Fancy getting one over on your enemies? Find out what they’re most afraid of. As the Labour party moves ever closer to choosing its next leader, this ostensibly pragmatic logic has shaped the discussion around the “electability” of the various candidates. What the Tories fear most, one would presume, is a Labour leader who can defeat them in a general election. Hence, according to this logic, Labour should choose the candidate most feared by the Tories in order to maximise the party’s chances of victory at the next general election.
It sounds simple. But there has so far been little agreement on which of the contenders is best qualified for the role of Tory-slayer. Questioned by Sky News host Kay Burley days after December’s general election defeat, Tory MP Nigel Evans named Lisa Nandy as the candidate he would be “most concerned about” facing next time. Earlier this month, politics professor Tim Bale predicted that Jess Phillips would be the one to make things “awkward” for Boris Johnson – a hunch apparently shared by the Labour MP Wes Streeting, the Daily Express reporting that he “believes that [Phillips] will have Mr Johnson ‘lying awake at night’”. It was not to be, for reasons perhaps put best by Owen Jones when he diagnosed Phillips with “centrist hack syndrome”, a condition in which candidates are lulled into an inflated sense of their own abilities and appeal, “then are suddenly subjected to mild media scrutiny for the first time, which is very disorienting, makes them realise politics is actually very hard, and their campaigns start to implode”.
The “think-like-your-enemy” approach to electability reflects a widespread assumption that getting elected is an apolitical, technical art – one that the right happens to be better at. According to this way of thinking, the political left often suffers from a failure to distinguish between what it wants and how to get it. The candidate or strategy that can bring the left closest to realising those ideals in practice might not be the one that embodies those ideals most perfectly. Labour cannot do anything, the left is so often reminded, without first winning power. And say what you will about the Tories, they seem to know how to win elections.
A problem of baby and bathwater lurks in the vicinity here. To the extent that claims about “electability” translate into an instruction to the left to move right in order to win (by those who sit to its right), there will inevitably come a point at which the returns are so diminished that further compromise is no longer worth the sacrifice of ambition. But there are also good reasons to be sceptical of the basis of the instruction.
There is no objective science of electability, to which the right has found the answer and the left has not. The Tories’ greatest strengths lie in being ruthless (even to one another when necessary), in having vastly greater material wealth and donations at their disposal, and in exploiting their cosy relationship with media and business. Above all, they win by being aligned with the interests of wealth and power. Just because the right wins this way does not mean the strategy is a coherent one for the left, let alone that Labour can beat the Tories at their own game.
That this strategy arguably worked for Tony Blair in the 1990s does not establish moving right as a stable formula for success, as both the steadily declining vote share under New Labour and the more recent collapse of centre-left parties across Europe serve to illustrate. What “electability” means now is a matter of fundamental political disagreement: about the best reading of the present and of recent history, and about how public opinion is formed and what it means.
Of the four remaining candidates for Labour leader, the one with the strongest grip on this seems to be Rebecca Long-Bailey – the only one of the four to have voted against Tory benefits cuts in 2015 (to be fair to Nandy, she was on maternity leave at the time). But the new consensus among the political and media establishment is that whoever is to strike fear into Tory hearts cannot be a “continuity Corbyn” candidate, as Long-Bailey has quickly been labelled.
In order for Labour to become electable again, the argument goes, we must have change. In this reasoning, “change” and “continuity” have been inverted: a platform for radical change has been defeated, therefore Labour must change by renouncing that platform for change. So strong is the hold that this thinking exerts over the liberal commentariat that it seems to have brought a sudden silence to the emphatic declarations, levelled frequently in the run-up to and during challenges to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, that we must have a woman as the next Labour leader. After all the protestations that it was not Corbyn’s politics but his personality that was the problem, that he must be replaced with a younger, more smartly dressed leader, preferably female – preferably Yvette Cooper – Long-Bailey now finds herself in that unenviable category of the “wrong kind of woman”.
There is no evidence that Labour lost the election because of its leftwing policies. Those policies – which Long-Bailey helped to create – remain extremely popular when put to the public in isolation. Equally, there is no good evidence to support the widespread conviction that a “soft-left” candidate such as Keir Starmer would be more likely than Long-Bailey to lead Labour to power. While Labour remains beholden to the wisdom of its enemies, the Tories have little to fear.
• Lorna Finlayson teaches philosophy at the University of Essex
