Why it has to be Liz for Leader

It has been a trying few weeks for Labour, to put it lightly. The catastrophic election result has been followed by Chuka Umunna’s surprise withdrawal from the leadership race and the resignation of Jim Murphy, events which have brought the party face to face with its own mortality. As Dan Jarvis said in his captivating speech to Progress conference, “this is a Clause One moment”, with our core obligation to maintain a representative presence for working people under threat. Labour must learn the right lessons and recover quickly if it is to continue as a progressive political force in Britain and have even the faintest hope of removing the Conservatives from power in 2020.

That starts with electing the right leader. The party has mapped out a sensible timetable for the leadership race. It will conclude on September 12^th, avoiding a quick contest that would constrain debate, while minimising the time the Tories have to set the national agenda and allowing the new leader to shape the Labour conference at the end of September. Harriet Harman has encouraged members to bring non-members to hustings and to think about what the wider public want to see in the next leader. And the timetable also allows us to make full use of one of Ed Miliband’s greatest legacies, the internal party reforms that introduced registered Labour supporters and fully-affiliated union members to the process, who have until mid-August to register and give the contest the feel of a primary.

We also have a good field of candidates emerging. Despite making an eye-catching entrance, it is unclear if dark-horse Mary Creagh will be able to clear the cumbersome nomination threshold, but Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall are all people I respect. All hail from the broad Labour right, and I believe the party could at least begin to advance in the right direction under any of them.

The crucial question we must ask of each candidate is this, though – “how far and how fast will that advance be under you?”

Labour starts with even fewer MPs than in 2010, nearly 100 seats from the barest of majorities and needing eternal Tory seats like Chingford for a majority of 10. 2010 seats like Morley & Outwood and Southampton Itchen need reclaiming from the Tories and they substantially increased their majorities in marginals they held onto this year, dramatically increasing the overall national swing Labour needs to nearly 9%. The Lib Dems are no longer taking several dozen seats out of the Conservative column. UKIP indirectly cost us seats and now lurk in second place in many northern Labour bastions (and could advance further if we get our tone wrong in the coming EU referendum). The SNP established daunting majorities in most of the 40 seats it took from Labour, probably forcing Labour to train its mind on the traditionally tougher task of winning England. And all of this is before the Tories enact their boundary changes.

In the face of this, it’s tempting to wonder if this is a 10 year project, with no way to win in 2020. But this would be unacceptable. First off, it continues to assume that in opposition things can’t get even worse – such complacency has already cost us dearly. But even if not, timidity is a betrayal of the people and the values Labour exists to defend and advance. By 2020, life will have become harder for working families struggling in an unequal economy, and for the most vulnerable in our society. Rather than being funded and reformed for the future, our public services and our welfare state will continue to be gutted and vandalised under the guise of it. Both our United Kingdom and our place in the EU will be stretched to breaking point, if they remain at all. And basic liberties, starting with the Human Rights Act and the ability of trade unions to organise, will have been further eroded.

This is the price we pay for failing to win in 2015, but if we as social democrats have it in our power to stop the Conservatives in their tracks in 2020, we should. This is a time for radicalism, not half-measures. And for me, that can only mean Liz Kendall. Here’s why.

“A fresh start”

That is Kendall’s campaign slogan, and she has a point. As I argued in my post-election blog, Labour needs to skip to the 2010 generation:

“Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper are both strong in their own ways, and I have great respect for them. I first-preferenced Burnham on my ballot paper in 2010, and might well have voted for Cooper instead had she stood then. It’s also true that they are known quantities with experience in government, which Labour’s 2010 intake will lack. But Blair and Cameron had similarly little experience, and it didn’t do them harm. Meanwhile, substantial baggage from the New Labour era weighs Burnham and Cooper down – the same “they crashed the car” problem on competence Ed faced, the memories of factional infighting, their half-baked manoeuvres against Ed in this parliament, Cooper’s inevitable association with her now-defeated husband (unfair and sexist though that may be) and Burnham’s with the Mid Staffs hospital scandal. The new generation are free of all this”

Since I wrote that, Chuka Umunna has withdrawn, Dan Jarvis and Rachel Reeves have thrown their support to Burnham and Tristram Hunt has backed Kendall. This means Kendall has emerged with the unified support of all those who want a clean slate or a “something New, something Blue” forward vision for Labour. LabourList ex-editor Mark Ferguson has joined Kendall’s campaign as a strategic communications advisor, despite repudiating the “Blairite” label often attached for her, and she has MPs who backed both Milibands five years ago nominating her. Further, while a Westminster Public Affairs survey of former Labour PPCs and the first LabourList survey of its (self-selecting) readers have confirmed Andy Burnham as the frontrunner, both also surprised many by placing Kendall second, ahead of the better-known Cooper.

As frontrunner, Burnham has the greatest institutional support, but he also has the most to lose, and is currently being branded as the “left-wing continuity candidate” by Cooper and an often-hostile press due to the support he has received from Len McCluskey. This is actually simplistic in my view, since Burnham has previously been a Blairite with notable appeal, bar his evolutions on public services in recent years. But his rhetoric has at times tempted the current impression of him, and post-election, I was also forced to note Ed Miliband’s leadership as a demonstration of how dangerous it can be when perceptions solidify into political realities. By contrast, though Kendall starts out as a somewhat obscure figure, this will allow her to define herself in the public eye for the first time – she is not encumbered by previous associations, which gives her unparalleled breathing room.

She’s bright, direct and personable

I think The Times put it best when it said Kendall "mixes blunt practicality with a beguiling empathy". She has that plain-speaking, engaging manner that we so often look for in politics and gained a lot of admirers with the Andrew Neil interview she used to launch her bid, in which she asked a surprised Neil an incisive question about social mobility (her deft response to a sexist Question Time gaffe by Phillip Hammond last year caught attention too). In an open letter to trade unionists, she told them that she counted herself among them because they “take power from the centre and put power in the hands of the many. That’s what I’m about too”. And the Independent noted her use of New Zealand Labor leader Norman Kirk’s maxim that people desire “somewhere to live, something to do, something to look forward to and someone to love” (before adding she wouldn’t advise on the last - a “jocular, if poignant, reference to the apparently amicable break-up…of her relationship with the actor Greg Davies”, of Inbetweeners fame).

She has a clear direction

As for the “blunt practicality”, Kendall doesn’t mince words about what she stands for and where Labour needs to go, even though not all of the Labour movement may be ready to hear it yet (even I’m not sure about some of her stands). She has said candidly that she thinks Labour lost because it misunderstood where the country was. She wants to champion the creation as well as the distribution of wealth, rewarding entrepreneurs who take risks in the economy. She embraces the coming EU referendum, eager to make the case for ‘In’, but is also keen to reform Europe to make it work better for us.

Kendall has also sought to flank the Tories on defence by pledging to sign up to the NATO 2% defence spending target, though the New Statesman did warn this could be a hostage to fortune, since fiscal rectitude is another priority of hers. At Progress conference, she made a Clinton-esque pitch to UKIP voters who feel “left behind” amid globalisation and mass immigration, by arguing that training and greater life chances are the most honest way to offer them reassurance. And she has said that investment in early-years education should be Labour’s priority over cutting tuition fees, noting that this will do comparatively more for social mobility (in Scotland, Labour has sometimes criticised the SNP for prioritising free university education and closing FE colleges when budgets are tight, effectively constraining working-class prospects while subsidising middle-class St Andrews graduates - Kendall’s logic here about relative progressive spending priorities is similar).

A vision for community and empowerment

Mostly in reference to her views on public service reform, Kendall is already being smeared by Cooper and Burnham for supposedly “swallowing the Tory manifesto” or “looking and sounding like the Tories” (though neither has had the courage to actually name her in their thinly-veiled attacks on Twitter, I’d note). It is true that Kendall firmly takes the side of users in public services and is pragmatic about how best to ensure standards, but she is also clear that this doesn’t mean matching the Tories like-for-like on the use of for-profit providers (and I’d remind that under Ed and Andy, Labour has not actually opposed private involvement – a 5% profit cap is not a 0% cap, something Natalie Bennett jibed Ed about in one of the leaders’ debates).

Liz addresses the Leicester stop of the Jarrow-to-London 'People's
March for the NHS', August 2014 (from Flickr/daliscar1)

Instead, Kendall wants to reorient the NHS towards community care and let patients make decisions about their own lives with personal care budgets (she wants the state to do things “with people, not to them”). Her comments on provider diversity have mostly focused on the use of not-for-profit social organisations and cooperatives in public services, which she is fond of describing as “where Labour came from” in reference to the Labour movement’s original civil society roots (she has worked with Labour’s brilliant Civil Society shadow Lisa Nandy MP here, who wants more social sector organisations to deliver services). This is also where Kendall herself cut her teeth – while she built up her political savvy advising Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman, she was previously a director at the Ambulance Services Network and the Maternity Alliance and a researcher for the health charity King’s Fund. And her pro-civil society instincts are similarly what led her to defend not-for-profit free schools run by local people – I’m actually in two minds here, but for what it’s worth, Andrew Adonis argues they can be viewed as an extension of the successful academies programme he masterminded for Labour.

I’m not surprised Kendall has caused a stir with these views, as she has stepped on a fault line in Labour – like Lord Maurice Glasman of Blue Labour fame, she longs for early Labour’s bottom-up version of how progress is achieved, while many in the party approach politics within a Fabian tradition that celebrates the central state somewhat more. David Miliband tugged at a similar thread in his leadership bid, and when he spoke stirringly at an August 2010 LFIG hustings, he felt it necessary to remind us all that “power...in the hands of the many, not the few” is printed on our party cards and that personal empowerment should be “our language, not Tory language”. I don’t mind that there is disagreement in the party on all this – we should have a vigorous debate, and many will be sympathetic to aspects of both approaches anyway (myself included). But what I do mind is the way that Kendall is being straw-manned and othered as a “Tory” by fellow Labourites for daring to outline her views. Labour has always been a broad church, and we should be capable of disagreeing without being so disagreeable.

That being said, where Kendall can improve is to more clearly articulate the progressive ends of some of her views. Economist Chris Dillow observed on his blog that Tony Blair’s skill was to triangulate, marrying sentiments from left and right to form a canny progressive consensus. The minimum wage, originally an unprecedented market intervention Tory MPs were whipped against, was explained as “making work pay”. “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of the crime” was another fine example, combining a “conservative” hard line on crime (which deprived Labour-voting communities are the most affected by, in fact) with commitment to interventions to pre-empt poverty and social breakdown.

From this angle, Dillow did praise the open letter on trade unionism from Kendall that I mentioned above – she counted herself among them, defended the union link and pledged to repeal any Conservative anti-union laws (straightforwardly “left”). But she also tacitly argued that to be stronger, the unions could rebuff the negative influence of Len McCluskey and engage the many trade union members who don’t currently vote Labour (who polls show hold views that are more reflective of Britain as a whole than those of the left-wing activist core of the union movement) – these sentiments appear more “right”, but would make Labour and the trade unions a stronger and more effective voice for working people overall (“left”). 

However, Dillow’s point was that her other “tanks on the Tory lawn” stances like free schools needed to be couched in progressive terms too. For example, she may want to stress them more clearly as an engine for social mobility (a core centre-left aim, and one highlighted by Adonis) and mandate that teachers in free schools should have to be qualified (already an existing Labour policy, which the Tories oppose). And she could put clear red water between herself and the Tories by opposing allowing free schools to be run by for-profit chains, so that they will instead remain firmly rooted in Labour’s civil society tradition (for-profit management has had a malign impact in Sweden, and it’s only Lib Dem influence that stopped Michael Gove going there last time). While we’re at it, Dillow pitched some other ideas about how Labour could triangulate on pressing issues such as business and immigration, which are well worth reading.

She can win – and that scares the Tories

While Kendall’s instincts do need to be fine-tuned to make clearer why her values should matter to left-wing voters too, what we do know is that they will fit the priorities of the voters in England and Wales Labour sorely needs to win over if we are to have any hope of climbing the electoral Everest we face in 2020. She may well be Labour’s silver bullet. The best indicator we have of this is that with Jarvis and Umunna out of the race, the torch of “the one the Tories fear” seems to have passed to Kendall, and while I wonder if they are somewhat underestimating his talents, Andy Burnham is very much who they say they want to face (five years ago, that was Ed Miliband). And I’m also mindful that as a stronger prospect than Cooper, Kendall represents our best chance to correct a historic wrong and elect not only the first female Labour leader, but the first female Labour Prime Minister too.

So let’s return to my original question – how far and how fast will the prospective leaders take us towards victory? With Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper, I believe their respective strengths are such that Burnham could stop the bleeding to UKIP, and both could make headway against the Tories in England and Wales. But I’m not yet convinced they can get anywhere near a majority - their past associations simply weigh too heavily against them, so I worry we would be ceding 2020 and be left “playing the long game”. This is something middle-class Labour politicians can afford to do, but working people and the most voiceless in our society cannot be left to languish under a decade or more of Tory government. A 2020 win demands audacity of us, and only Liz Kendall appears to be offering that.

It has to be Liz.