Afternoon summary
- Emily Thornberry has declared she is entering the race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, revealing she warned the Labour leadership that backing a Brexit election would be an “act of catastrophic political folly”. For a full round-up of today’s developments in the Labour leadership contest, see the summary and analysis at 3.06pm.
- Boris Johnson has received a warm reception from Tory MPs at the 1922 Committee. One MP described the atmosphere at this afternoon’s meeting as “euphoric”. The former minister Robert Halfon told the Press Association:
[Johnson] said we’ve got a lot of work to do. The voters, they’ve lent us their vote and we need to prove to the people that we can keep our pledges and promises. It’s in getting Brexit sorted in the next few weeks, but that we’ve got a lot of work to do - there’s not a moment to lose.
That’s all from me for today.
Thanks for the comments.
Here is Richard Burgon explaining why he is considering standing for the deputy leadership of the Labour party.
I told @BBCPolitics I’m considering running as Deputy Leader to ensure members have an option - for both Leader & Deputy - of someone who backed Jeremy from the start, nominated him & will ensure our popular policies are maintained, while also learning the lessons of our defeat. pic.twitter.com/iObAwKsF6i
— Richard Burgon MP (@RichardBurgon) December 18, 2019
Burgon is stressing the fact that he nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership in 2015 because this differentiates him from Angela Rayner, who is currently the favourite amongst those likely to run for the deputy leadership. Rayner supported Corbyn in the summer of 2016, when most Labour MPs backed a motion of no confidence in him and dozens of MPs refused to serve on his front bench, but she was not one of the 35 MPs who nominated him for the leadership when he first stood the year before.
In the Commons more MPs have been swearing in today. Here is the Conservative MP Kemi Badenoch swearing in yesterday with her baby.
This is from Gareth Snell, who lost his seat as Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central last week, on Keir Starmer’s Guardian interview. Snell was one of the Labour MPs in the last parliament strongly arguing that the party had to accept the result of the 2016 referendum.
Those of us in leave seats with small
— Gareth Snell (@gareth_snell) December 17, 2019
majorities in towns and small cities *begged* @Keir_Starmer to listen to us and our constituents when we told him that the party’s brexit policy was losing us votes. He wouldn't listen and we lost. https://t.co/tm6pgnCSiA
Here is Sky’s Lewis Goodall on Tony Blair’s speech this morning.
Problem with Blair critique is he puts all Momentum/left types into one amorphous blob, the "hard left". This isn't true. There is a hard left faction which is reminscent of Bennites but there's a much bigger soft left group who could potentially peel away from Corbyn faction...
— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) December 18, 2019
UK will not be able to agree transition extension after 1 July, EU diplomats told
EU diplomats have been told it will be impossible to extend the Brexit transition after 1 July 2020, if Boris Johnson decides in the second half of next year he wants extra time to negotiate the future relationship.
At a private meeting on Tuesday, diplomats from the 27 member states were told by senior EU lawyers that 1 July 2020 was a hard deadline that could not be changed, if no extension was agreed in the first half of the year.
The UK is due to leave the EU on 31 January and then falls into an 11-month transition period, where it will remain in the EU single market and customs union without voting rights.
Under the withdrawal agreement negotiated by Theresa May, the British government has the option to request a one-off extension of the transition of one or two years, before 1 July 2020.
The prime minister has promised to legislate against any extension to the transition, but that has not killed speculation that the UK may seek a last-minute delay in late 2020 if a no-deal exit is looming.
Lawyers at the EU council’s legal service moved to quash that option on Tuesday, by delivering an uncompromising message that the transition would cease to exist after 1 July 2020, because the withdrawal agreement leaves no provision for later agreement.
The message was conveyed in stark terms by EU lawyers, who want this point transmitted to all EU27 national capitals.
However, the EU has a track record in declaring immovable deadlines, only to find a workaround when a no-deal deadline loomed. Some EU officials had previously insisted the UK would have to leave the EU before European parliamentary elections in May 2019, only for the UK to secure a delay and elect British MEPs.
EU diplomats believe Boris Johnson when he says he doesn’t want to extend the transition period. “It is probably one of the areas where Johnson isn’t lying,” quipped one person in Tuesday’s meeting, a joke appreciated by others.
The European commission, which will handle day-to-day negotiations with the UK, has promised to draft a comprehensive mandate for the talks in early February, soon after the UK leaves.
That will be a document setting out the EU red lines on the future relationship covering trade, security, foreign policy, education and research and other areas.
“We will organise these negotiations to make the most out of the short period. On 1 February we will be ready to propose a mandate for the negotiations,” the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, told MEPs this morning.
But the commission is already warning member states not everything can be done in 11 months. Von der Leyen has said the commission will have to prioritise key topics, expected to be free trade in goods in exchange for British guarantees of fair competition, as well as fisheries.
EU officials continue to stress the UK parliament must ratify the withdrawal agreement. The Guardian understands that the European parliament has pencilled in 29 January for ratification of the Brexit deal, assuming the process goes smoothly at Westminster.
Updated
Labour leadership contest - Summary and analysis of today's developments
In her Guardian article Emily Thornberry confirms that she will be a candidate in the Labour leadership contest. (Or at least that she wants to be a candidate; she will need to get enough nominations, but this is unlikely to be a problem.) She is the first person to announce her candidature, but within the last 24 hours at least three other possible candidates have given interviews, and Tony Blair – the last person to do the job and actually win an election – has given a detailed speech on what the party needs to do next. Here is a summary of the latest developments.
- Tony Blair, the former prime minister, has said that no one deserves to win the Labour leadership unless they are prepared to face up to the scale of the challenge facing the party. In a Q&A after his speech he accepted it would be counter-productive for him to endorse any of the potential candidates. He also said he accepted that candidates would not be able to be as blunt about the problems facing the party as he had been. But he said the new leader had to be someone who recognised that the “whole ideology” of Corbynism needed to be replaced. He said:
I will say this. This is a fundamental moment in the history of the Labour party and the public is going to judge whoever steps forward for leadership. The public will switch on and look at what these people are saying. And if there’s any sense that they don’t get that a whole ideology, not just an individual, was rejected, if there is any sense that people say, ‘The policies were all great, we did the right things, it’s just that for some reason it didn’t quite work,’ if there is any sense that we are ignoring the message they have given us, it doesn’t matter who leads the Labour party. We just won’t win again ...
The minimum threshold of credibility for any person who wants to lead and win is an acknowledgement that we have been in the wrong political place and we let the country down. If you are not prepared to go that far, even if you win the leadership, you are not going to win an election.
Blair also said he did not accept arguments that the next leader had to be a woman, or someone from outside London. It had to be the best person for the job, he said. (See 9.36am.)
- Blair said the election result “brought shame” on the Labour party because failing to offer people the chance to vote for a credible opposition was “unforgivable”. In his speech he argued that the problem facing the party was not just Corbyn personally, but the far left politics that now dominated the party. He said:
[Corbyn] personified an idea, a brand of quasi-revolutionary socialism, mixing far left economic policy with deep hostility to western foreign policy, which never has appealed to traditional Labour voters, never will appeal and represented for them a combination of misguided ideology and terminal ineptitude that they found insulting.
No sentient political party goes into an election with a leader who has a net approval rating of -40%.
The takeover of the Labour party by the far left turned it into a glorified protest movement, with cult trimmings, utterly incapable of being a credible government.
The result has brought shame on us. We let our country down. To go into an election at any time with such a divergence between people and party is unacceptable. To do it at a time of national crisis when a credible opposition was so essential to our national interest, is unforgivable.
In a later interview, Blair said Labour would be “finished” if the far left stayed in charge. (See 1.49am.)
No leadership candidate has come anywhere close to criticising Corbyn and his leadership in these terms. But ...
- Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, has launched her leadership campaign with an article in the Guardian featuring a blistering attack on Corbyn for agreeing to an early election. Until now, other candidates have been notably cautious about criticising Corbyn (reflecting an assumption that he is still held in high esteem by a large number of party members). But Thornberry said that Corbyn went ahead and ordered Labour to vote for an early election despite her sending him a note saying this would be “an act of catastrophic folly”. (Blair also warned publicly that agreeing to an early election ahead of a second referendum would be a serious mistake.) As well as going negative against Corbyn, Thornberry’s article includes an implicit swipe at Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary and the Corbynite candidate for the leadership. Someone has briefed the Evening Standard that Long-Bailey was one of those in shadow cabinet backing Corbyn’s call for an early election. (See 12.38pm.)
- Thornberry has depicted herself as someone with the ability to outperform Boris Johnson. In her article she says:
When I faced Johnson for the entire two years he was foreign secretary, the only ministerial job he previously held, my strategy was to focus relentlessly on five key issues where there were huge differences between Labour’s policy and his, and where his position was indefensible: the Northern Ireland border; the war in Yemen; Donald Trump; human rights; and climate change.
I took the fight to him every day, and pummelled him every week. Each time, the mask slipped, and we saw the real man – a mendacious, lazy, dangerous charlatan, unable to hide behind the tiresome smokescreen of bluster he usually relies on. He hated it, especially coming from a woman.
Thornberry is entitled to say she was effective when it came to challenging Johnson when he was foreign secretary, at least in the Commons. What is also clever about this is that it incorporates an argument for Labour having a woman as leader (which obviously benefits Thornberry) based on the idea that Johnson reacts badly to being challenged by women (which is true), and not just based on pro-diversity sentiment.
- Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, has argued that he should have been allowed to challenge Johnson’s Brexit arguments in the election campaign. (See 10.15am.) This is about as far as Starmer has gone so far in criticising Corbyn’s handling of the election, although Starmer has not yet formally announced his campaign. Starmer and Thornberry are both lawyers who perform well in the Commons and in debate, and it is understandable that they should want to talk up these qualities.
- Starmer and Yvette Cooper have both given interviews in which they have sought to distance themselves not just from Corbynism, but from Blairism. Starmer told the Today programme:
I don’t need somebody else’s name tattooed to my head, some past leader, in order to identify and make decisions.
And Cooper told the same programme:
Both Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair are seen as internationalist, not patriots, and we should be able to be both patriotic and outward-looking because that’s what we were in 1945.
- Yvette Cooper and Lisa Nandy have both stressed the importance of the next Labour leader being able to win votes in towns and not just in cities. (See 11.38am and 1.25pm.)
- Rebecca Long-Bailey has lost her position as the bookmakers’ favourite in the contest. At least two bookmakers have sent out press notices today saying Starmer is now the favourite, ahead of Long-Bailey, with Nandy, Jess Phillips and Cooper coming behind. Long-Bailey was installed as the favourite on the basis that she is the candidate preferred by the current Labour leadership, and particularly by John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, and Karie Murphy, the party’s elections chief. She has not declared her candidature yet, and has said nothing of substance in public since the general election on what Labour needs to do next. Bookmakers made her favourite on the assumption that, if the Labour leadership wants her as leader, the members will too. But there is no strong evidence for this. When YouGov polled Labour members in July, they found she was not their first choice.
- Blair has rejected claims that the Labour government he led neglected the interests of working-class voters in northern seats. This is an argument being made by many people since last Thursday who are saying Labour’s problems in its heartlands go back decades, particularly Cooper and Nandy (see above). In his speech Blair said he did not accept this. He said:
[New Labour] was not – for all the caricature since we left office – a project of the metropolitan liberal elite. It assembled a new coalition of traditional working-class voters, aspirational voters who had previously turned to Margaret Thatcher, and it fused together the progressive vote that had been split in the previous century.
The extraordinary thing is the Labour party’s desire to rewrite its only period of majority government in half a century in negative terms.
We did not ‘neglect’ those traditional Labour heartlands in some appeasement of the middle class. We made the largest ever investment in schools and hospitals in those communities; redistributed wealth through tax changes and tax credits; cut pensioner and child poverty; took the homeless of the streets; and, through Sure Start, the minimum wage and a host of other programmes, helped those who needed help most.
And we kept their support. In 2005, in Sedgefield, my majority was almost 20,000. In Bolsover, it was 18,000. In Scotland we had 41 of the 56 seats, including two with increased majorities over 2001. The support we lost was mainly amongst the middle class, especially over tuition fees and Iraq.
- Blair has claimed that the party could have pursued a Brexit policy since 2016 that would have been electorally successful. In his speech he said:
What we should have done, following June 2016, is accepted the result, said it was for the government to negotiate an agreement but reserved our right to critique that agreement and should it fail to be a good deal for the country, advocate the final decision should rest with the people. Ultimately, we might have lost the most ardent Brexit support, but I believe, with different leadership, we would have kept much of our vote in traditional Labour areas, whilst benefiting from the fact that even in those areas, the majority of those voting Labour, were remain.
Updated
Labour is 'finished' if far left remain in charge, says Blair
Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister, has now given an interview to Newsnight reinforcing the argument he made in his speech this morning - that Labour needs to ditch Corbynism if it wants to survive. (See 9.05am.) In an interview with Kirsty Wark he said:
I’ve come to the conclusion in politics, that anger is a redundant emotion. I’m more motivated than I’ve ever been since leaving power, because I really do believe that we’ve just made a disastrous mistake for the country about its future, which is Brexit – and believe me, it will be seen to be a terrible mistake. We are going to have to make it work now, but it’s a terrible mistake.
And the Labour party, by its self-indulgence – and that’s what it was in the end – was the effective handmaiden of Brexit. It’s not our fault, because the fault is with those who advocated it. But our combination of misguided ideology and utter incompetence allowed it to happen ...
The far left that has taken over the Labour party, if they remain in a position of authority – if they’re in charge of the Labour party going forward then I think the Labour party is finished.
Updated
From the Financial Times’ Jim Pickard
I can reveal that Labour membership has spiked by 24,000 since last week
— Jim Pickard (@PickardJE) December 18, 2019
Lisa Nandy confirms she is considering standing for Labour leadership
Since I have been focusing mostly on the Labour leadership today, here are three clips from Lisa Nandy on Newsnight last night.
In the first one she says that, although she wants time to reflect on the general election result first, if she concludes that she can find a root to regaining the trust of lifelong Labour voters, she will stand as a candidate for the leadership.
“If I genuinely believe I can understand the root to regaining the trust of lifelong labour voters, who felt that they couldn’t vote Labour… then yes, of course, I would do it.”
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) December 17, 2019
Labour’s @lisanandy on if she is considering running for the position of Labour leader#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/b24VgDpy22
In the second one she says Labour needs to come up with policies to address the needs of towns that have never recovered from the loss of heavy industry. She says in these places young people have to leave to find good jobs, leaving the towns full of people growing old without their children or grandchildren living nearby. Investing in cities and hoping that the wealth will trickle down to these towns has failed, she says.
"If you contrast someone like Barnsley with Silicon Valley, where the federal government drives investment with real powers, our towns don't have those powers. Our kids are building solar panels on the minimum wage"
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) December 17, 2019
- Potential Labour leader Lisa Nandy#Newsnight | @lisanandy pic.twitter.com/qQJCKsuqeM
And in this clip she says she thinks there is an opportunity for Labour because Boris Johnson is learning the wrong lessons from his election victory in northern seats.
"There is very little that divides a Northern Labour seat and a Northern Conservative seat in terms of where you are heading?"
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) December 17, 2019
Emily Maitlis asks Conservative MP Ben Bradley and Labour MP Lisa Nandy what divides them.#Newsnight | @lisanandy | @BBradley_Mans pic.twitter.com/N3GA1p1Iy6
Boris Johnson has written the diary for the Christmas edition of the Spectator, the pro-Conservative magazine he used to edit. In it he does not say anything very new about what his government will do, but he has a colourful description of his campaign. Here’s an extract.
You will read elsewhere of the heroics of the campaign director, the strategists, thinkers and others. Perhaps I should mention especially the media team, who had to explain such mysteries as why I chose to shut myself in a giant fridge and what exactly I was thinking when I confiscated a TV reporter’s mobile live on air; and the ‘Ops’ team. The ‘Ops’ team basically manage your life. They tell you when to get up, what to wear, where to stand, and they organise brilliantly vivid metaphors for the political points you are trying to make. In the space of 24 hours they had me driving a JCB through a Styrofoam wall to symbolise breaking the parliamentary deadlock; delivering milk on the doorstep, to denote delivery of our domestic agenda; baking an oven-ready pie to show that we have a ready-made withdrawal agreement with the EU; and working in a wonderful Welsh wrapping-paper factory — to show that we could get it ‘wrapped up’ by Christmas (more or less). Some said these metaphors were clunking, but in a general election campaign, clunking is what you need.
In her Guardian article, Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, says she wrote to Jeremy Corbyn saying it would be “an act of catastrophic political folly” to vote for an early election. Today Joe Murphy in the Evening Standard has a story quoting from what it describes as the memo Thornberry sent to Corbyn making this case. Murphy writes:
In her memo to Mr Corbyn, Ms Thornberry wrote: “We need to ask the question, ‘What would we prefer? Boris Johnson in power for a few more months until a referendum, or Boris Johnson with a parliamentary majority for five years, and a mandate to do whatever else is on his anti-public services agenda?”
Her detailed memo said Mr Johnson had aimed from the start to force a “Brexit election” and, unlike Theresa May in 2017, would succeed.
“Much as we might wish it, we must all realise that pattern will not be repeated this time around,” she wrote. “If we are honest, we know they will likely succeed in turning the general election into a simple choice on Brexit where Theresa May failed, not least because of the imminence of the decision, and the fact that it can genuinely be presented as a ‘crisis election’.”
In her Guardian article, Thornberry also says that, when she argued against an early election at shadow cabinet, “pro-leave colleagues” insisted Labour should back an early election. The Evening Standard says it has “learnt” (one wonders from whom?) that Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary who has been favourite to be the next Labour leader, was one of those arguing against Thornberry at that meeting.
Updated
Emily Thornberry throws her hat into ring for Labour leadership
Emily Thornberry has declared she is entering the race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, revealing she warned the Labour leadership that backing a Brexit election would be an “act of catastrophic political folly”, my colleague Rowena Mason reports. The shadow foreign secretary set out her pitch to be the next Labour leader in an article for the Guardian, arguing she has already “pummelled” Boris Johnson across the dispatch box and knows how to exploit his failings.
Rowena’s story is here.
And Thornberry’s Guardian article is here.
Updated
Emma Dent Coad, who was the Labour MP for Kensington before losing her seat to the Conservatives last week by just 150 votes, has told the BBC that she was diagnosed with breast cancer a month before polling day. She said that she underwent surgery three days before the election and that now she is OK.
Updated
The newly appointed chair of the Conservative party’s inquiry into its handling of complaints about discrimination, including Islamophobia, has been plunged into a row over comments he made about the disputed Kashmir region, my colleague Simon Murphy reports. His story goes on:
The Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi questioned the views of Prof Swaran Singh, who was announced on Tuesday as the chair of the review, after he wrote a piece for an online publication whose editor has dismissed Islamophobia as a term designed to shut down criticism of Islam.
Warsi highlighted sections of the article in which Singh, who is a former equality and human rights commissioner, argued that the Kashmir conflict had been portrayed as a tragedy only for Muslims and that, for many, Sikhs and Hindus “do not meet the criteria of victimhood”.
And here is Simon’s story in full.
Turning away from Labour for a moment, this is what Steve Baker, chair of the European Research Group, which represents Tories pushing for a harder Brexit, posted on Twitter last night. He had 37 MPs turning up to the ERG’s first meeting of the new parliament. That suggests that they will continue to be an influential force in the Conservative party.
Tonight's ERG meeting saw a healthy turnout of new members, outnumbering old hands. I'm advised to expect more next time.
— Steve Baker MP (@SteveBakerHW) December 17, 2019
We are proud to support @BorisJohnson as we deliver our manifesto to #GetBrexitDone pic.twitter.com/ghuAaLJVJY
Sally Gimson, who was selected and then deselected as Labour’s candidate for Bassetlaw in the election, has strongly rejected John Mann’s claim that Sir Keir Starmer did not support her. (See 11.10am.) She is backing Starmer for leader.
John - this is totally unfair and untrue. Keir did stand up for me, and did all he could to help me behind the scenes, and gave me his support publicly. I back him whole heartedly and think he will be a brilliant leader. Please stop making these accusations
— Sally Gimson (@SallyGimson) December 18, 2019
Yvette Cooper says Labour must be seen as more patriotic as she confirms she could stand for leader
And here are the main points from Yvette Cooper’s interview on the Today programme this morning. Cooper, a former cabinet minister and chair of the home affairs committee in the last parliament, was a candidate for the leadership in 2015, when she came third behind Jeremy Corbyn and Andy Burnham.
- Cooper said the Labour party had to change in the light of the election defeat. She said:
I think we clearly do have to change because it hasn’t worked, and we’ve got the fewest Labour MPs since 1935 and a big drop in working-class support with low-income voters choosing the Conservatives even though they didn’t want to, and people felt let down by the choice that we give them, so we have to show some humility, because we got things wrong.
- She said Labour could not just be a party for those living in cities. She said:
We cannot just become a party that is concentrated in cities with our support increasingly concentrated in diverse young fast-moving areas while older voters in towns think we aren’t listening to them.
This is a point that is also made in the Fabian Society’s post-election analysis (pdf) of what Labour needs to do to win in the 2020s. In the report, Andrew Harrop writes:
Across the country, over half of Labour’s existing MPs represent cities with over 250,000 inhabitants – 49 are from London and 55 from 16 cities outside the capital. By contrast, among the 123 target seats [that Labour needs to win to gain a majority at the next election] only 19 are in cities with a population of over 250,000 while 104 represent towns and smaller communities. This could pose a significant challenge to the party in rebuilding in the areas it needs to target, as existing MPs will naturally channel the perspectives of their urban constituents.
5. 63pc of the seats Labour needs to win are in the north, the midlands and Wales; 13pc are in Scotland; and 24pc are in southern England.
— Andrew Harrop (@andrew_harrop) December 15, 2019
6. 104 of the 123 seats Labour needs to win are in towns not cities (over half of existing Labour seats are in cities). pic.twitter.com/5pClmcUlos
- Cooper sought to distance herself from both Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair by saying that Labour needed to be seen as patriotic. Speaking about the need to appeal to voters in towns, she said:
And that is not a left/right issue, and this is where both the Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair challenge comes in, because both the left and the right of our party are seen as internationalist, not patriotic, at the moment.
And that might not be fair, but it is how they are seen. Both Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair are seen as internationalist, not patriots, and we should be able to be both patriotic and outward-looking because that’s what we were in 1945.
(Blair would not accept that Labour was not seen as patriotic when he was party leader. But it was seen as very globalist, which is what Cooper seemed to be referring to. Being globalist and being unpatriotic are not necessarily the same thing.)
- She confirmed that she was thinking of standing, but said she would not take a decision until after Christmas. Asked whether she would be a candidate, she said:
The contest doesn’t start until January, and I’ll decide over Christmas what I’m going to do, because we’ve just obviously had a hard local campaign. As you know, I’ve stood before, but obviously the party membership has changed a lot. There’s a lot of things to reflect on ... I’m going to reflect over Christmas.
- She said Labour had to be both radical and credible. She said:
There are some great things in our manifesto, like the green new deal, the national education service. Wonderful radical things that we have to fight for. But we’ve also got to be credible in delivering them and be focused and get a grip.
- She said Labour needed to eliminate antisemitism in the party, and make its culture kinder and more inclusive. She said:
We have to sort out the problems in our party, that includes kicking out the vile antisemitism in our party, but it’s also about a broader thing, about restoring kindness to politics, being more inclusive and challenging some of the abuse in politics that we have seen from all sides and we certainly should not have in the Labour party.
Updated
John Mann, the former Labour MP who now sits in the Lords and serves as an independent adviser to the government on antisemitism, is not impressed by Keir Starmer’s leadership bid.
If you are too cowardly to stand up to Corbyn when your own campaign organiser is stabbed in the back (when removed as Bassetlaw election candidate) how dare you even consider standing as a ‘leader’ https://t.co/XcaKCQPSps
— John Mann (@LordJohnMann) December 18, 2019
Mann is referring to the way Sally Gimson, an ally of Starmer’s, was removed as Labour candidate for Bassetlaw by the party leadership on a dubious pretext because she was not favoured by the left.
Starmer's interviews – verdict from Twitter commentariat
This is what political journalists and commentators are saying about what has effectively been the soft launch of his leadership campaign, with his Guardian interview yesterday and his Today interview this morning. He is certainly not winning universal approval.
From my colleague Rafael Behr:
Starmer here struggling to sound urgent about need for change without speaking ill of JC. This mulchy 'still radical, different radical, Labour values!' pitch will be crowded terrain in leadership contest. https://t.co/iykOmU9rc5
— Rafael Behr (@rafaelbehr) December 17, 2019
From the New Statesman’s Jason Cowley:
"Radical" is now so overused and abused as to be virtually meaningless ... Starmer will need to do a lot better than this https://t.co/f9UcpD9IBp
— Jason Cowley (@JasonCowleyNS) December 17, 2019
Cowley is editor of the New Statesman, but his staff are quite happy to take a different view.
From the New Statesman’s George Eaton:
Starmer’s leftish tone here suggests he understands where the Labour membership are (which many did not in early stages of 2015). https://t.co/iDK6fMZQyr
— George Eaton (@georgeeaton) December 17, 2019
From the New Statesman’s Stephen Bush:
I don't know if it will work, but Keir Starmer's leadership roll-out is incredibly well done. All that and more in today's Morning Call: https://t.co/1LpOl5fjff
— Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) December 18, 2019
From the Daily Mirror’s Jason Beattie:
Not convinced that rehashing the line 'the problem was not the menu but the maitre'd' will work for Keir Starmerhttps://t.co/Pre9F87Bsi
— Jason Beattie (@JBeattieMirror) December 18, 2019
From the Daily Mirror’s Pippa Crerar:
A very definite pitch to the left-leaning Labour membership. Starmer - irrespective of being a North London male - polls well among them. But will he at some point have to be more bold? https://t.co/pZrYgUbPcy
— Pippa Crerar (@PippaCrerar) December 18, 2019
From Sky’s Lewis Goodall:
Starmer’s status as remainer in chief is his biggest problem. Nonetheless Johnson did him and all the candidates a favour by winning so big. Had it been small maj Brexit could have remained a live issue/even pressure to lead rejoin. That won’t happen now. They can leave it alone.
— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) December 18, 2019
From the i’s Jane Merrick:
The Labour leadership contest is at risk of turning into Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch. Keir Starmer says before he went to university “I’d never been in an office”. #r4today
— Jane Merrick (@janemerrick23) December 18, 2019
From the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges:
People keep saying Rebecca Long-Bailey is continuity Corbyn. The problem - as Keir Starmer is making clear - is that in reality they're all continuity Corbyn.
— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) December 18, 2019
Updated
Starmer implicitly criticises Labour leadership for sidelining him during election campaign
I will post more from the Blair speech, Q&A and report soon, but first here is a summary of the main points Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary and a Labour leadership candidate, was making in his interview on the Today programme.
- Starmer implicitly criticised the Labour leadership for sidelining him during the election campaign. He acknowledged that Brexit was an issue in the election, but he said Labour’s problem was that it did not challenge Boris Johnson’s claim he would “get Brexit done”. Starmer said:
Brexit did, of course, come up on the doorstep. What really came up was this slogan ‘get Brexit done’. And we didn’t knock it back, we didn’t knock it down and neutralise it hard enough, because it clearly wasn’t going to happen ...
What resonated on the doors was this phrase ‘Get Brexit done’ and we did not knock that flat. And we should have done, and I would have liked the chance to have knocked it flat, because that was what was cutting through. People thought, ‘Well, if I vote Conservative, I’m getting it done.’
Asked why he did not get the chance, he replied:
Well, the strategists decided that it would be far better if, as it were, leave voices were out there. That’s fine. I didn’t complain then and I’m not complaining now.
- He repeated and expanded on the point he made in his Guardian interview about thinking it would be a mistake for Labour to “oversteer” in response to its defeat. He said:
We need to reflect, but what we shouldn’t do is now oversteer.
And I’ve seen organisations and political parties do this so many times.
In 2010, we oversteered on austerity, and began to think that it might be all right to have some cuts.
In 2015, we oversteered on welfare. What we mustn’t do now is for a third time oversteer, make this simplistic and go back to some foregone era.
- He said that Labour needed to “build on” the radicalism introduced into the party by Jeremy Corbyn. He said:
What Jeremy Corbyn brought to the Labour party in 2015 was a change in emphasis that was really important, a radicalism that matters, and the rejection of anti-austerity. And we need to build on that, rather than simply say, ‘Well, let’s now oversteer and go back to some bygone age.’
But when it was put to Starmer that he seemed to be proposing “Corbynism without Corbyn”, he rejected that suggestion. He said:
What I’m saying is that the desperate needs of millions of people for change – people in poverty, people who are homeless – the moral case for change is still there, just as it was last Thursday.
And it’s only going to be met by a radical Labour government. The case for a radical government has never been stronger.
- He suggested he did not want to be associated with any previous leader. When it was put to him that he was sounding more leftwing than usual to appeal to party members, he replied:
Everybody who’s listened to me in the last three or four years knows exactly what I think.
And I’ve said this before, I don’t need somebody else’s name tattooed to my head, some past leader, in order to identify and make decisions.
I can make them for myself.
That sounded like a declaration that he did not want to be seen either as a Corbynite or a Blairite (or a Brownite or a Milibandite, I suppose, although it is the first two who tend to frame the debate in the party at the moment).
- Starmer said there was “too much” in the manifesto. He said:
We put too much in the manifesto, you couldn’t see the wood for the trees. It was really good stuff in there.
- He said Corbyn led the party into the election carrying too much “baggage”. He said:
And we carried, I think, too much baggage into the election, and antisemitism is an example of that because it was about values and about competence.
In his Guardian interview, and again on Today, Starmer sounded reluctant to criticise Corbyn personally. This was one of the few moments where he came close, although “baggage” did sound euphemistic.
- He said there was no point in Labour just blaming the media for its election defeat. He said:
I think we need to reflect. There are people who say, ‘well it’s the media’. The media was hostile but it’s been hostile in the past and it’ll probably be hostile in the future, so we can’t rest there.
- He stressed that he came from a working-class background. He said:
As for the sort of middle-class thrust, as you know, my dad worked in a factory, he was a toolmaker, and my mum was a nurse, and she contracted a very rare disease early in her life that meant she was constantly in need of NHS care.
So, actually, my background isn’t what people think it is. I know what it’s like. I actually never had been in any workplace other than a factory until I left home for university. I’d never been in an office.
So the idea that somehow I personally don’t know what it’s like for people across the country in all sorts of different circumstances is just not borne out.
- He said that a lot of people wanted him to stand for the leadership, and that he was “seriously considering” standing, but that he would talk to colleagues before he announced his decision.
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Q: Many people in Labour are saying the new leader must be a woman, and someone from outside London. Do you agree? Or should it be the best person for the job?
Blair says it should be the best person for the job.
He says it would be great to have a woman as leader.
But it should be the best person for the job. There is no point having a woman, or someone from outside London, if they are in the wrong space politically.
He says it does not matter if someone is from London or not if their politics is right. “Believe me, the country is not going to care?”
People says the public does not want someone who went to public school. But who is prime minister now?
Blair also says the Labour party should never be anti-intellectual. It has had great intellectuals in the past. Good intellectuals give you good ideas, he says.
He recalls giving conference speeches as leader. The first draft of the speech would always contain lots of policy. But then advisers told him to take it out, because it was boring. He would say policy matter. His advisers said they agreed; but they told him just not to put it in the speech.
Blair says he has not persuaded people yet about the importance of the technology revolution. The mission of modern social democracy is to spread its benefits fairly.
It does not really matter whether someone is London or not London, he says.
And that’s it. The Q&A is over.
Q: What is your message to leadership candidates? Are you saying it is better to say the right thing, and lose?
Blair says he is cautious about this. In the Tony Blair Institute, they take a view that they must give practical advise when they are advising leaders around the world. There is no point giving advice that will be rejected.
He says he accepts the leadership candidates won’t be able to be as blunt as he is being now.
But what they say must pass the “minimum bar of credibility”, otherwise members of the public will not listen to them afterwards.
He says the election defeat should provide a moment of clarity. People must not forget this, he says.
Q: Are you hoping a mass influx of people will sign up as registered supporters to vote in the leadership contest? And doesn’t the experience of the Independent Group for Change show that replacing Labour is very difficult?
Blair says he hopes people do join Labour. But the Labour membership has changed. In 2010 David Miliband won a majority of party members. That has changed.
He says his job is just to speak about reality.
On the prospect of Labour being replaced, Blair says after 1983, if Neil Kinnock had not started changing the party, he thinks it would have been replaced.
He says some people who did vote Labour this time were voting for the part despite what they felt about it, not because of what they felt about it.
He says Labour was unable to build a coalition on Brexit this year because its leadership was seen as sectarian.
Q: Do you think leadership candidates should accept the Brexit outcome? And do you accept there is a danger that, if you abandon Corbynism, the young people attracted to the party will walk away?
Blair says it was a mistake holding a Brexit election. The Lib Dems were partly to blame. But the remain camp has lost. We now have to make Brexit work, he says.
He says the issue for the party is whether it will be willing to return to the mainstream of social democratic thinking.
He says in 1983 it was also the case that individual manifesto policies were popular.
You might assume that, of policies poll well individually, they will succeed collectively.
But Blair says if you had tried to implement the whole manifesto, there would have been chaos. People understood that. So it is wrong to say the manifesto was popular. If it were popular, people would have voted for it, he says.
He says “the Labour party’s ability to delude itself about where people really are” has been a constant factor in the party’s election defeat.
Blair says he accepts that young people are enthused by the idea of radical change. But Labour’s share of the vote amongst young people dropped in 2019.
They are less enthused by this idea now.
If you put forward a radical manifesto for change which is practical, young people will be enthused. They were enthused in 1997, he says.
Blair is now taking questions from journalists. (The previous questions were from Hazarika).
Q: What sort of person do you want to see leading the Labour party?
Blair says it must be someone who recognises the scale of the defeat.
He says this is unlike any election defeat Labour has ever has.
The party has never been taken over by the far left before, he says.
Now it has to “re-engineer social democratic politics”.
If Labour cannot do that, then people will look to another party, he suggests.
Q: Who would you like to see as next Labour leader?
Blair says it would be sensible not to answer that question.
Q: Are there any candidates up to the challenge?
Blair says that is another way of asking the same thing.
But he says the public will be looking at what happens. And the party has to show it is changing. If there is any sense that “we are ignoring the message [the public] has given us, it doesn’t matter who leads the Labour party - we just won’t win again.”
He says the “minimal threshold for credibility” is an acknowledgement that Labour has been in the wrong place, and needs to change.
He says there is no point any candidate winning the leadership without accepting this, because they won’t win an election if they haven’t absorbed this lesson.
Tony Blair is now taking questions after his speech. He is being interviewed by Ayesha Hazarika, a former Labour aide who is now a journalist and comedian, before taking questions from journalists.
Blair says the problems facing Britain in the 21st century require an activist state. That should be an advantage for Labour, he says, because the party believes in an activist state.
He says he came into the Commons after the 1983 defeat. There were some similarities then with now; it was clear that the leader, a decent man, needed to go.
But 1983 was also different. In 1983 Michael Foot was trying to get rid of Militant. Now the far left has taken over the party, he says.
He says “this far left grouping” is not interested in compromise. They want to take over the party, he says. He says in the months ahead of the election they were trying to deselect sensible candidates, and replace them with far left candidates.
Updated
Here is another extract from the Tony Blair’s speech.
What we should have done, following June 2016, is accepted the result, said it was for the government to negotiate an agreement but reserved our right to critique that agreement and should it fail to be a good deal for the country, advocate the final decision should rest with the people. Ultimately, we might have lost the most ardent Brexit support, but I believe, with different leadership, we would have kept much of our vote in traditional Labour areas, whilst benefiting from the fact that even in those areas, the majority of those voting Labour, were Remain.
Instead we pursued a path of almost comic indecision, alienated both sides of the debate, leaving our voters without guidance or leadership.
The absence of leadership on what was obviously the biggest question facing the country, then reinforced all the other doubts about Jeremy Corbyn.
What is important is to understand why his leadership was so decisively rejected.
This is not about Jeremy Corbyn as a person. I have no doubt he is someone of deeply held and sincere beliefs, who stayed true to them under harsh attack.
But politically, people saw him as fundamentally opposing what Britain and Western societies stand for. He personified an idea, a brand of quasi revolutionary socialism, mixing far left economic policy with deep hostility to Western foreign policy, which never has appealed to traditional Labour voters, never will appeal and represented for them a combination of misguided ideology and terminal ineptitude that they found insulting.
No sentient political party goes into an election with a leader who has a net approval rating of – 40%.
The takeover of the Labour party by the far left turned it into a glorified protest movement, with cult trimmings, utterly incapable of being a credible government.
Blair urges Labour to abandon 'fantasy island' and ditch Corbynism
Good morning. Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, has effectively set out his opening pitch for the Labour leadership in an interview with the Guardian. He has not yet confirmed that he will stand, but it is impossible to imagine that he won’t after reading what he says, which he fleshed out a few minutes ago in an interview on the Today programme. His Guardian interview is here.
I will post more from his Today interview shortly. And Yvette Cooper, the former Labour minister and chair of the home affairs committee in the last parliament, has also been on the same programme this morning, confirming that she is considering standing for the leadership too.
And on the same theme, Tony Blair, the former Labour leader and the last person to win a general election for the party since 1974, has just given a speech on the election this morning. There is nothing more satisfying in life than being able to say ‘I told you so’, and so it is not surprising that he wants to have his say. His thinktank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, has also published an 18-page report on why Labour lost.
The report is here, the speech is here, and there is a live feed of the event here. I will cover the argument of the speech, and the report, in detail, but the key message is that this defeat was “seminal” and Labour must now ditch Corbynism. Here is an extract from the report.
Our research shows that the breach need not be permanent, but simply changing the leader will not be enough. The problems go far deeper; and so must the solutions. Labour needs not just a different driver, but a different bus. The first task is to discard the sectarian ultra-left politics that has taken the party over and condemned it to the wilderness of opposition. Only then can Labour begin the journey back to government.
And here is an extract from the speech.
The Labour party is presently marooned on fantasy island. I understand would be Leaders will want to go there and speak the native language in the hope of persuading enough eventually to migrate to the mainland of reality.
But there is a risk that the only people speaking the language of reality to the party are those who don’t aspire to lead it.
Unfortunately, 2019 is much worse than 1983.
Then was our second defeat; now is our fourth. The country is different. Politics is different. The country is less fixed in political affiliation. Politics moves at speed accelerated by social media.
We don’t have the luxury of the slow march back.
We can correct our historical and contemporary weaknesses; or be consumed by them.
Here is the agenda for the day.
8.30am: Tony Blair gives a speech on Labour’s election defeat.
10am: Matt Hancock, the health secretary, gives a speech to the Policy Exchange thinktank.
As usual, I will be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web. We plan to publish a summary at the end of the day.
You can read all the latest Guardian politics articles here. Here is the Politico Europe roundup of this morning’s political news. And here is the PoliticsHome list of today’s top 10 must-reads.
If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.
If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter.
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