The most striking thing about last night’s debate is that no one with a vote seemed to actually be listening.
This was clear from the polls conducted by Sky News before and after the debate. At the beginning of the programme the audience were asked who they wanted to win, and Jeremy Corbyn came first by a country mile. A couple of hours later when they were asked who they thought had actually won, virtually nothing had changed with Corbyn a terrifying 75 per cent ahead of second placed Liz Kendall.
Let us be honest, anyone watching a debate on Sky News at 8pm on a Thursday evening will in all likelihood have voted five minutes after receiving their ballot paper, so it will be unlikely to have changed many minds. Also the length of the contest has caused many members to switch off, relying on their first impressions or pre-existing views.
What any swing voters there watching will have seen is an audience of Labour party members cheering raucously the idea of printing money that would never be repaid, and the statement that there is almost no circumstance in which the British army would be deployed – worrying news for anyone watching from the Falkland islands. Whoever is announced as Labour’s next leader on 12 September will struggle to convince the public that the party shares their aspirations, and will not put their livelihoods at risk after scenes like this.
It is a shame that those who ultimately will make this choice were not paying attention last night, because after weeks of repetition we actually saw something different.
There was genuine shock from the candidates when, after endless hustings across the country, they were asked a question they had not been asked before on legalising marijuana for medical use. An audience member in a dog collar asked the candidates’ views on faith schools, which led to some genuinely interesting responses.
The approach taken by the candidates changed too. While at the first televised debate Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper had been careful to appease Corbyn’s supporters, they now took turns criticising his policies as dangerous and unworkable.
Burnham took him to task for his suggestion that the United Kingdom could leave Nato, and Cooper passionately tore apart his ridiculous policy of printing money to pay for a spending binge. Perhaps if they had done this earlier instead of competing for Corbyn’s second preferences the polls might be different today.
Only Kendall has consistently taken Corbyn’s arguments head on. Not accepting the easy answers and facing up to the hard truths on why we lost so badly in May. Her willingness to tell crowds what she knows they do not want to hear may have been the reason she polled ahead of the other two mainstream candidates on the night.
Labour members and supporters may have already made up their mind as to who will be the next leader of the opposition, but it is the electorate as a whole who will decide who is prime minister in 2020.
In May they decided that they could not trust Labour with their vote. It will be a difficult task to convince them that they can in time for 2020. To win, Labour needed to use this leadership contest to start building its house of victory on a bedrock of trust. Instead, it is set to sink on foundations of sand.
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Alex Sanderson is former parliamentary candidate for Chelsea and Fulham. She tweets @_AlexSanderson
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Jeremy Corbyn was judged to have outperformed the other candidates by 80.6%, of the 8000 people polled after the debate! Liz Kendall came second with 9.1%, Yvette Cooper on 5.7% and Andy Burnham trailing on 4.6%. I suspect the actual Leadership election results may be closer than that, although the figure for Liz Kendall is probably correct, within a margin of +- 2%.
I really like Liz Kendall and here’s the BUT I voted for Andy because it was tactical voting to keep Corbyn out.
I think that’s quite common.
I found this to be such a negative contribution from an author whose understanding of Quantitative Easing amounted to nothing more than the handbag economics of the old school – along with the now repetitive disaster stories of the media and Osbourne. Labour members/supporters are no longer to be convinced by the ‘top downers’ who failed to appreciate that printing money for productive investment and growth does not require to be paid back – it produces its own payback. This is opposed to the alternative of the PFI (6 x investments) which is already starting to kill the health service. The instincts of much of grassroots Labour along with eminent economists now get beyond the nonsense that handbag collections of money diminishes deficit in multiple ways.
The hard truth is that austerity does not work, that New Labour was over-relaxed about the consequences of letting financial speculators run amok, that Blair hollowed out the Labour Party and stifled all thinking for two decades and that Ed Miliband did not have time enough to turn a broken ship around. The writer might reflect that the ‘progressives’ have now lost two Elections and the whole of Scotland. Voters decided in 2010 and 2015 that they did not trust New Labour or Blue Labour. Never mind, new members will rebuild the Party with a scaffolding of democracy, maybe on fresh ground.
Blair and the Labour Party in power of course did not hallow out the Labour party whatsoever because on just about any social or economic indicator life improved for most working people in Britain.
Before the global crisis broke in 2008 our economy be it jobs, growth , productivity was doing fine hence Labour being re-elected after 4 years in 2001, (the so called quiet landslide) with 160 + majority and again in 2005 with impressive majority. On education and university expansion , family/child issues, poverty/ low pay reductions, job conditions, pensions, tax credits for families , reduced VAT on heating, Winter allowance, EMA for students in schools, civil and equall rights, help for Wales/Scotland the list goes on but the lazy Corbynites are as always spinning half truths about Labour in Power their obsession with TB overides everything they see post their defeats of M. Foot et. al…
Moreover in 2010 Brown won more seats than Miliband and in Scotland there was a whopping 10% swing to Labour. I do not think 2015 was about New Labour whatsoever as Marginal voters cited ‘Red Ed’, his unlikely prospects as PM, his closeness to Unions or Sturgeon and Red Ed’s reluctance to embrace the Deficit issue. So nothing to do with New Labour. All voter surveys/voter panels and research on voting trends in marginal seats have people in key marginals totally rejecting Corbyn as most of the people at my work said today Corbyn will not get their general election vote as he is the wrong person to be the next Prime Minister of the UK.and is not suited to run the British gov. The press will of course totally crucify him and funding for Labour’s election in 2020 will dry up..
Have you been kicked off LabourList and hope to get a better reception here? Peter Mandelson and some other contributors from the ‘far right’ of the Party may agree with your views but I suspect the majority do not!
Democracy is a wonderful thing, although New Labour may belittle it, when it reveals them as an isolated clique. All will be revealed on the 12th September – will Liz Kendall get 7% of the vote or could it be as high as 8%? Perhaps 1 in 14, or 1 in 12, indicates the true level of support for this old and failed cult?
You are ‘personalising’ issues because as always those like yourself who are defending a ‘Hard Leftist’ lurch ( The independent’s label describing Jeremy ) do so based on the same emotive rhetoric which is based on:
denial of what Labour achieved for working class people over 13 yrs as people like Alan Johnstone and Gordon Brown have set out as I did above;
denial of how ‘ex-Labour’ swing voters report they will not vote JC, ( an iconic example ,the BBC News Night/ IPOS panel of such voters, showed not a single voter for J.C.)
denial of the fact especially in England & Wales that the G.E.s are won from ‘the centre ground’ not the perceived ‘extremes’ mainly because marginal seat swing voters are least likely to embrace the extremes of Tory pary as in the 2001 or Labour with Foot in 1981 and JC as will be the case in 2020.
Mr Leslie is a member of the Cameron appreciation society in the Labour Party. He is the one, of four members Jimmy Sands, the White Van Man, and Mr OConnor.
They did not kick him off, laugh him off is more like.