For Labour, electability doesn’t mean becoming ‘more Tory’ | Lorna Finlayson

The leadership candidates must realise there’s no evidence that Labour lost the election because of its leftwing policiesFancy getting one over on your enemies? Find out what they’re most afraid of. As the Labour party moves ever closer to choosing its next leader, this ostensibly pragmatic logic has shaped the discussion around the “electability” of the various candidates. What the Tories fear most, one would presume, is a Labour leader who can defeat them in a general election. Hence, according to this logic, Labour should choose the candidate most feared by the Tories in order to maximise the party’s chances of victory at the next general election.It sounds simple. But there has so far been little agreement on which of the contenders is best qualified for the role of Tory-slayer. Questioned by Sky News host Kay Burley days after December’s general election defeat, Tory MP Nigel Evans named Lisa Nandy as the candidate he would be “most concerned about” facing next time. Earlier this month, politics professor Tim Bale predicted that Jess Phillips would be the one to make things “awkward” for Boris Johnson – a hunch apparently shared by the Labour MP Wes Streeting, the Daily Express reporting that he “believes that [Phillips] will have Mr Johnson ‘lying awake at night’”. It was not to be, for reasons perhaps put best by Owen Jones when he diagnosed Phillips with “centrist hack syndrome”, a condition in which candidates are lulled into an inflated sense of their own abilities and appeal, “then are suddenly subjected to mild media scrutiny for the first time, which is very disorienting, makes them realise politics is actually very hard, and their campaigns start to implode”. Continue reading…
Via: For Labour, electability doesn’t mean becoming ‘more Tory’ | Lorna Finlayson