New face of British Labour has a daunting challenge

The British Labour Party, which suffered its worst election defeat since 1935, is engaged in a long process to select a leader. Britain can be thankful Jeremy Corbyn is stepping down. His leadership has been an unmitigated disaster for the once great party.

Observing the contest for the Labour leadership from London has been a surreal experience. Corbyn’s shadow looms large. Over the past decade, the party has moved considerably to the left. There is no place for moderation or centrism, let alone pragmatism, as this is a contest between the left of the party.

There are three candidates: ­Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy and Sir Keir Starmer. Long-Bailey is the heir to Corbyn and brooks no criticism of his policies but concedes he should have done more to address anti-Semitism.

Nandy has at least acknowledged Labour’s failures and systemic problems, and has pledged to pivot the party back to its working-class roots.

Starmer is the frontrunner. He is intelligent and capable but often dull. He is a former human rights lawyer and director of public prosecutions. He is a Queen’s Counsel, a Member of the Privy Council and was knighted in 2014. He has been careful in his criticism of Corbyn and argues the party must not “retreat from the radicalism of the past few years”.

The blue-collar knight, who was named after the party’s founder, James Keir Hardie, has support from the soft left to which Ed Miliband and Neil Kinnock belonged. He has grudging support from what ­remains of the old right and New Labour crowd. The hard left, or radical left, personified by Tony Benn and Corbyn, backs Long-Bailey. Nandy has been harder to pigeonhole.

The convoluted process to determine a new leader will conclude on April 4. Candidates had to be nominated by a mix of MPs and MEPs, constituency parties and affiliated societies or unions. Minimum thresholds of support were required to reach the final stage. Party members and registered and affiliated supporters began voting via post last month.

None of the candidates looks like leading Labour back to power any time soon. The task, as ever, is not to shift to the left but to appeal to swinging voters who occupy the middle ground of politics. Labour must win votes from the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats while getting its own supporters out to vote. Easier said than done.

Labour has been in power for 30 of the past 100 years. Only four men have led the party to an election victory: Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair.

MacDonald and Attlee were born in the 19th century, before the party existed. Wilson died in 1995. So Blair, as he noted recently, is the only person alive who has led Labour to power.

Yet Blair is a pariah inside the party he led from 1994 to 2007. He led Labour to three successive election victories — a feat achieved by nobody else — and was prime minister for 10 years. Although he has a strong legacy on economic, social and environment policy, he has not been forgiven for his support for the Iraq War. New Labour is a term that is now banished from the party.

While the world has changed and the challenges are different today, the essential strategy for winning elections remains the same.

Blair recently warned the party against reverting to tax-and-spend policies, a big government approach, anti-Western foreign policy, an embrace of identity politics and a “shouty denunciation” of anybody who disagrees with it.

“Labour has always won when it secured the centre of British politics, addressed the future and broadened its appeal; and yet despite this obviously being true, we have exhibited an extraordinary attachment to retreating into a narrow part of the left which has always ended in defeat,” Blair said last month.

“Then, when defeated, we say we will listen to the people, and for a short time we do, before we decide that what they’re saying is too uncomfortable and lapse into our comfort zone, only to edge with agonised slowness back to where we should have been in the first place.”

Labour has lost four elections in a row. But many party members would rather remain wedded to the purity of their policies than change to win an election. They are not interested in building a new coalition of voter support or developing a saleable and achievable model for centre-left politics in the new century.

A January YouGov poll showed just how delusional party members are. Can you believe that Corbyn, despite his twin election defeats, is the leader that party members view most favourably? He has a high 71 per cent favourability rating among members but is the most unpopular party leader — ever — among all voters.

Miliband, who also lost an election, has a 70 per cent favourability rating among members. Labour prime ministers have not fared too badly: Attlee (66 per cent favourability), Gordon Brown (65 per cent), Wilson (62 per cent). Blair, the most successful, is viewed favourably by just 37 per cent of members. He’s below Kinnock (46 per cent) and even the hapless Michael Foot (45 per cent).

Starmer is the best of the leadership candidates. If, as is widely expected, he is elected leader next month he will have an enormous job ahead of him to make the Labour Party a viable electoral force. He will have to purge many of the Corbyn loyalists and dump a swath of radical policies. There is little sign he will do either.

This year, the Labour Party marks 120 years since its founding. On February 28, 1900, the Labour Representation Committee was established to organise and campaign for working-class representatives to be elected to the House of Commons. As the party recovers from its most recent rout, and chooses a new leader, the future looks bleak.