Labour

The persecution complex of the British left is both a psychological reality and the outcome of a cynical strategy. No one can doubt that the left feels victimised. But left-wing politicians have an interest in pretending that dark forces predetermine its defeat. If they are to keep their supporters in line, they can never take responsibility. They must convince Labour members they are victims of an elite conspiracy rather than of their own abysmal leadership. https://twitter.com/adamec87/status/1227239993623506944?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Maintaining the necessary levels of paranoia in the current Labour leadership contest looked a hard task. Until this week, the Labour party has resembled a Victorian family with a dirty secret.

As the well-worn cliché has it: if you’re not a socialist at 16, you don’t have a heart; if you’re still one at 60, you don’t have a head. The Labour party is on the brink of extinction. To survive, its members must use their heads. At 16, I was a fanatical socialist, reading Lenin, wearing a Chairman Mao hat and marching against the Iraq war. At 19, I went to Cuba. I learned about the revolution and planted crops with farmers, working with Amnesty workers and middle-aged Trots. The year I left university, David Cameron was elected prime minister and, for the first time since I was in primary school, we had a Tory government.

This week every contender for the Labour leadership and deputy leadership signed up to a series of pledges issued by the pressure group We Own It, an organisation established in 2013 to campaign against privatisation and in favour of what it calls ‘21st century public ownership’. The pledges repeat many of the promises made in Labour’s 2019 manifesto. They include nationalising various public utilities, introducing a publicly-owned broadband infrastructure provider, ending NHS ‘privatisation’, returning all schools to local government control, allowing bus services to again be run by councils, opposing profit-making in the justice system and ending the outsourcing of municipal services. Some of these pledges are less clear than others.

Keir Starmer has complained to the head of the civil service after a spat between political journalists and Downing Street. The row broke out after No. 10 insisted that only 'senior, specialist members of the lobby' could attend a briefing with Brexit negotiator David Frost. Several journalists decided to walk out of No. 10 as a result. But now Sir Keir has come to their rescue. The Labour leadership hopeful has written to Sir Mark Sedwill criticising Boris Johnson's media operation. In the letter, which carries Starmer's official campaign logo, the former Corbyn loyalist complained that briefing attendees 'should not be determined by political favouritism'.

Richard Burgon is an idiot. Yes, I know you subscribe to The Spectator expecting more high-brow invective but I believe in being direct. Now, ordinarily I’d be in favour of leaving such a simple creature to his own devices, but this is the Labour Party we’re talking about, so Daisley’s First Law applies: The worst candidate in any Labour election is the one most likely to win. Elections for the deputy leader of the Labour party are generally to be filed under ‘private grief’, but Burgon is bent on spreading the misery around. He wants to be ‘campaigner in chief’ and pledges that, ‘within the first month of being deputy leader I will visit every single seat we lost’.

Keir Starmer has made it through to the final round of the Labour leadership contest, having secured the backing of shop workers' union Usdaw. The party's rules state that a candidate needs to get the backing of three affiliated organisations, of which two must be trade unions (or the nomination of at least 33 constituency Labour parties), and along with the earlier backing of Unison and Labour's Environment Campaign SERA, Starmer has made it. Usdaw also nominated Angela Rayner for the deputy leadership, and she is now also through to the final round of her contest. This is a big week for nominations from affiliates, with both the GMB and Unite unions holding hustings with the candidates on Tuesday and Friday respectively.

Now that the second phase of the Labour leadership contest is underway, the five candidates are finalising their campaign teams. Some of them, of course, have had some kind of infrastructure running for a good long while before the December election was even called. Others are just announcing their big hires and co-chairs now. Here's who is working on each campaign, and what the line-up says about the pitch their candidate is making. Keir Starmer Jenny Chapman is the chair. She is the former MP for Darlington, in a nod to the importance of winning back seats Labour had formerly considered its heartlands. Her analysis of the election result is that Labour only pitched to 'about a third of the electorate and those people that live in cities who are fairly well-off people'.

Just as Hollywood's racist liberals love a Magical Negro, so young socialists love a Magic Grandpa who promises to shake the money tree, annul student debt and hand out free subsidies to the kulaks. Not all socialism is the same, though, and not just because some of it is national socialism. The Chinese communists under Deng Xiaoping declared ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. America's Magic Grandpa, Bernie Sanders, is a socialist with American characteristics, a millionaire whose life was recently saved by the insertion of an ingeniously capitalist heart stent into his clogged arteries. Being rich, Bernie could, if he needed it, expect to receive a replacement kidney without it first being cut out of a tax defaulter.