This September the Labour party will vote for who should become its new leader. Four contenders have presented themselves; Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham, Jeremy Corbyn and Yvette Cooper. Anyone who can should vote for Yvette, and here is why.
There are two criteria by which I judge the appropriateness of a leadership candidate; policy and long-term electability. More precisely, I look for the candidate with the best policies who can also be a realistic contender in a general election, and who can be elected without damaging the possibility of long-term success for the party.
Jeremy Corbyn fails on almost all of these fronts. Although I admire his support for policies such as the nationalisation of natural monopolies and ending austerity, I am concerned by the fact that he justifies the latter exclusively in terms of progressive social policy. Such justifications are inferior to the (both correct and persuasive to Tory voters) macroeconomic justification, which (bizarrely) Labour has failed to show follows the consensus view among economists.
More worryingly, his personal qualities show him to be aggressive (eg. towards the opposition debaters in this video) and dangerously flippant in his use of language (eg. when he described the UKIP vote as 'in part motivated by racism'). This casts doubt over his leadership credentials, an area that the 2015 election proved was significant. Miliband's perceived leadership qualities lagged behind both David Cameron and the rest of the Labour party, and is one explanation offered by Comres for why Labour won fewer votes than predicted. In other words, some people that would otherwise be willing to support Labour chose not to on the basis of leadership and, given that Corbyn, like Miliband, lacks crucial leadership qualities, he should be dismissed.
It is also concerning because, according to IPSOS MORI, the party that came closest to Labour in being trusted on immigration was UKIP, with this being a greater area of strength for UKIP than Europe. Despite the fact that I am someone who supports the free movement of people and the European project (except for currency union), the electoral reality of Labour, and not just the Tories, losing ground to UKIP needs to be addressed. I do not want a Labour candidate to support restrictions on immigration (indeed, some of those on start-up jobs should be loosened), but I also do not want one needlessly providing ammunition for UKIP by castigating 13% of UK voters. I am concerned that Corbyn's loose mouth could prove electorally disastrous, causing Gordon Brown's 'bigoted woman' moment to pale to insignificance beside it.
Liz Kendall is possibly an even more dangerous candidate for the Labour party to support. The media's description of her as the Blairite candidate paints a misleadingly progressive image of her political beliefs. Her support of Osborne's plan for a legally enforced cyclically adjusted budget surplus is both macroeconomic nonsense and dangerous for Labour's long-run electoral success. The reason for it being nonsense is that, in order to maintain debt at a low and stable proportion of GDP (probably somewhere between 20% and 60%), a growing economy can run a fiscal deficit (so long as the long-term real growth rate is higher than the long-term real interest rate, which in the UK it is). Further, in the same way as rational, utility-maximising humans should borrow when their annual income is below their lifetime expected value, and save when it is above it, the government (whose income is constantly growing because the economy grows), should borrow against the incomes of wealthier future generations in order to allow current generations to benefit from future affluence.
The reason her rejection of Labour's record is dangerous in the long-run is because it would prevent her party from successfully taking a centre-left position for an entire generation. This is because if, for whatever reason, she resigned as leader, a new leader that rejected her views would make the party look disorganised, as Labour would have performed U-turns on economic policy twice in the space of a few years. Inconsistency in the one area of policy consistently considered most important by voters, and in which you are already 18% behind the Conservatives, is not an attractive strategy. Voters are already confused about what Labour stands for, as Alan Milburn points out and Comres agree, so there is no need to confuse them further.
Her close alignment with the Tories on a number of other policies, such as cutting welfare and education and expenditure is also a strategic mistake (even if some aspects of what she is proposing, such as a commitment to more flexible labour markets, could be part of a sensible Labour platform). As Simon-Wren Lewis says, it is bizarre for Labour to compete against the Conservatives by becoming more Conservative; there is already a party that does that exceptionally well - the Conservatives.
Andy Burnham would be a good leader, though not quite as good as Yvette. I subjectively consider him to have the qualities of a leader (though not in abundance), such as approachability and eloquence, and admire the fact that he does not want to reject the successes of the previous Labour government, particularly on managing the economy and health.
I consider him inferior to Yvette for the following reasons. Firstly, he is slightly more in favour of austerity than Yvette (this is according to Yvette herself, when I asked her about him today). Secondly, he is a man. Both times when Barack Obama has run for the Presidency, he has received a higher percentage of votes from the black community than any Presidential candidate since records began. Analogously, Yvette's position as only the second ever Prime Ministerial candidate of (an admittedly much less) marginalised social group (women, in case you're wondering), will likely give the Labour party several thousand more free votes than her male counterparts would be able to muster.
And so I conclude that Yvette Cooper should become the new leader of the Labour party. Her policies, such as taking a charitable approach towards asylum seekers (though not economic migrants) are progressive, without being unelectably and incorrectly left-wing like Corbyn's. She is eloquent, experienced and female; in sum the best chance that Labour has of getting back into power by 2020.
