That’s her brand. Her schtick.
Just as Johnson musses his hair and bumbles around to appear more like a man of the people, Jess Phillips presents herself as a normal person (just like you) who happens to be in Parliament. Polish would ruin the effect.
This isn’t a criticism of Jess Phillips by any means. I quite like her.
Her Twitter feed irritates my inner pedant insofar as it is filled with rambling, ungrammatical sentences. But frankly I could live with that if she could pull the Labour Party 1) together and 2) all in the right direction. She says sensible things, even if she doesn’t say them perfectly.
I think you can judge a lot by seeing how they conduct themselves in the company of those they deeply disagree with.
Here she is with Jacob Rees-Mogg of all people. I suspect that this kind of discussion is actually far more prevalent than the voluble polarisation of the media would have us believe. I’d like to see more of it.
Well, she didn’t slap him so she has more restraint than I do.
As for constructive dialogue, I’ll point to this from Phillips’ Twitter feed, which is both heartening and an example of the sort of writing stuff I was grumping about above.
That was pretty good!
Hahaha!
A little more kindness and forgiveness all round would be a blessed relief I think.
Whether she will run and win I don’t know. She has a lot of Momentum against her (note the capital M) but her general warmth and approachability could potentially be a vote winner. There has been zero of that from Corbyn’s group and I get nothing of that from their preferred candidates either.
Short anwser: Democracy, that how it works; you go with the higher number of votes.
Long answer: Who determines this “based on lies” thing? Would you trust the currect Boris government to decide they won’t respect a vtoed because it was “based of commie lies”?
Rayner isn’t a Corbynite, she’s a pragmatic, centre-left social democrat who has been smart enough not to piss off the ruling clique or its supporters. During the campaign, she was given the chance to be one of the leading voices over the likes of Thornberry and Starmer precisely because she wasn’t seen as a threat to the Corbynites’ chosen candidate, who happens to be her best mate.
Long-Bailey, who was effectively anointed during the campaign, is a much less impressive thinker and speaker than her friend. But she was always going to be the clear frontrunner, so Rayner has probably known for a while that her best move is not to stand for the top job now. If she’s as smart as I hope she is - and to get from where she started out to where she is now suggests a remarkable talent for politics - her positional instincts make Rayner my best bet for the next Labour PM, two or three general elections into the future.
If Labour really wanted to have any kind of shot at the next election, however, and the left of the party was willing to make such a major concession to electability, on first glance I think their best choice would be Lisa Nandy. Out of all those named in connection with the job, she looks the least likely to scare potential voters away. There’s no chance she’ll go full Blairite in the current party climate, so the left vote ought to follow her come election time. But she could also do much better with the two groups with which the current leadership is so incredibly unpopular: those courted by the Lib Dems in the south, and those courted by the Tories in the north. She might even have a shout of clawing back a Scottish seat or two.
As it is, I don’t think there’s any realistic chance of Nandy - or anyone else who promises a clean break - winning this leadership race. There are murmurs of recognition among some of those who followed Corbyn to this point that a major shift is needed, but my impression is that it’s nowhere near enough to prevent continued indulgence of his project.
If, as seems inevitable, the next leader is a woman then I think it’s really important that they don’t talk about it. They can and should certainly talk about issues affecting women. But claims to the relevance of their own gender should be avoided at all costs. Competence and confidence are the main things they need to project, and that means keeping the focus always on what they can do, and not what they are.
I think it would be big mistake to even nod towards it during the leadership campaign. The other parties have managed to bring it about completely organically and labour should allow the same thing to happen, they leave their future female leader open to a lot of unvoiced, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, accusations of quota-filling and that isn’t helpful.
Yes it’s an important distinction between do labour need an internal operator who can put the house in order and build credibility, or more of an immediate strong face to put to the people in the aftermath of last week. Starmer could be that first person for sure.
Basically what Stanislaus posted above - classic #1 Collect the underpants. #2 ??? #3 profit situation. We have a few reasonable candidates, we know what the goals are but what’s the strategy, the roadmap? That is the question.
id go for the election after next because by that time the populace will painfully realize all Brexit did is make a bunch of rich bastards even richer by tax avoidance and the rainbows and unicorns pooping solid gold to cure all their woes that they were promised ain’t ever happening
Labour need to start embracing the good things Tony Blair did rather than see him as a boogeyman.
Fucked up on Iraq but he’d won two elections with over 400 seats before 9/11 even happened.
I’ve been saying for a decade now that Labour won’t move on until it does a proper assessment of the good, the bad, and the ugly of Blairism. Treating the whole thing as ‘red tory’ or ‘just plain evil’ has led them to ignore all the lessons to be had from both its successes and failures.
It would probably help if Blair himself kept his damned mouth shut for a while, though.
One of the biggest lessons that they clearly haven’t learned is that breadth of ambition is rarely a good thing in politics. Too many competing projects and priorities is what led to the epic levels of waste and incompetent failure under New Labour. Much more than Iraq (appalling as that was), it’s this part that really battered their reputation with the electorate, as scheme after scheme blew up in scandal or stupidity (see The Blunders of Our Governments by Anthony King and Ivor Crew, which should be required reading for anyone considering a career in politics imo).
This latest manifesto, however, promised a breadth of ambition far in excess of that offered by Blair’s Labour. The amount of work involved in planning, implementation and oversight would have dwarfed anything attempted by government outside of a world war (or the immediate aftermath thereof). And yet, at the same time, it was curiously shallow in its ambitions. Full implementation would not have been anywhere near as radical a change as you might expect for the amount of work involved. Almost none of the policies offered any kind of transformational effect in themselves, and the general thrust seemed to offer no coherent vision of a new socio-economic reality at which to aim.
One policy in the manifesto that did offer a genuinely transformational effect - the building of 100,000 council houses every year by the end of the parliament - was going to be incredibly difficult (some say outright impossible) thanks to a lack of both skilled labour and material supply chains, as well as the problem of securing suitable land in the areas where such housing is needed. Targeting a massive increase in council house building certainly could have been good policy and politics if it had been the manifesto’s centrepiece. Tacking it onto the side of a program which involved taking direct responsibility for virtually all of the country’s major infrastructure, among a whole slew of other new tasks for central government, and what you had was a recipe for fraud and failure.
So to bring my conversation with myself back on-topic, I guess one of the main things I’m hoping for in the next Labour leader is someone who has a vision radical enough to promise real change, but narrow enough to be plausibly achievable.
Another thing is the ability and determination to bring the party’s best talents together in a front bench characterised more by competence than sectarian loyalty.
I want someone who has the leadership skills needed to manage ambitious people who don’t share their exact vision of what is best for the party or country. I want someone brave and strong enough to handle having both a John McDonnell and an Yvette Cooper around the same cabinet table.
On McDonnell, while he takes a large share of blame for this latest disaster, unlike Corbyn he has a serious mind for policy and enough political nous to be a good team player in a more broad-based cabinet. Given a brief much more limited than wholesale revolution of the British socio-economic settlement, I think he could do a good job. As minister for Housing, Culture, or International Development, he could be a real asset, bringing an experienced left-wing voice capable of speaking truth to power.
I don’t think this question been addressed in this thread: how does the Labour Party sélect its next leader? I gather that the party has moved away from a major role for the Parliamentary party and given greater say to the rank and file membership?
Does the selection process implicitly favour some candidates over others?