{"id":130425,"date":"2020-02-02T14:30:44","date_gmt":"2020-02-02T13:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/2020\/02\/02\/for-labour-electability-doesnt-mean-becoming-more-tory-lorna-finlayson\/"},"modified":"2020-02-02T14:30:44","modified_gmt":"2020-02-02T13:30:44","slug":"for-labour-electability-doesnt-mean-becoming-more-tory-lorna-finlayson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/?p=130425","title":{"rendered":"For Labour, electability doesn\u2019t mean becoming \u2018more Tory\u2019 | Lorna Finlayson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The leadership candidates must realise there\u2019s no evidence that Labour lost the election because of its leftwing policiesFancy getting one over on your enemies? Find out what they\u2019re 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 \u201celectability\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s general election defeat, Tory MP Nigel Evans named Lisa Nandy as the candidate he would be \u201cmost concerned about\u201d facing next time. Earlier this month, politics professor Tim Bale predicted that Jess Phillips would be the one to make things \u201cawkward\u201d for Boris Johnson \u2013 a hunch apparently shared by the Labour MP Wes Streeting, the Daily Express reporting that he \u201cbelieves that [Phillips] will have Mr Johnson \u2018lying awake at night\u2019\u201d. It was not to be, for reasons perhaps put best by Owen Jones when he diagnosed Phillips with \u201ccentrist hack syndrome\u201d, a condition in which candidates are lulled into an inflated sense of their own abilities and appeal, \u201cthen 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\u201d. Continue reading&#8230;<br \/>\nVia: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2020\/feb\/02\/labour-electability-more-tory-leadership-candidates\" target=\"_blank\">For Labour, electability doesn\u2019t mean becoming \u2018more Tory\u2019 | Lorna Finlayson<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The leadership candidates must realise there\u2019s no evidence that Labour lost the election because of its leftwing policiesFancy getting one over on your enemies? Find out what they\u2019re most afraid of. As the Labour party moves ever closer to choosing its next leader, this ostensibly pragmatic logic has shaped the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=130425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=130425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=130425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=130425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}