David Littlefair in a recent article for The New Statesman suggested a minimum standard for selecting the deputy leader of the Labour Party:
How about these, most of which would strike the public as incredibly normal but are embarrassingly hard for Labour MPs to leapfrog over:
Is not a landlord
Has had a job outside of politics and lobbying
Is not an Oxbridge graduate
Did not go to private school
Is not the third generation of a political family dynastyAnd, for good measure, given Labour’s strategic struggles:
Did not vote to defecate on disabled people from a height
All splendid suggestions but it is the never having had a proper job that most often troubles me. By a proper job I mean doing something that if it was not done people would notice. If doctors and nurses stopped doing their jobs people would die. If shop workers stopped filling shelves we would rapidly descend into a state of anarchy as people tried to feed their families. If delivery people abandoned their vans modern life would grind to a halt. If refuse collectors did not arrive regularly we would soon start to drown in our own crap. Basically people who continued working during the Covid pandemic, who were described as Key Workers, because what they do needs to be done.
From Jeremy Corbyn rightwards we struggle to find MPs who have ever done a day’s work. Both of the likely candidates for the deputy leader post would certainly fail.
Regarding the landlord requirement; Rivkah Brown catalogued all the perks they receive. So we arrive at people who’s only earnings have come from public funds operating multi-million pound property empires.
Whilst I have no time for Mr Farage and his band of buffoons it is easy to see why voters are growing tired of such people and are looking for something else. It is like looking in on another world from which we are excluded; will always be excluded, and one that most decent people would be too embarrassed to be a part.
