Who is popular today?

It’s hard to work out who’s more socialist, or more centrist – and leave-remain isn’t a faultline either. Party members face a host of unknowns
This is the phase of the Labour leadership contest in which people try and guess at what the candidates believe via means other than what they say. In some ways, that’s understandable: the hustings format, four 40-second answers to identical questions, is dull and unenlightening. Instead, commentators look at what they’ve said in the past; how they’ve voted in the past; the company they keep and who supports them; what they look like; and the state of their hair. I’m joking, of course: most are going by the hair.
In fairness, all the other data yields confusing or, at best, inconclusive results. The most that you can tell about voting record is that Rebecca Long-Bailey was by far the most Corbyn-loyal of the candidates: yet if you put loyalty to Jeremy Corbyn as the top priority, then many criticisms of Keir Starmer – that he was temporarily against freedom of movement, for instance – melt away, since that stance was the price of frontbench loyalty. Unions have broken every way but Emily Thornberry’s (Unite for Long-Bailey; Unison and Usdaw for Starmer; GMB for Lisa Nandy) and classic evaluations of tribes within the parliamentary Labour party don’t really work for Starmer or Nandy, neither of whom fit neatly into any faction. Continue reading...