After Harriet Harman announced that Labour would ‘let the public in’ to its leadership contest, the BBC has announced that it will broadcast a hustings with the candidates on 17 June. The programme, which will be broadcast on BBC Two (which might give a clue as to how popular BBC executives think this example of public service broadcasting will be), will be presented by Laura Kuenssberg.
The venue is quite instructive. Harman said this week that the contest need to take place in places where Labour wasn’t winning, rather than the party’s strongholds. So the hustings will be broadcast from Nuneaton: the constituency that showed the demise of Labour’s hopes of victory on election night by staying Tory.
Even though this isn’t going to be a box office programme for most members of the viewing public, it will allow the candidates to present themselves to Labour members who do not come to party events, and who do not tend to come to conferences.
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