I’ve heard people say that they are fatigued with the Labour party leadership race, that the party have made a mistake by allowing the contest to run on this long, diverting media attention from the key policy areas where Labour should be challenging the government. The candidates certainly seem tired, and I can understand why, travelling up and down the country and speaking at hundreds of CLP, town hall and media events is not an easy task either logistically or in terms of their stamina. As we gently move into silly season I think they all deserve a short break to prepare for the final push.
But although I am excited and energised by the prospect of a David Miliband victory, I can’t help feeling that the way this leadership battle has been structured has been wrong from the start.
I know it’s easy to criticise with hindsight, but I think that Labour has failed to set the terms of this leadership contest to allow party members, and future Labour voters, to get a real sense of who these candidates are and what they will do as Labour leader.
It was evident that we would be in a post-election, post-power vacuum when this contest was being planned by party staff. With an acting leader who has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and seeing that things tick over nicely until conference it’s not surprising that haven’t been set on fire by the shadow front bench in the Commons, despite a bit of a refresh with trusted performers such as Gordon Marsden being brought into shadow posts that were vacated by MPs who we lost in the election. Labour’s election manifesto has essentially been junked by all but one of the leadership candidates and there are various attempts to either protect or subtley rubbish Labour’s record in government by the candidates on key issues such as Iraq, academies, tuition fees, reforming the public sector, and our response to the financial crisis. To their credit, the candidates have tried to create key policy differences between each other and some have put forward specific proposals to at least give members a sense of what their leadership would look like.
But I would like to have seen much earlier on in this contest a clear set of issues defined by the Labour party on which the candidates were asked to define themselves. This could have included the public sector, aspiration and equality, and financial stability. But by leaving it down to the candidates to get the ball rolling we have inevitably had to wait a long time for some of them to cautiously set out their stall. This has missed a key window of interest amongst the party membership, Labour supporters and the media – who are obsessed with the Nick and Dave show.
The numerous hustings should have been themed around specific policy areas to allow proper debate on key issues. Also candidates should have been asked to publish policy on those issues at the same time such as an education manifesto week, followed by health, security and so on. Not only would this have allowed members to put the candidates side by side and compare their ideas, it would have also forced the candidates to focus on what their platform is as a potential leader. At the moment I think that only the two Milibands really have this and it’s evident from the field that some of the candidates aren’t really sure why they are doing this.
Finally this kind of approach would have guaranteed some more structured media coverage of the contest that showed Labour still has innovative and relevant ideas. Whereas at the moment, we see the BBC doing its duty by asking David Miliband to comment at the end of a three minute piece about Cameron’s diplomatic clangers in India but no real sense of a policy debate within the Labour party about how we want our new leader to approach foreign affairs.
When we have to run this contest again, hopefully not for some time, there are definitely lessons to be learnt about how to engage our members in the process, and ensure that we attract new ideas and supporters to our party through the process.