party which wants to attain power and has to address the issues of the whole electorate, versus a pressure group which simply lobbies for its pet concern.

Angela, I thought to myself, calm yourself, the pass is sold: you spoke to a meeting of overlapping pressure groups - pro-immigrant, pro-welfare, anti-welfare-caps, pro-trade-union .. I think that covers most of what came up.

Clare prepares herself for the meeting (Bath Abbey backdrop)

This does leave me with a dilemma: who do I vote for in the leadership elections next week? I strongly lean towards supporting Jeremy Corbyn, not because I agree with his policies (one Venezuela on the planet is quite enough) but because the Party seems to need to go through the Corbyn experience just to discover in practice why it doesn't deliver their noble (but deeply naive) objectives.

But then there's the argument that the sane wing of the Party needs all the help it can get to pick up the pieces after Jeremy gets in anyhow. But Liz Kendall seems a wasted vote - there is no constituency for her position in the Party's voting-electorate (Blairism is dead) and in any case she's a deeply underwhelming candidate with not an original idea that I've seen.

I'm still thinking about it ...

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Ironically, Clare will vote for Jeremy Corbyn on the single issue of his opposition to Trident ...

Fixing Labour

Mark Mardell wrote an intelligent piece on the BBC website, pointing out that the conventional wisdom as to why Labour lost the election has congealed out as follows:

"Step back from the angst of supporters, and it may not be that hard to see why Labour failed. An economic recovery, hailed by independent organisations as the result of government policy, undid a party that had loudly proclaimed for five years that the coalition's policies would lead to economic disaster. Combine that with an uncharismatic and uninspirational leader, then you might argue no further debate is necessary. Fat chance of that.

Defeat breeds resentment, and this one has opened up old divisions. A chorus of Blairites, led by the man himself, has declared that Ed's problem was ignoring those with aspiration and ambition, failing to appeal to those running business."

This is an incredibly superficial diagnosis, which fails to capture the diversity of trends which undercut Labour's simplistic message during the election. Mardell continues,

"The Scottish wipeout is Labour's biggest problem. Fail to solve it, and Labour can forget ever having a comfortable majority again. It is hard to argue Labour were wiped out in Scotland because the SNP outflanked them to the right with their appeal to the business community and the ambitious and aspirational. But it is true the SNP drew in to people from left, right and centre, just as the modernisers say Labour should. It was the politics of economic self-interest, but cast in a very different light. Tribally sneering at "the reactionary ideology of nationalism" as Mr Blair does, will not reach the central belt of Scotland, the middle ground of Midlothian."

Lenin and Trotsky were quite aware of the anti-imperialist power of nationalism, and certainly didn't reduce it to economic class interest. Nor, by the way, did they consider it reactionary. Below Marxism's radar lies the indisputable dynamic of ethnic social solidarity, perhaps the most powerful emotional motivator in the mass.

Then we come to the second, and quite different fissure - UKIP:

"The increase in votes for Nigel Farage's party wasn't translated into parliamentary seats, but, although it is early days in terms of research, it probably hurt Labour a lot. If we believe - and I do - Matthew Goodwin and Rob Ford, authors of Revolt on the Right, these voters are often former Labour supporters - older, less educated, those left behind on the tides of globalisation, stranded on the shores of post-industrialisation. They may have had too many disappointments to feel much ambition or aspiration. They are a challenge for Labour, and any new leader will spend a good deal of time thinking how to deal with the concerns of Europe and immigration.

Whether to share their fears, or confront them will be a big decision."

The third driver of Labour's defeat is paradoxically the very element which informs so much of Labour's own leadership, the trendy-leftism of petit-bourgeois radicalism and the aristo-liberal wing of the party:

"Those members who still proudly call themselves socialist. This is not about Old Labour - they are more likely to be baristas or barristers than boilermakers. It is easy as an outsider, as a journalist, to treat politics as an intellectual game about how best to win power - but many people, particularly the foot soldiers, particularly after the death of purely tribal loyalties, are in it because they passionately believe in winning power to do something specific. Many of them are suspicious of the later incarnations of New Labour, not because it reached an accommodation with wealth and business, but because it seemed to worship at the same altar, to regard the party's core beliefs in redistribution and equality as childish fantasies from a past age.

Perhaps to Mr Blair, they are the problem, people who may equate "ambition" with greed. They might point out that a man who claims to be worth "only" £20m may find it harder than most to squeeze through the eye of a needle to understand their point of view. Most successful Labour leaders will confront the left at some point, but the concerns of this group go to the existential question "What is the party for?"

Mark Mardell is as baffled as the rest of us as to the putative 'new direction for Labour'. I agree with his concluding thought, that these centrifugal dynamics are:

" a reflection on the complex conundrums that will face any new Labour leader, the tearing apart of the old alliance that made up a Labour majority, and so the political need to satisfy groups with very different, indeed, contradictory demands. But looking for a Social Democratic universal theory of everything may be missing the point. What the party desperately wants is a leader who can pull the disparate threads together and articulate them as common purpose.

Whether she or he exists is another matter."

Good luck with that then.

---
Update:

"Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy is to resign next month, he has announced. It comes despite Mr Murphy narrowly surviving a vote of no confidence at a meeting of the party's national executive in Glasgow. Mr Murphy said he would tender his resignation alongside a plan to reform the party. He lost his seat in last week's general election as the SNP won 56 of the 59 Scottish seats, leaving Labour with a single MP in Scotland. Mr Murphy said he wanted to have a successor as leader in place by the summer, and confirmed he would not be standing for a seat at the Scottish Parliament in next year's election."

Apparently Jim Murphy was far and away the most competent senior leader in the Scottish Labour Party. His departure at the hands of the left further weakens the 'come back' strategy, not just in Scotland but in the whole of the UK.