The Labour party has decided on a medium-length campaign to elect its new leader, the Press Association reports, with the announcement on 12 September. This is slightly odd, given NEC members were still on their way to the meeting where they’ll vote on the timetable, but there you go. If that date is approved, it is a halfway house between the short campaign that some were arguing would stop the party from descending into lengthy navel-gazing while the Tories got away with introducing policies that weren’t properly scrutinised by the Opposition, and the long campaign that the unions wanted so they could sign up more members – and that some of the less well-known candidates wanted too in order to establish themselves.
The argument about getting a move on does still ignore the fact that even once you’ve got a leader, that leader is trying to work out where the party should go and what it should say. Labour was indeed leaderless when the emergency budget came out in 2010 with a number of cuts, including what came to be known as the ‘bedroom tax’, but it had a leader by the time of the Comprehensive Spending Review and it had a leader during the passage of the Welfare Reform Act and other pieces of legislation that it couldn’t work out whether to oppose or support. On some pieces of legislation the party changed its mind from stage to stage in the Commons. It was running a lengthy policy review that never really managed to conclude anyway and which stopped front bench spokespeople from effective scrutiny of policies. There is no reason to believe that things will be any different this time round, unless leadership contenders can set out a radical new plan for having party policy in place from 12 September, which would be odd.
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