Tag Archives: labour leadership

At the time of writing, we have no idea who the new Labour leader is. Whoever it is, I wish him or her well in their task of holding this most incompetent and mediocre of Tory governments to account.

It shouldn’t have taken this long for Labour to choose their new leader, of course. The contest has been interminable. The hustings have been tedious. The debates have been largely dull. But at least they’ve managed to get a new leader in post in 2020 – something which, apparently, is beyond the wit of our own party.

Instead, we’ve to wait another year on top of an already very generous transition period. I can’t say I’ve seen a single argument made in favour of doing this which stacks up. Indeed, every single reason not to choose our new leader during the Covid-19 state of uncertainty and looming crisis can be flipped on its head and turned into quite a good reason to plough on as originally planned. For example:-

We need an experienced hand at the tiller just now. Ed Davey, the argument runs, has the experience and gravitas needed to take us through this difficult period. Never mind that it’s frankly outrageous for a supposedly liberal party which is supposedly in favour of democracy to suspend its own democratic processes in this way. Never mind that we have other MPs who have been involved in crisis situations in their careers outside of politics, and never mind that nobody is really paying attention to us at the moment anyway so who cares. On which…

We’ll get more attention if we wait until the crisis is over. I’m not convinced anyone outside of the party, certainly outside of the political sphere, is really going to care any more next year than they would if we did it in 2020. Why would they? Indeed, I think we might get more positive attention from the press at least if we do it now – we’ll get props for having the first ever digital-only party leadership contest. And we’ll get a nice press release out of how much CO2 we’ve saved by not ferrying the contenders and their coteries across the country for months on end.