‘The Longest Suicide Vote in History’: The Labour Party Leadership Election of 2015

Abstract

Abstract:The Labour leadership contest of 2015 resulted in the election of the veteran Leftwing backbencher, Jeremy Corbyn, who clearly defeated the early favourite, Andy Burnham. Yet Corbyn enjoyed very little support among Labour MPs, and his victory plunged the PLP into turmoil, particularly as he was widely viewed as incapable of leading the Party to victory in the 2020 general election. Given that much of the established academic literature on Party leadership contests emphasises the ability to foster unity, and thereby render a party electable, as two of the key criteria for electing a new leader, coupled with overall competence, important questions are raised about how and why the Labour Party chose someone to lead them who clearly does not meet these criteria. We will argue that while these are the natural priorities of MPs when electing a new leader, in Corbyn's case, much of the extraparliamentary Labour Party was more concerned about ideological conviction and purity of principles, regardless of how far these diverged from public opinion. This was especially true of those who signed-up to the Labour Party following the 2015 general election defeat. Indeed, many of these only did so after Corbyn had become a candidate. This clearly suggests a serious tension between maximising intra-party democracy and ensuring the electability of the parliamentary party itself. 2The Labour Party has long been viewed by most of its members as a democratic socialist party, but this clearly has two meanings. The first is that the Party seeks to create a democratic socialist society, in which wealth and power are widely shared, and equality is a primary objective. The second meaning is that Labour is a democratic party in terms of the participatory role played by its members. However, this second definition immediately raises a problem when applied to the election of Labour Party leaders, namely whether they should be elected solely by the MPs who they will lead and work with on a daily basis in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), or by the extra-parliamentary Party, whose members often play such a vital role in constituencies and the workplace, and who also make a major collective contribution to the Party's funding. The purpose of this article is thus to explain how Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour Party leader in September 2015, from where and whom his support emanated, and why he attracted this support. In so doing, we will highlight the divergence between the criteria usually adopted by Labour parliamentarians when electing a new leader, and the qualities sought by much of the extra-parliamentary membership. Whereas the established academic literature emphasises the importance of party unity, electability and policy competence as the three key criteria for leadership candidates, we argue that these are the attributes usually (and understandably) prioritised by MPs themselves.By contrast, as Corbyn's election highlights, extra-parliamentary members, and particularly a party's rank-and-file activists, are much mo...

Choosing party leaders: Anglophone democracies, British parties and the limits of comparative politics

“…Consistent with developments in other parliamentary democracies (LeDuc, 2001;Kenig, 2009a: Kenig, 2009bCross and Blais, 2012a;Cross and Blais, 2012b;Pilet and Cross, 2014;Cross and Pilet, 2015) they have expanded their leadership selectorates beyond parliamentary elites to include party members (Quinn, 2010), delegates and members of affiliated organizations, particularly trade unions (Drucker, 1981;Quinn, 2004;Wickham-Jones, 2014) and even latterly, in the case of the Labour Party, their affiliated and registered supporters (Quinn, 2015;Dorey and Denham, 2016). Building on a recent comparative study of party leadership selection in the five principal Anglophone ('Westminster') parliamentary democracies (Cross and Blais, 2012a), this article first sets out its theoretical framework that purports to explain why the major parties in three of those countries, including Britain, have adopted such reform.…”

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