Following December’s devastating election defeat, Jeremy Corbyn has announced his resignation and the leadership race to replace him has begun in earnest.
The current candidates are Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry. Clive Lewis and Jess Phillips have already dropped out of the race.
Though all the candidates have committed to maintaining the Party’s policy platform created under Corbyn, Long-Bailey remains the candidate of the Left; the other three candidates are on the soft left of the Party.
Provided they receive the requisite nominations from Trade Unions and Constituency Labour Parties (which may not happen for Thornberry), the candidates will proceed to a membership vote, in which they will be ranked in order of preference. The candidate with the least number of first placed votes will be eliminated in each round, with their votes redistributed to the candidate ranked second on each ballot. This process will continue until a candidate receives a majority of the vote.
Starmer and Long-Bailey are the most likely victors, polling showing both having a significant chance of winning.
Labour is also undergoing an election for Deputy Leader after Tom Watson opted not to stand for reelection in 2019. The candidates include the frontrunner Angela Rayner, along with Rosena Allin-Khan, Richard Burgon, Dawn Butler and Ian Murray.
Voting will commence on February 21, before the results of the election are announced on April 4.
Here, Cherwell profiles the major candidates, their strengths and weaknesses.
Keir Starmer
The Shadow Brexit Secretary is widely seen as the frontrunner in the race, appearing as a ‘safe pair of hands’ to Party members who have experienced four consecutive election defeats.
The MP for Holborn and St Pancras received the most nominations from MPs with 88; his closest challenger was Long-Bailey on 33. Among his supporters is the Anneliese Dodds, the MP for Oxford East, who hosted him in Oxford a fortnight ago.
His left-wing credentials have been questioned by some within the Party. He backed Owen Smith “100%” during his failed attempt to defeat Jeremy Corbyn in 2016, and has since employed a number of Smith staffers on his leadership campaign.
Still, he stressed in his launch piece for The Sunday Mirror that Labour “must not lose sight of our values” and has pledged to unite all factions of the Party. More damaging may be his role in crafting the Party’s Brexit policy, widely seen as pivotal to December’s defeat, though attacks have yet to land.
Emily Thornberry
Thornberry may be the candidate Boris Johnson most fears facing over the dispatch box at PMQs, ably deputising for Corbyn over the last few years in questioning both Johnson and Theresa May. She has been notably loyal to Corbyn, despite not standing politically on the left of the Party. One of the few who did not resign from the Shadow Cabinet in 2016, Thornberry served as both Shadow Foreign Secretary and Shadow Brexit Secretary for several months.
Nonetheless, she has been repeatedly dogged by claims of being the candidate of a liberal metropolitan elite. She was forced to resign as Shadow Attorney General in 2014 after she tweeted a picture of a house adorned with three flags of St George in Rochester and Strood. Thornberry has also been a key figure in the pro-European wing of the Party, wearing a necklace made of the EU stars at Party Conference last year.
Thornberry scraped into the next round with 23 MP nominations, and has largely failed to gain traction in the campaign.
Lisa Nandy
The Wigan MP represents perhaps the Party’s best chance at unifying its various factions. Nandy has a solidly left-wing voting record in Parliament, though is not seen as a Corbynite after she resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in 2016.
Nandy was one of the few Labour MPs to argue against a second Brexit referendum, and has based her campaign in attempting to reconnect with Labour’s traditional voters outside of metropolitan areas, many of whom were lost in the election.
After Clive Lewis failed to secure the necessary parliamentary nominations to proceed to the next round, Nandy is the only BAME candidate for Leader, though Dawn Butler and Rosena Allin-Khan are standing for Deputy.
Unlike the other three candidates, Nandy remains a largely unknown quantity, and could pose a potent challenge to Starmer and Long-Bailey as the campaign continues.
Rebecca Long-Bailey
Cherwell met with, and interviewed, Long-Bailey last week. Our profile of her can be found here.
https://cherwell.org/2020/02/01/rebecca-long-bailey-on-aspiration-and-going-further-left/
