I meet Rebecca Long-Bailey in her latest makeshift office, a slightly grubby kitchen in Blackbird Leys Community Centre, one of the poorest areas of Oxford. She made this the latest stop of her campaign for the leadership on Monday evening, as she attempts to maintain the Left’s control over the Labour Party.
Long-Bailey is a woman of great modesty, raised the daughter of a Salford docker and trade union representative, I get the sense from our surroundings that socialism is not merely a vocation for her, but a calling. Her main rival for the leadership is Keir Starmer, who, when he was here in Oxford a fortnight ago, held his event in Wesley Memorial Hall. The contrast could not be more obvious.
I start on the much-hyped idea of the ‘Red Wall,’ the northern seats which Labour lost so heavily in December. Given that across Europe social democratic parties have lost their industrial heartlands and failed to win them back, I ask, is Labour is barking up the wrong tree in trying to win them back?
Long-Bailey is unchastened: “I think we need to win those seats back but we’ve also got to win the seats that we need to win a general election and that means appealing to all cross sections of the United Kingdom. It’s important to focus on the reasons why we lost so-called seats in the ‘Red Wall’ and we lost them for a variety of reasons. Brexit, and our position, the compromise that we out forward angered both leavers and remainers, and came across as quite confusing on the doorstep, certainly our activists reported that. I think the facts that our election campaign didn’t offer an overarching narrative or a message which resonated with communities and spoke to life improvement and aspiration was a huge thing. Many people didn’t understand that the Labour Party’s role was to improve their lives and they saw us as a Party sometimes of handouts rather than of aspiration. So I think it’s important to rebrand ourselves and focus a lot on the message going forward.”
Pressed on her definition of “aspiration,” an ideal most commonly associated with the Left’s most hated Labour leader, Tony Blair, Long-Bailey outlines her view of socialist aspiration.
“It’s aspiration but it’s real realisation of aspiration and it’s not just realising the aspiration of somebody who might be lucky enough to climb the ladder and achieve success like I did. It’s about making sure that no matter where you’re from, whatever community you’re from, no matter how wealthy your parents are, we all rise up together. And that only happens with a government that is ready to invest in the economy, to collaborate with businesses, to provide the critical infrastructure that we need to spur on investment and growth. To make sure that we’ve got an education system that’s fit for purpose, it skills up our people for the future, particularly with the fourth industrial revolution and automation presenting another huge challenge. So it runs right through everything. The Green Industrial Revolution is another one where it’s about aspiration, and again it’s not just aspiration of individuals to do better, it’s aspiration about what kind of world we want to live in and what our place in the world should be.”
Moving to parliamentary politics, Long-Bailey has recently come out in favour of mandatory reselection, meaning no Labour MP would be automatically reselected as a parliamentary candidate in each general election. Labour MPs have been notoriously difficult to deal with under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. What’s their reaction been to mandatory reselection, I ask Long-Bailey, and how would you deal with the PLP over the next 4-5 years if you were to win the leadership?
“The important point about open selection is that firstly no MP should ever feel that they’ve got a job for life, and most don’t if I’m honest, they realise that they’ve got to be accountable to their members,” Long-Bailey responds. “But the process that we’ve got within the Party at the moment was a bit of a fudge. We wanted to make the Party more democratic; Jeremy did a democracy review, and it resulted in our trigger ballot system being such that branches themselves had to actively campaign against a sitting MP if they wanted to have an open selection. So it’s very negative and it didn’t allow any new candidates to emerge without the stigma of being the person who tried to unseat the relevant MP. Now I think we need to have a discussion within the Party about how we can have a fair and open selection process that also recognises the hard work of MPs, and they shouldn’t have anything to worry about if I’m honest if they’re hardworking and they’re accountable to the local members then they should be welcomed with open arms in terms of going forward in that open selection process. But it also needs to be a system that allows for women to progress through the Party, for black and ethnic minorities to progress through the Party. So we need to have that frank discussion and I understand the concerns because on the other side of the fence there are concerns that if we have an open selection process then that might allow individuals with lots of wealth and means to campaign behind them, to suddenly install themselves in a constituency and actively campaign because they know that an open selection is coming up. But I don’t think we should be frightened about that because we’re supposed to be a democratic Party and we can’t democratise the economy if we’re not even able to democratise ourselves.”
Long-Bailey is the hope of Labour’s left in this election. If she loses, the consequences to the socialist revival that has occurred in the Party may well be dire, something which Long-Bailey seems aware of.
She finishes the interview with an appeal to socialist values and a rejection that Labour lost last year by going too far left, implying to could go even further.
“I think this leadership election is important and I know all of the candidates have talked about sticking to our values and not deviating. But I think I’m certainly the candidate that has spent the last four years working on many of the policies that were contained within our manifesto that would have helped us realise our vision of improving our communities lives. And I think the fundamental point and one of the particular reasons why I stood in this election was that, not because I’m personally ambitious, I’ve always been a worker in the background, developing the ideas and the policies, but I’m ambitious for my community and worry because we heard this after the general election that people were complaining about the policies. It was the policies that needed to change rather than the message, and the leader etc etc. And what I would say was that it wasn’t the policies, most of our policies were broadly popular and when you polled them independently without attaching them to the Labour Party, they did very very well. So it’s not the policies, it’s the way we packaged them and in fact I think we could go further than where we are at the moment in terms of our policy offering.”
