Labour leadership hustings: "the closer you are to winning, the more vacuous"

Love him or loathe him, Jeremy Corbyn stood out as the candidate with the most fire last night. Perhaps there’s a kind of freedom that comes with being the outsider, but he knew why he was on stage and he articulated it. It was no coincidence that he went in for no hedging, no pandering and received most of the applause.

The problem of course, is his content. Labour can’t win in England by turning into the Socialist Worker's Party. To elect Corbyn would be to walk further down a dark path. For the last five years, Labour’s agenda has assumed that people are either needy, greedy or irrelevant. We had nothing to say about wealth creation. As Corbyn said himself, his priorities would be equality, council housing and public services. To choose him would be a statement to the country: Sorry England, we didn’t listen and we still don’t get it.

Liz Kendall, who I support, gracefully expressed her understanding of this when she said; “I care passionately about those who are struggling on the bedroom tax or zero hours contracts, but we have to speak to the whole country... we didn't speak enough to those who weren't on the minimum wage or who might own their own home or run their own business." Phrases like that widen our politics without alienating our Labour heartlands. She did the same on the economy saying, “unless we balance the books, live within our means, get the debt, the deficit down, we cannot do the things we are passionate about.” She was the only one who had anything to say about bringing regional balance back to our country, and she wasn’t afraid to disagree with Corbyn, even when he was getting the applause.

Yvette Cooper was also stronger than expected. She spoke passionately about the need to restore contribution in welfare, while being brave enough to talk about how important it is to get support when you need it, referring to her own year of illness.

But too often in the debate, I found myself wishing that the other candidates would be as straight and clear as Corbyn. It seems as if the closer you are to winning, the more cautious and vacuous you need to be. Throughout the debate, balance seemed to be used as an excuse for vagueness. All the candidates said they understood people’s concerns about immigration, but nothing was going to change about the party’s offer from 2015. There were times when all of them felt they were pandering rather than leading.

This is not to say that any of this is easy. Listening to the audience last night, it’s clear that the stark divide between people and politicians remains in place. Our leadership candidates are dealing with decades of disappointment beyond their control; expenses, broken promises, scandals, lies. When the trust has decayed this far, saying the right thing is not enough, and professionalism is a liability—smoothness is manipulation, and eloquence distance. It struck me that if our leadership candidates had made exactly the same contributions but speaking as audience members from the floor, they would have received a very different reception for identical content.

The news headlines after the debate revealed exactly why our leaders tiptoe so cautiously. Most of the papers picked up on Andy Burnam’s line that “the party comes first,” when of course we all know—as Kendall corrected him—that the country does. But anyone listening would know that Burnham was simply saying that the party should come first above his own preferences on a second leadership election. The country has never had a direct say in triggering internal contests, but of course that context was deliberately forgotten. The candidates have a huge incentive to play it safe, and that makes it almost impossible to speak from the heart.

Cutting through these problems is, however, exactly what leadership is. We need someone fearless, who can risk the press and earn the trust of people who are justly cynical. The answer cannot be to pander, but to love and to challenge. For too long Labour has treated the people as if they are to be feared, mollycoddled or ignored when they should be trusted and engaged. No candidates in the debate stopped to ask a follow up question of the audience, or thanked the firefighter for his years of service. No one was quite willing to cede their time for the people’s. Whoever wins will have to build a team not just of Labour members, but of citizens, and that means having the courage to talk less about ourselves and what makes us comfortable, and more about the people and their place in rebuilding our country.