Angela Rayner: Or Why Policies Not Parrots Win
Angela Rayner has been sacked. Or she was reshuffled in some botched attempt to reorder Sir Keir’s top team.
The reaction has been unanimous in anger against the decision.
Everyone from the Right of the Party, to the Centre, to the Very Online Left, have tweeted their (essentially) confusion and anger.
They are all united in the following: Angela Rayner is a decent person. She is a woman. She is Northern. She is nice. She shouldn’t have been removed.
Hmm. Well yes and no.
Rayner is indeed lovely. She seems honest and truly genuine. She’s also the poster child of what Labour can and should be about. Giving working people the chance to get to the top.
And much of the criticism (from the Lobby but also from ordinary members) has been focused on this identity. The insistence that getting rid of a ‘Northern woman’ is a bad look.
Well, is that true?
Rayner polls moderately well (all are put to shame by Ed Balls who was booted out by the Red Wall in 2015) and interestingly polls much better with men than women.
But she’s hardly Blair in the early 90s, nor is she loved by the Lobby like a certain Miliband was back when Brown was PM.
She’s also not a Minister for the Today Programme that the Sir Keir project so desperately needs. Being nice, liked by the Lobby, and good on Today is tough. Uncork The Gauke best represented this specific political gift.
Officially, Rayner was Chair of the Labour Party. Surely, one of the responsibilities in this role is to deliver election wins?
Sir Keir called Hartlepool ‘shattering’ which even without looking at the results of a by-election probably means that it wasn’t an electoral victory.
But forget all of this. Forget her supposed popularity or the roles and responsibilities she held, shouldn’t people who defend Rayner care what Rayner actually thinks or does?
Following Rayner’s career outside the Westminster Bubble goes like this: Rayner is on the Left of the Party. Now she is on the Right of the Party.
Rayner (allegedly) plotted a coup against Jeremy Corbyn. She was very popular with the Membership. She was sacked by Starmer.
It is almost like we have someone that the Lobby don’t understand and neither does the Labour Machine.
A 3D politician is never a good thing in Labour (for all the legitimate criticisms, Chuka Umunna fell foul of this ‘We don’t know who you are’ from the Right not the Left.).
This is both wildly unfair on the individual but also wildly basic from the perspective of political parties wanting to win.
The public wants clear ‘Who are you?’ vibes from their politicians, just as much as Party machines do. Weirdly, the public are often better at discerning this than machines. See how people ‘Get Boris’ but CCHQ really doesn’t.
So does Rayner stand for anything? Much has been said of Sir Keir not standing for anything but shouldn’t the same be said of Rayner?
Her Deputy Leadership platform certainly united many in the PLP, the Unions, and the Membership. But did it set out a programme for Government? No. (And why should it have done, many may point out),
I’m sure she has a very strong set of policies today but whenever voters see her on the TV she bravely and touchingly explores what a Labour government has done for people like them, like her, rather than policies for the future.
It’s very good telly but it’s not a platform for Government.
That’s not entirely her fault, Labour has no policies beyond the foundations laid disastrously in 2017 Sir Keir honourably refused to nix them all in scorched earth policies they deserved.
As an aside: having a set of bad policies is the same as having no policies. Consider how Blair went from the excellent ‘waiting time’ policy (people wanted smaller waiting times when they engaged with the health service, Blair heard voters, found a way to deliver it, told voters about it, won) to the ideologically driven competition within the health service.
Back to today: Labour won’t get any new policies if answers to the so-called Red Wall question is formed around an ideological drive towards identity i.e. ‘Get a Northerner in.’
Blair didn’t win the South because he sounded Southern, he won because his policies would deliver for the North and the South.
The person who has best understood the Party’s obsession with identity over sensible policies is Khalid Mahmood who said: ‘Labour has lost touch with ordinary British people.
‘A London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors, has effectively captured the party.
‘They mean well, of course, but their politics — obsessed with identity, division and even tech utopianism — have more in common with those of Californian high society than the kind of people who voted in Hartlepool yesterday.’
Indeed, while the summer for Sir Keir was dominated by whether or not he should have said ‘moment’ or ‘movement’ or ‘movement’ or ‘moment’ about the BLM movement/moment, voters were just waiting for policies that mattered to them actually being suggested by Labour.
Indeed, isn’t the clamour for a Northern female voice not a symptom of exactly the identity-politics from California Mahmood identifies?
It certainly isn’t the solution to the Red Wall collapse.
The most popular politician is Rishi Sunak. He’s a man, not Northern, and very rich. Hardly the story Rayner embodies.
Johnson is an Old Etonian, Oxford grad, who took a bulldozer to the Red Wall.
Why would someone with a Northern accent, but with the same policies of an Islington North MP, or for that matter a Holborn and St Pancras MP, cut differently?
Maybe, Rayner would understand differently the causes and solutions of Labour’s woes? Well is there evidence to support that assumption? Kinda, but not really — and that’s a problem.
The fact the Labour Party commentariat (both Lobby and Members) can’t see that is why the Lisa Nandy 2020 leadership election was so distracted. The accusations of prolier-than-thou performances from Nandy, RLB, and Sir Keir wasn’t without merit.
What was worse was the desire to be seen as ‘more’ Red Wall than opponents. It all superficially became about who can win back the Red Wall. Of course, in the end it wasn’t about anything of the sort.
It was who could make Labour members feel nice and plausibly win. And Sir Keir fit the bill perfectly.
So, when a focus group of Red Wall voters during the leadership election was shown on Channel 4, it revealed a rejection of both RLB (quelle surprise) and Sir Keir. Nandy and Emily Thornberry polled best.
Strange, no? We have the obvious answer: A Northern woman gets these voters. But how does that explain Emily? Best known for mocking an England flag in Rochester or cutting her hedge while threatening legal action.
Could it be that these voters don’t want parrots (people who sound and repeat what voters have said) but policies which react and respond to the problems facing the Red Wall?
This similarly explains the popularity of Sunak and Johnson and the rejection of a North East doctor in a North East by-election held in the middle of a health pandemic.
As was once asked by a man on the Left, what is to be done?
One option is Sir Keir has understood all of the above and thinks Rayner is a millstone of Corbynism around his neck. Getting rid of her would then free up his ability to pivot the Party’s platform away from the Left (or indeed the Right) and focus on policies, not ideologies, that resonate with voters.
Another alternative is that Sir Keir has not understood this and, more crucially, Labour more widely hasn’t understood this.
Thus he will face criticism for having the misfortune of being born in the South until he is eventually replaced by Nandy or perhaps even Rayner.
They will then lose the General Election because a new policy platform won’t have been allowed to develop because they will have been helped to victory by the Left.
Both options are open but things have a funny way of working themselves out in the favour of Sir Keir (Just as an example: Labour members blame Brexit for the defeat in 2019 but the Brexit secretary is currently the leader).
Let’s see how many Red Wall voters actually notice what is happening in Labour, and if they do notice let’s see how many care.
