Where Rebecca Long-Bailey went wrong
Jeremy Corbyn famously said during the 2019 General Election that: “There is no such thing as Corbynism. There is socialism, there is social justice.” If Corbynism did ever exist as distinct from socialism and social justice, it is certainly over now. Labour’s defeat in December was immediately followed by Corbyn’s resignation and a leadership election where Keir Starmer decisively won out against the Left’s candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey. She had been Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy under Corbyn’s leadership where she most famously led on developing Labour’s Green Industrial Revolution (sometimes called Green New Deal) policies.
Long-Bailey’s leadership campaign never really got started and couldn’t have felt more different to Corbyn’s insurgent 2015 campaign – or even his re-election victory in 2016. Too often it felt like Long-Bailey never really wanted to be Leader of the Labour Party. She was just the only viable candidate the Left could offer, especially with Laura Pidcock losing her Parliamentary seat in the General Election. Some have said the Left entered the leadership election in an insurmountably weak position after Labour’s election defeat and we could never have hoped to beat Starmer. But Long-Bailey collected just 27.6% of the vote. The campaign should be disappointed with an embarrassing return, four years after Corbyn’s second leadership election where he beat Owen Smith in the first round of voting with 61.8%.
At times, Long-Bailey’s campaign alienated her natural base of supporters including by declaring herself a “Zionist” and uncritically signing up to the Board of Deputies of British Jews’ ten pledges, some of which were functionally unworkable as pointed out by Richard Burgon, the Left’s candidate for Deputy Leader. These capitulations are likely to have discouraged some left-wing members from voting or campaigning for her and evidently did little to attract the “soft-left” support they may have been designed to court. She also failed to lean in fully to the popularity of the Green New Deal, which she could credibly claim ownership of within the Party, instead continuing to mix messages between it and the ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ while rarely offering new and exciting policy areas to bolster the Green New Deal.
Other lessons for the Left from the Long-Bailey campaign include the need to prepare for every scenario. Long-Bailey’s excuse for the chaotic start to the campaign (compared to Starmer’s quick and professional start) was that she was campaigning in the General Election not preparing a leadership bid. But Labour’s defeat was always a possibility and the Left needs to be ready to move decisively and strategically whatever the outcome of these key junctures. Instead we wasted weeks after the General Election with widely reported factional maneuvering over who would run and staff the campaign. Those issues should be resolved behind closed doors before the contest starts. Although I have been critical of the management of Long-Bailey’s campaign – and those in charge should certainly take responsibility for its ineptitude – the Labour Left as a whole should take responsibility too. As a movement, we weren’t ready to spring in to action as we did for General Election campaigns. We were tired and devastated, but we will now live with the consequences of our collective lack of preparedness.
The final lesson to draw from this leadership election is that the base of “Corbynism” is less solid than we might have assumed. We can infer that roughly a quarter of Labour members and affiliates are committed to the socialist project within Labour based on Long-Bailey’s share of the vote. This is a solid base to work from, capable of achieving significant gains within the party if organised, but not a decisive majority. This shows that the Left needs to work to further, while continuing to build, its base of support and effectively activate those members so they productively contribute to the project of re-building our dominance in the Party.
This article is the first in a series from Chris Saltmarsh on the state of the Labour Left after Jeremy Corbyn. The series can be found here.
Image credit: YouTube Screengrab
The idea of a party with in a party is a big problem. It seems like Long-Bailey could have done better if she had just declared rather than consult if it was ok for her to stand. The Labour left would have fell behind her pretty quickly with out her losing ground during the consultation phase.
It is good to be reflective about the way that politics turns out and why but Chris Saltmarsh’s piece misses the point in several fundamental ways:
i) RLB got a quarter of the Labour leadership vote and this seems to come as a surprise. This muddles up two things, the strength of the left (as defined by him) and who voted for Corbyn in 2015 and 2016. Plenty of mainstream/’soft left’ Labour members voted for him as a signal that the tired ‘retail politics’ of the other candidates was played out, and that a new approach was needed. They voted for him again in 2016 because there is a certain generosity of spirit amongst Labour members, who felt that the PLP manoeuvring’s hadn’t given him a chance to prove himself. This didn’t mean that everybody (or even most people) who voted for him were true believing ‘Corbynistas’.
ii) RLB ‘s message was mixed. In fact it sounded as if she didn’t have any independent voice at all. Early in the campaign she wrote a piece in the Guardian lamenting the Tory victory for all the reasons about ‘austerity’ ‘the precarious economy’ and the general wickedness of oligarchs and the 1%. It was roundly criticised for its negativity and lack of vision. A few days later she popped up with a piece about how she knew working people in her constituency who bought their own house, had a couple of cars and holidayed abroad every year. Its aspirational tone sounded like it had been lifted direct from the Blair playbook. Would the real RLB please stand up?
iii) The ‘continuity Corbyn’ approach didn’t play well. To describe his performance in the 2019 General Election as ‘10 out of 10’ left a lot of Labour members reeling. What would 6/10 have looked like? Fewer seats than the Lib Dems? People join a political party in a parliamentary democracy to win power at the level of the state. That is what the Labour Party is for, and she seemed either not to understand this or not care. Which brings me to my next point
iv) The Green New Deal/Green Industrial Revolution has many good points but it has been critiqued from a green-left perspective for being too statist, too top down, and too narrow (sustainable agriculture? Biodiversity? Where are they when we need them?). RLB’s vision in so far as she had one, pre-supposed a Labour Government. But Corbynism was about ‘winning the argument’ (as if), not winning the election. Labour members saw through this disjunction.
v) Finally, RLB ‘s position on women’s reproductive rights was (if I’m generous) confused. She seemed to say one thing to the Catholic hierarchy in Manchester and then tried to say something else to other more radical audiences – like Labour members. It suggested that her policy positions consisted of telling people what she thought they wanted to hear. For all the criticism directed at Corbyn over the past few years he was at least consistent.
In relation to the self-defined ‘left’ in the Labour Party as a whole, its problem is exemplified in this article. There is no attempt to understand, let alone reach out to the ‘soft left’, the mutual co-operative or communitarian traditions in the Party, no effort to actually put into practice the ‘gentler kinder politics’ that Jeremy Corbyn himself espoused. The result? Unless they change their ways and fast, they will forever be confined to the 20-25% that RLB and Richard Burgon achieved. The Party has moved on, but they haven’t come to terms with that.