Almost 600,000 Labour members will get their leadership voting papers starting today. Too little about the party’s leadership election to date has suggested a way out of the existential crisis the party and social democracy more widely are in. So, as members ponder their vote, what might a road to real renewal look like?
Let’s start where we are. If it wasn’t so serious it would be laughably shambolic to interview and select a new leader of an organisation before that organisation has decided why it keeps failing and what its purpose is at the start of the third decade of the 21st century.
But that is what Labour is doing. Going through the motions, yet again, of loading impossible expectations on a single person with little if any regard for the bewildering context and complexity of the challenges facing progressive politics. It’s just hit and hope. A new messiah that will do it all for us and to us, until of course they are found out and the process is repeated, a little to the left or the right of the previous incumbent.
