Rebecca Long Bailey has blamed Labour’s obsession with “parliamentary process” over Brexit during the past few years for its disastrous defeat in December’s general election — in what amounts to a coded attack on Keir Starmer, her main rival in the party’s leadership race.
Ms Long Bailey, shadow business secretary, declared on Monday night that she was standing in the contest to replace Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Britain’s biggest opposition party.
The former solicitor, who is MP for Salford, is expected to win the backing of powerful leftwing groups including Unite the Union and pro-Corbyn pressure group Momentum. She is a protégé of John McDonnell, shadow chancellor, who ran the unsuccessful election campaign, and would be expected to continue Mr Corbyn’s hard-left political agenda.
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, she said that Sir Keir had — as shadow Brexit secretary — been trying to reach a compromise solution on Brexit that could unify the membership and the voters. Ultimately, however, Labour ended up baffling many people and alienating voters on both sides of the debate.
Labour should have focused on “trying to get a good deal” because the party was “losing trust” with communities that voted Leave, she argued.
“While we triangulated and focused on parliamentary process and manoeuvres . . . we often took our eye off the ball in developing that message,” she said. “We did spend an inordinate amount of time on those parliamentary dealings.”
Asked if she had attacked Labour’s Brexit policy while in the shadow cabinet, she replied: “I certainly did.”
Initial polls of the Labour membership have suggested that Sir Keir, a former director of public prosecutions, is the most popular candidate among the membership. Other MPs in the race are Jess Phillips, Clive Lewis, Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry.
Candidates need the support of 22 MPs or MEPs and 5 per cent of constituency Labour parties or three affiliates, such as unions. The new leader will be announced on April 4, the party’s national executive committee announced on Monday.
Meanwhile, Ms Long Bailey has defended Mr Corbyn’s approach, despite him presiding over the party’s worst election defeat for 80 years. “I don’t just agree with the policies, I’ve spent the last four years writing them,” she wrote in an article in Tribune magazine on Monday night.
She told the BBC that she continued to support Mr Corbyn, defending his “moral integrity” and saying that he would “go down in history” as the man who had set up a radical platform for policy development inside the party. Mr Corbyn had unfairly suffered “unprecedented” levels of criticism, she suggested.
Ms Long Bailey suggested in the interview that the election result was because of Labour’s Brexit position, its failure to tackle the anti-Semitism crisis in the party and a lack of a “coherent strategy and narrative” around what were otherwise popular policies on issues such as an industrial strategy and a green new deal.
In recent days there have been tensions between Unite, Momentum and Mr McDonnell’s office — all of which want to wield influence over the Long Bailey campaign.
Among those seemingly opposed to Ms Long Bailey is former foreign secretary Jack Straw. He told Sky News that the party “needs a true, loyal successor to Jeremy Corbyn like it needs a hole in the head”.
“If it goes for somebody who says he or she is the continuity candidate that is signing a collective suicide note,” he said. “We’ve tried that. We’ve had four-and-a-half dismal years of this far-left experiment of not compromising with the electorate.”
