With Chuka Umunna out, the choice for Labour party members is simple. If they want to win the next election they will choose Liz Kendall as their next leader.
There is a very simple test for suitability for the job: their reply to the question ‘did the last Labour government spend too much money?’ Kendall is the only one who has passed. On yesterday’s Newsnight she was straightforward: yes, Labour did spend too much. Yvette Cooper, by contrast, said on Radio 4 this morning: ‘I think there were things that we were spending wrongly on, there were issues that we would have been spending money, too much money on – for example there were things that went wrong with the NHS computer system, with all sorts of things like that – but the deficit at the time was 0.6 per cent, the current deficit, and all the political parties at the time were all supporting the spending plans.’
Andy Burnham has not addressed the deficit since the beginning of the leadership campaign, but on 1 May he was asked the question on Radio 5 live and said that blaming the deficit on Labour was a ‘triumph of political spin over the facts’. His fingers are all over the deficit because he was chief secretary to the Treasury in 2007. Mary Creagh told the World at One today that Labour should ‘probably’ not have run a deficit before the crash, but rather spoiled it by trotting out Miliband’s standard response: ‘the global financial crisis did not happen because we employed more teachers, nurses and doctors.’ Tristram Hunt did admit on Question Time last night that ‘yes, we overspent’ but marred it by saying ‘I do not accept that the last Labour government did not fix the roof while the sun was shining’.
Yvette Cooper’s rambling answer should spell immediate disqualification. Two weeks ago she presumably watched Ed Miliband’s stumbling response when asked the spending question. There was an audible gulp from the audience when he tried to defend Labour’s spending record. Almost everyone outside the Labour party can see that if you are running a structural deficit during the boom times – which the IMF puts at 5.2 per cent of GDP in 2007 – the public finances are doomed when, as is inevitable, the economy eventually turns down. Labour will remain unelectable for as long as its leadership tries to deny this.
The leadership candidates need to remember how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown brought the party back to power. They apologised for the over-spending of the Callaghan government, even though by 1997 that was 18 years into the past. In 2020, the last Labour government will only be a decade ago – still within the memory of most voters.
Leadership elections are often won by candidates whom hardly anyone outside politics has previously heard of, and not without reason: they are untainted by the past. If Labour is serious about winning in 2020 it will make sure that Liz Kendall is the latest in the trend.
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