Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith have faced off in their first hustings of what has already proved to be a bitter leadership campaign. That disunity and turmoil was on display on stage in Cardiff last night. The Labour leader hit back at Smith’s dig about the ‘fractured’ state of the party by saying it was hard to preach about unity when Smith and others had ‘resigned from the shadow cabinet’. This was business as usual then. So whilst Corbyn and Smith made it clear they will never see eye to eye, what did they have to say on what they actually stand for?
Whilst their clashes on stage only reveal the divisions we already know about, their closing pitches were somewhat more informative in boiling down why they think Labour members should back them. Owen Smith’s buzzword was ‘crisis’. He said wages and job security are collapsing (never mind that employment is at record levels). Smith also did his bit to try and detoxify the row over his links to Pfizer by suggesting the NHS was ‘crumbling’ and he was the one to fix it. Controversially, he also did nothing to win over Labour ‘Leave’ voters by saying Brexit was a ‘terrible vote’. But whilst Smith’s vision of 2016 Britain was pretty dire, what was his solution? He told the audience in Cardiff to look to 1945 for answers, which he said provided the inspiration for the ‘most radical, practical, socialist program for Government’ that we’ve seen since then.
So if Smith was all about gazing into the past for answers, Corbyn was focused on talking about the positives of 2015. Labour wasn’t in crisis, he insisted, to wild applause, and Corbyn pointed to Mayoral wins (never mind the distance Sadiq Khan placed between himself and the Labour leader in campaigning), local election victories and the insistence that he could win a General Election. Corbyn finished by saying the thing that mattered was to offer something different and that Labour under him was the party with the clear economic alternative to the Tories. The polls might suggest he’s wrong but the wild applause which greeted his pitch suggests those who matter in this leadership contest think otherwise.
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