Keir Starmer was victorious because he was the best candidate to take Labour to at least some sort of electoral respectability. His campaign was planned, professional and aimed at Labour members exhausted by repeated defeats. That, for now, is enough to give him a mandate that will last beyond the exceptional politics of the coronavirus crisis. His actions in the first few days of his leadership are already indicating that this professionalism maybe the hallmark of a new era. In this he has been helped by the weakness and division of his opponents within the party.

For the Left this is a cataclysmic moment similar to 1983 when it was blamed for the party’s disastrous performance against Margaret Thatcher. The left had a choice in 1983: move to the centre and support the new leadership or remain outside. Although some Bennites decided to support Neil Kinnock the rump remained defiant — and out of power for 30 years. Now John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn and their acolytes face the same choice. Already Momentum has issued its clarion call to supporters to watch and judge the new leader. The message was sent to its supporters over the weekend:

“We have to be there to hold him to account, make sure he sticks to his promises and advances the socialist cause in the party.”

It has a core of support of around 30% of the membership who voted for Rebecca Long Bailey but in all three internal elections it was substantially weakened. For the leadership Long Bailey was beaten in both the affiliates section (trades unions) and the registered members (newly joined for this election) not just by Keir Starmer but by Lisa Nandy.

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Why the Labour Left is doomed

By David Kogan

This failure was compounded in the election for deputy leader. Since 2015 the left has unified around single candidates and slates to win elections. Not his time. It was split between support for Angela Rayner, nominated by Momentum, and Richard Burgon, supported by McDonnell. Rayner won her victory; Burgon was beaten into third place.

The lack of unity and failure of the machine was best seen in the elections to the party’s ruling National Executive Committee — centre candidates won all three positions. Along with the replacement of the three parliamentary Labour Party representatives, selected by the shadow cabinet, there will be a switch of at least eight votes on the NEC. As in 1983 the Left will lose its power base and the world of Labour politics will change. As Momentum weakens so two centrist groups — Labour First and Progress — have announced that they have formed an umbrella organisation, Labour to Win, and pledged to support the new leadership in the future.

What will Keir Starmer do and how quickly? Historically, Labour leaders focus on two aspects of leadership: management and policy. Neil Kinnock was the example of a leader who used the party machine to attack Labour’s internal dissenters and show the electorate it was serious. It was his courage in the Eighties that paved the way for New Labour in the Nineties. He brought in new, younger management of the party, most notably in the form of Peter Mandelson as Director of Communications in 1985, but also promoted young new MPs such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and most of the future New Labour government.

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By David Goodhart

With the NEC under new control the obvious move is the replacement of the General Secretary and other key officers. When Labour is in opposition, the power of the General Secretary is substantial and the cooperative balance between it and the leader’s office is crucial for the internal management of the party. It is very hard to see how Starmer could work with the incumbent, Jennie Formby, and he needs his own person in place. Formby has been locked into a partnership with Len McCluskey, Karie Murphy (formerly Executive Director of the Leader’s Office), and other Unite acolytes of the Corbyn regime. The influence of Unison — which is a bigger union and supporter of Starmer’s campaign — may soon be brought to tell.

The first item will be cleaning up anti-Semitism. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been summoning evidence from a wide range of Labour members to get into the history of this mess, going back to when Corbyn was elected leader in 2015. There are pending legal as well as political consequences. Labour has to show not just contrition for the past; it has to reveal its managerial and political failures and then prove that it has a defined route to ensure they are never repeated. Action has to happen immediately and be visible.

Beyond that it is a managerial blank canvas for candidate selection, financing and the most important issue which is how to manage a party of 550,000 members as a coherent political force. The new managerialism should mean that there is a new professionalism. Perhaps in the next election Labour’s website will not crash as everyone tries to get the results.

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Then there is policy development. Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher shows how she spent her four years in opposition developing new policy for the Conservative Party to get her agenda ready for government after 1979. New Labour between 1994 and 1997 was devoted to policy development, which gave it a template for governing.

The current crisis has turned all the normal political rules on their head with more spending, huge government debt, more state intervention in running key sectors, and more state subsidies to keep people employed. No Labour government would have dreamt of these measures. Waiting for politics to return to normal will take time but there are four years before the next election to create a coherent vision for a Britain that may be a very different place after this crisis.

The new shadow cabinet is a good start. Just like Neil Kinnock and Harold Wilson when they became opposition leader, Starmer has promoted a new generation based on available talent. Losing Barry Gardiner (63), Jon Trickett (69) and Ian Lavery (57) for Lisa Nandy (40)  and Anneliese Dodds (42) and Nick Thomas-Symonds (39) is both a generational shift and a talent upgrade. Making Angela Rayner the face of the party and keeping Jonathan Ashworth, who has shown total command of the health portfolio, are both strong moves. The creation of a Covid-19 committee within the shadow cabinet is the right way to focus on the problem.

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Yet in this febrile moment of crisis how can policy can possibly be developed  for an election in 2024? It was George H W Bush who in 1988 worried about the ‘vision thing’, or his lack thereof. Starmer is not a man who exudes the vision thing but he does exude the ‘leadership thing’. He doesn’t appear to be Blair or Thatcher, both of whom drove British politics in radical new directions after winning power. His appointments already show he is geared towards talent, competence and rigour. In this he resembles Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, who created teams of the best available talent in opposition and managed them in power.

As questions are asked about the handling of this crisis by current ministers and advisers, Starmer and his new team can convey a greater sense of competence and cohesion. Policy will follow but for now professionalism might just be enough.

Labour leadership contests have always had an impetus all of their own. They are always long, with tortuous rules that make them subject to surprise. Just ask David Miliband in 2010 or Andy Burnham in 2015. Under two different electoral systems the early favourites lost in elongated campaigns that threw up Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. We all know how well they turned out.

Labour’s reaction to the 2019 general election has been analysed by Lord Ashcroft in his “Diagnosis of Defeat”. Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn were the two principal causes for members deserting the party, contrary to the findings of the National Executive Committee’s report last month that exonerated the Labour leader. Among those who stayed loyal most of those polled by Ashcroft said Labour did not deserve to lose. Asked whether Labour had been an adequate opposition since 2015, Corbyn supporters gave it 6.8 out of 10. The public in general gave it only 2.9.

This disparity has also been shown in other ways: 73% of party members in the poll said anti-Semitism was exaggerated or invented, although the leadership should have done a better job in dealing with it. Amazingly, when asked who was the best Labour leader of modern times the largest vote, at 35%, was for Corbyn; over Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and John Smith. Essentially these party members seem to think that 2019 was an aberration based on Brexit.

However, they did accept that the highest priority now is to win lost voters back and win an election, and this may be the start of reality dawning. The choice between the policies and tactics of the past four years and a desire to win is now firmly on the agenda.

The 2020 leadership campaign has now reached its critical point.

by the same author

How Labour's Left has stitched up selection

By David Kogan

The various constituencies of the party have, after different nominating phases, voted to select leadership and deputy leadership candidates for the final ballot of members. On Saturday the candidates were granted access to data on individual members and registered supporters of the party — now remarkably up to as many as 650,000 — and the battle for votes begins. That night the campaigns were already texting and calling supporters; and there are another nine weeks for official campaigning to take place.

In the deputy leadership race Angela Rayner is sweeping all before her. CLP Nominations has been collating nominations from constituency Labour parties; every night anoraks like me read the latest results. Of 640 CLPs Rayner has gathered 365. The four other candidates — Dawn Butler, with 82, the ineffable Richard Burgon, 77 , Ian Murray, 60  and Rosena Alin-Khan, 56 — are way off pace. Even with the historic vagaries of  Labour party elections it seems impossible for Rayner not to be its new Deputy Leader.

It’s worth noting that the deputy leader race has exposed a deep split within the forces that have run the Labour party in the past five years. When Momentum decided to back Rayner over Burgon it created a split between leading members of the Left such as Jon Lansman — now both chair of Momentum and campaign director of Rebecca Long-Bailey’s leadership challenge — and those such as Laura Pidcock and John McDonnell, who seems to have reverted to a previous political ultra-Left incarnation in the past few weeks. This split will not be healed in the near future especially if Long-Bailey loses the leadership.

If Rayner is a shoo in, then the leadership at first glance looks to be equally one sided. Of the 641 nominating CLPs  374 have voted for Keir Starmer, 164 for Long-Bailey and 72 for the radical and interesting Lisa Nandy. Starmer really hit the ground running. His campaign recruited key figures from across the different wings of the party from the 2015 leadership election — Simon Fletcher and Kat Fletcher from Corbyn’s campaign and Morgan McSweeney from Liz Kendall’s campaign. They are three seasoned political operators. He has gathered wide support from unions and the affiliated societies as well as being dominant in nominations from the MPs and MEPs (in a ballot before they became redundant on 31 January). He has attracted wide ranging support across the party. If the election were held today, he would win it by a landslide. He is also a perfect unity candidate — reasonable, clear, competent, experienced, hardworking and capable of taking on Boris Johnson in opposition as well as potentially running a government. In other words, he is the anthesis of Jeremy Corbyn.

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Rebecca Long-Bailey is more of an enigma. In private she is a lot warmer and funnier than in public, but she is relatively inexperienced as a political performer and has a huge problem shaking off the impression that she is the creature of the Left machine. Corbyn in 2015 and 2016 revealed unsuspected levels of charisma born of 35 years of campaigning for losing causes. He made the other new Labour candidates look boring and formulaic. Long-Bailey is trying to rally the Momentum and unite troops with policy derived from the 2019 manifesto — the Green New Deal — but it’s not quite playing, and she has the real problem of whether she can take on Johnson. Has she got the big enough political personality? Is the need for strong political leadership stronger than supporting the left project? Long-Bailey may be the wrong candidate at the wrong time for the Left.

Which leaves Lisa Nandy. On the last day of nominations Emily Thornberry failed to make the final ballot. Being the warhorse able to beat up Boris Johnson was not enough of a pitch to win support. Nandy is the opposite. Her campaign, more than any other, is rooted in policy aimed at Labour’s lost seats and economic regeneration. She has moral authority on topics such as anti-Semitism where she won the nomination of the Jewish Labour Movement while also being the Vice Chair of Labour Friends of Palestine. She has been on the back benches warning about Brexit for three years. She is surprisingly compelling but that is the problem. She is a surprise. In the race for support she has a tiny professional network and is relatively unknown.

So how does this work? The electorate is all the members and registered supporters, of whom more than 100,000 are rumoured to have joined in the past six weeks. Balloting ends on 2 April. Then the votes for all three leadership candidates are tallied by the single transferable vote method until one achieves more than 50%.

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On this basis Starmer is racing ahead but there are still vagaries in this race. The front runner rarely wins. He has the disadvantage of being the last leadership candidate from London, the last man and the establishment candidate. Despite his attempts to show his own Left-leaning history as a human rights barrister does he appear to be radical enough for the party membership? He is the political adult in the room: but is that enough?

The Labour machine is still dominated by the Corbyn cabal. Those acolytes of Len McCluskey are still there: Jennie Formby as General Secretary and Karie Murphy, previously Corbyn’s chief of staff. They lurk at Labour’s HQ — and already there have been signs of meddling, with accusations against Starmer’s campaign of data breaches, and nasty attacks on Starmer’s staff from leftist websites. As he gets stronger so the attacks will grow.

Long-Bailey also has the advantage of a well-honed machine that is used to winning internal elections and, in Jon Lansman, a seasoned operator of that machine. Her disadvantages as a candidate are offset by the power of organisation. She could take this election, as did Ed Miliband in 2010, by winning as enough supporters from the trade union membership to offset Starmer’s support in Parliament and the CLPs. However, this is not an electoral college, and no one really knows how the upsurge in membership will affect this race. If she is close to Starmer in the first round of the ballot it could be a close-run thing on second preferences.

For Nandy the only way she has a chance is to get into second place in the ballot. What is clear is that the more she is seen the more support she gains. If she can beat Long-Bailey into third place, will there be enough of Long-Bailey’s support to transfer to her to help her challenge Starmer’s probable lead on first preferences? This will be the determinant for her to stand any chance other than coming a gallant third. For her it’s a race to be seen and to get to the electorate with a much smaller campaign organisation.

The good news from Labour is that the factionalism of the past five years is beginning to recede. Most of the candidates for Leader and deputy leader are capable of mounting serious opposition to the government and now at least have a window of a year or two to clean up the party by dealing with anti-Semitism and the internal chaos created by the Corbyn cabal. Boris Johnson owns Brexit and economic policy. If they go awry there may now be a Labour leadership that can take fight to him. There is all to play for in this leadership election as Labour starts its long walk back to electoral competence.

That was Rebecca Long-Bailey’s answer when Laura Kuenssberg asked her about transgender issues — specifically the legal recognition of gender on the basis of self-identification.

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Test article

By Peter Franklin

But does the principle of letting people be who they want to be apply to gender alone?

What about other personal characteristics that are defined in law, such as age? Should people be able to decide what age they want to be and have that legally recognised?

*

You may remember a Dutchman by the name of Emile Ratelband. In 2018 he launched a legal action to change his official age from 69 to 49. “We live in a time when you can change your name and change your gender. Why can’t I decide my own age?”, he argued.

The Dutch courts, however, disagreed. While Mr Ratelband was “at liberty to feel 20 years younger than his real age and to act accordingly”, the right to change legal documents was judged to be “undesirable”.

Case closed, then?

Not according to Joona Räsänen, a bioethicist at the University of Oslo. In a thought-provoking piece for Aeon, he makes the argument for the right to change one’s legal age. It applies specifically to other people seeking to lower their age, though “in principle”, he is “not opposed to younger people increasing their age”.

So under what circumstances might this right apply? Räsänen sets out three conditions:

“First, the person is at risk of being discriminated against because of age. Second, the person’s body and mind are in better shape than would be expected based on the person’s chronological age (that is, the person is biologically younger than he is chronologically). Third, the person does not feel that his legal age is befitting.”

Ageism certainly exists. People can be discriminated against because they’re considered too old or too young — their actual capabilities discounted in favour of a mere number.

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By Peter Franklin

But isn’t a better solution to outlaw such discrimination? A lot of progress has already been made. For instance, in the UK it’s now illegal to force employees to retire just because they’ve reached a certain age. The employer has to prove that the employee is incapable of doing their job. So, in that context there’s no need for people to pretend they’re 55 when in reality they’re 65.

Ah, but when it comes to age what is reality? Räsänen draws a distinction between chronological and biological age. It’s true that people age at different rates. People of exactly the same age can differ radically in terms of appearance, physical fitness, mental acuity or other measures of youthfulness. Aren’t these qualities more meaningful than the number of birthdays you’ve had? Why shouldn’t you have your biological age recognised as your legal age if that is what you wish?

The key problem is that, as Räsänen admits, “little consensus exists on how it should be determined”. Who would do the determining? The state? A private consultant? Or would it be self-assessed? There’d be no consistency across the population.

Biological age isn’t even consistent within an individual. Somebody might be a physical wreck, but sharp-as-a-tack mentally. A middle-aged, sun-worshipping fitness fanatic might have a face full wrinkles, but stronger muscles than most people half their age. The gardener Monty Don, who is 65 this year, recently observed that his “shot” knees were 85, while “aerobically” the rest of his body was 45.

*

So, performance-wise, different parts of our selves age at different rates — not that a precise figure could be put on any of it. Chronological age remains the only precise, consistent and objective measure of age that we have. But, of course, the third of Joona Räsänen’s conditions — i.e. that “that the person does not feel that his legal age is befitting” isn’t meant to be objective, it is by definition subjective.

Which is why I doubt that all three of his conditions would endure, if used as a basis for reform. In a post-modern society, subjectivity trumps everything else. Before long, self-ID would come to dominate any alternative to the chronological reckoning of age.

Would that matter? After all, in many circumstances people can lie about their age anyway — or refuse to divulge it. Furthermore, if we’re outlawing ageism, then age really would be just a number.

Except that not all age-based discrimination is bad. In fact, a great deal is necessary or, at least, not unfair. For instance, government has to set an age at which someone qualifies for the state old age pension. We can argue over precisely what age that should be, but a line has to be drawn somewhere otherwise everyone would qualify and the system go bankrupt. In deciding who is legally of pensionable age , the only fair and equal way of doing it is years elapsed since birth. Any system of self-ID would be gamed to the point of absurdity.

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Or what about the age at which older drivers must reapply for their licenses (and declare any relevant medical conditions)? In the UK this is 70, which further re-applications required every three years after that. It’s a somewhat arbitrary line to draw and one which applies to all individuals regardless of variations in capability. And yet it makes sense and affects everyone equally on the basis of the same objective measure of age. Self-ID would drive a coach-and-horses through all of that.

The same would be true at the other end of the age spectrum. If young people could self-ID on age then we would have 13-year-olds taking their driving tests. What could possibly go wrong? Of course, it’s undoubtedly the case that some 16-year-olds would make safer drivers than some 18-year-olds. But that doesn’t mean that the driving age of 17 is ‘unfair’. It’s perfectly fair because it collectively applies the same requirement to everybody equally and does so for the common good. The loss of opportunity suffered by the potentially safe-driving 16-year-old is rightly judged a price worth paying for that common good. Self-ID on age, however, would place the boot on the other foot, empowering individuals at the expense of society.

In an era in which individualism and relativism are intellectually dominant, it’s worth pausing to consider just how much of everyday life still depends on restricting individual freedom of action and doing so on the basis of a shared understanding of reality.

*

Is our shared understanding of age under any serious threat? After all, Emile Ratelband’s legal challenge didn’t get very far — not even in a notably liberal country like the Netherlands. However, fringe ideas can become mainstream in the space of a generation or two.

Alongside Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry, Rebecca Long-Bailey is a candidate in the current Labour leadership contest. Now compare that field with the candidates in the 1976 contest — James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Dennis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn and Anthony Crosland. Can you imagine any of those gentlemen supporting the idea of self-ID on gender? I doubt the concept would have even occurred to them — and that includes Jenkins, author of the permissive society. A lot can change in a few decades.

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However, viewed from a different angle, Long-Bailey’s position is consistent with the 19th century philosophy of utilitarian liberals like John Stuart Mill.

In furthering the liberty of the individual, Mill not only believed in limiting the power of the state, but also the power of society. This is how he puts in his most famous work, On Liberty:

“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

When the contemporary Left — which combines Mill’s liberalism with over-confidence in the state — says “we have to let people be who they want to be”, I want to ask who do they mean by “we” and what do they mean by “have to”? Are we to be forced to speak and act as if something is real when we know very well that it isn’t?

*

Terry Pratchett once said that “inside every old person there’s a young person wondering what happened”. As a middle-aged person, I find that feels truer every day.

And yet the actual truth about the date of my birth remains the same. No one should be compelled to deny it just because of how I feel (especially as feelings are hardly the most constant thing in the world).

That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to go down the street in a pair of spray-on jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt if I want to (don’t worry, I don’t). It isn’t the job of state to protect me from public embarrassment. But, equally, the state has no business forcing society to play along with my delusions. I have no right to falsify my birth certificate. Or to claim a young person’s railcard. Or to claim that I’m 25 on a dating app.

The fact is that I can’t be whoever I want to be. Reality is real and I am what I am.

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The MP is, of course, Jeremy Corbyn.

Rebecca Long Bailey has rightly been pilloried for awarding him 10/10 for his leadership, despite his leading the party to its worst defeat since 1935. But I’d bet my mortage on her being far from alone. Mr Corbyn remains as popular as ever with members.

Jeremy Corbyn will stop being leader in April. But he won’t stop being Jeremy Corbyn — the Jeremy Corbyn, that is, who spent decades campaigning and speaking about his political passions, and who will be given a new freedom when he steps down. That’s why Labour is going to find it impossible to escape from his shadow in 2020 — and beyond.

Just look at what happened after the election. Twitter, effectively a Left-wing echo chamber, was filled with Labour members tweeting that they want Mr Corbyn to stay on. They regard the result not as an indictment of his leadership — but of the voters. Labour, they believe, would have won were it not for the distorting effect of Brexit.

I write this not just to expose the self-delusion of so many Labour members. It is, rather, to understand the implications. Because whoever is chosen to succeed him as leader will, by definition, be second best. This matters not because of the members but because of Mr Corbyn.

Anyone who thinks that even after leading Labour to such a catastrophic defeat, Mr Corbyn will simply retire to his allotment, clearly hasn’t paid attention to his first 32 years as an MP, before he became leader in 2015.

As a backbencher — and indeed long before he was first elected in 1983 — pretty much all he did was campaign and speak about the various causes that motivated him. These were the same causes which have remained with him all his adult life and which haunted him as leader — such as his hero worship of dictators such as Castro and Chavez, his support for terrorists like Hamas and the IRA and his hatred of the West and regard for our enemies, such as Iran and Russia.

Consider his behaviour since losing the election. He refused to step down immediately, despite the urgings of colleagues. He has posted a series of bizarre videos on social media, behaving as if he had led Labour to some kind of triumph. As 2019 ended, he described it as “quite the year for…our Labour movement”. That’s one way of putting it.

And then, yesterday, he began the first of his ‘living dead’ Prime Minister’s Questions sessions, a humiliated and discredited figure nonetheless insisting on his right to ask the Prime Minister six questions every week.

The idea of him going silent when he stops being leader — even as a courtesy to the new leader — is preposterous. For Mr Corbyn, loyalty has only ever been a one-way street. As leader, he demanded loyalty from his MPs — but when he was a backbencher, he never once accepted the idea that he should respect the party leader or stop campaigning for his causes. Famously, when Labour was in government between 1997 and 2010, he voted against the party whip 428 times, far more than any other Labour MP.

Mr Corbyn is typical of a strand of the Left that believes its conscience gives it licence to behave as it sees fit. This was part of what made him such a terrible leader, since he has always been convinced of his own rectitude. Anyone who disagreed with or questioned him was therefore, by definition, immoral.
This will not stop when he returns to the backbenches. He will not suddenly lose the arrogance that has fuelled him as leader. Rather, he will revert to his previous behaviour, offering vigorous support to his favourite causes. And he will do so freed from the pressures of leadership.

We can expect to see him re-joining the Stop the War Coalition, the Trotskyite group he used to chair which campaigns against the West and supports dictators such as Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

We can expect to see him speaking at the numerous fringe protests against the West which occupy the weekends of the hard Left. And we can expect to see him lending his support to other extremist campaigns and supporting Russia and Iran.
But there is a big difference from such behaviour before he became leader. Back then, he was a minor backbencher — a figure of no significance other than among his fellow Trotskyites. No one else paid him the least attention when he droned on. Now, however, he is the former leader of the Labour Party.

No matter who succeeds him, Mr Corbyn will revert to type. He is incapable of doing otherwise. That will be annoying enough for a new leader from his own hard Left wing of the party. But imagine if the new leader is someone such as Sir Keir Starmer or Jess Phillips, who will be genuinely seeking to distance themselves in the eyes of the public from Mr Corbyn. There he will be, campaigning and vocal. And there, too, will be the members, who regard him as their political hero.

Labour’s Nightmare on Corbyn Street is far from over.