The challenges Labour faces are formidable. The Ukip donor Arron Banks talks openly of funding a post-Ukip party, nationalist, populist and pitched at the angry and excluded working classes who voted leave a month ago. Labour itself is mired in a cultural quagmire, its leader enthusiastically supported by party members but unable to command the loyalty of a majority of his MPs. The polls give Theresa May’s Conservatives a bigger lead over Labour than at any time since 2009. A snap election will be a severe temptation for the new prime minister.
In this bleak political environment, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership challenger Owen Smith today set out his policy agenda. The location was a skills centre near the site of the battle of Orgreave, the scene of one of the most controversial episodes in the miners’ strike, which took place when Mr Smith was still a teenager. The surrounding props were distinctly retro, too: this was a campaign that shouted its enthusiasm for mainstream trade union Labour, non-metropolitan, embedded in traditional values, defender of workers’ rights and standards of living. His list of 20 key proposals matched his environment: replace the Department for Work and Pensions with a ministry of labour, and a department for social security; use the proceeds of a wealth tax to fund a sustained boost in spending on the NHS; reverse cuts to inheritance and corporation tax and restore the 50p top rate of income tax, and introduce a £200bn investment fund. When the Labour leadership protested that these were all policies that either Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell had proposed already, it played directly into Mr Smith’s central claim that the current leadership is failing to make an impact either at Westminster or beyond. He shrugged off the allegation of policy theft: any announcements had not just passed him by, but more importantly the British public.
Since he emerged as the sole challenger, Mr Smith’s campaign has often looked wobbly. His first media outings exposed aspects of his pre-political career as a BBC journalist who once called 999 for a police comment, and as a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical giant (and manufacturer of Viagra) Pfizer, that were embarrassing. His support for Trident, and his readiness to press the button, mattered more than his equivocal position on the Iraq war, a conflict that took place long before he was an MP, and became a rallying cry for Corbyn supporters. Under pressure that was sometimes of his own making, he looked a little too much like the PR professional he once was, and not enough like the potential prime minister he hopes to become. But in his South Yorkshire speech, he began to put that nervous start behind him. He emerged looking credible, a serious contender rather than a choice of last resort.
All the same, there is still ground to make up. He had to apologise for his aggressive language in his swaggering claim that Mrs May should be “smashed back on her heels” for lecturing Labour on social justice. It is not the first time he has been tone deaf about matters that many party members, particularly women, are sensitive to. There are rough edges and policy contradictions, for example on the detail of any Brexit offer, that he must clarify. He will struggle to appeal to some voters if he cannot answer the conundrum of free movement versus access to the single market. He is committed to a second referendum on the terms of any Brexit deal, but he is also clear, unlike Mr Corbyn, that the terms are fundamentally irrelevant: his ambition is to reverse the vote to leave.
Between now and the close of the poll in mid-September, Mr Smith has to persuade party members that insisting that the leader inspires confidence in MPs at Westminster as well as members in the country is not a neo-Blairite plot but a fundamental prerequisite in a representative democracy. The stakes could not be higher. There may not be much talk of a split among the two leadership contenders, but at stake is the unity of the only party capable of opposing the government.
