Spare a thought for Shabana Mahmood this weekend. The Labour poster girl for anti-woke politics may be asked by No 10’s politburo to use her position as chair of the powerful National Executive Committee (NEC) to impose an all-BAME shortlist on the newly vacated seat of Gorton and Denton. The move would be a bit problematic for Andy Burnham, who, as far as we know, is a white man. Since Thursday’s announcement of a by-election, the commanding upper reaches of the Labour Party have been feverish, doing what they do best: plotting to block the enemy within.
I always thought the managerial right of the party – who should not be referred to as Blairites because no losers who poll this low should be given that title – has less destructive impulses than Labour’s left and the soft left. Their motives are transparent. Unlike the left and soft left, who are prisoners to their woolly feelings and abstract concepts like “values”, the right are simple: they like winning and money.
So you knew what to expect from the forces behind the Keir Starmer government: lobbying and ruthless election-winning tactics. Which begs the question: what are they playing at now, trying to keep the most popular Labour politician in Britain out of the House of Commons? Look at the polls. Andy Burnham is capable of beating Reform UK. The same Burnham, who, anyone old enough to need a PAP test will recall, was considered a Blairite candidate in the 2015 leadership election. Thwarting his candidacy is putting neither country nor party first. It is prioritising the interests of a handful of political careers, and makes the entire party look like petty bureaucrats again.
Identity politics have long been the weapon of choice for Labour Party officials and politicians of all factions, but especially those with no ideological or intellectual hinterland. If you don’t know what you stand for, or why, you can always disarm your enemy by invoking sexism, racism or any other bigotry. Call it ad hominem, or Machiavellian political manoeuvring. If you are on the left, it works because we tell ourselves we joined politics to fight those “isms”, not perpetrate them. Any way you see it, being accused of not making space willingly for a woman or BAMΕ candidate hits below the belt: professionally, socially, personally.
The first reports about the options of blocking Andy Burnham available to the NEC was the all-women shortlist. It was followed by naked gaslighting of Labour members by leadership loyalists claiming the costly by-election only serves to “placate one man’s ego”. Some tripped over themselves to manifest the narrative and make the case for the moral imperative of increasing the number of women in parliament. Labour currently has 218 male MPs and 190 female ones. A senior LabourFirst staffer tweeted yesterday that we should not stop using all-women shortlists until we have complete parity.
I do not doubt this staffer’s sincerity about having more female representation in the Labour Party. But her reaction to the expected criticism was familiar. No. 10’s new concern over insufficient diversity and inclusion on the Gorton candidates list were apparently examples of “far left men confidently dictating” women’s views. The use of the prefix “far” was telling, as most of the comments beneath her post were the usual alt-right trolls that harass all women on Elon Musk’s X, plus a handful of men who were at best centrists and soft left. Until Owen Jones chimed in, I couldn’t even see anyone from the party’s left, let alone the “far left”.
In my experience, it is only the party’s managerial careerists who refer to the “far left”. The term, when it’s used in this context, is usually a way to put conscientious social democrats in their place whenever they want to talk about economic redistribution more than they want to thumbs-up liberals for promoting a select number of often already privileged women and ethnic minorities. I hope it doesn’t make me a “pick-me” feminist, but I would choose a male Labour MP over a female Reform one any day of the week, and would trust him to vote to defend my rights more robustly too.
The hypocrisy of using identity politics, or diversity and inclusion, to block a white male candidate will not be lost to the Corbynites who in 2020 picked Rebecca Long-Bailey to represent them, as opposed to the far more popular John McDonnell. They wanted to be true to a counterproductive party dictum that the “next leader must be a woman”. LabourFirst naturally did not worry about running a male candidate against the three female candidates in the 2020 leadership election. This made sense given that its founder, John Spellar, when he was an MP in the 90s, used to write letters opposing all-women shortlists and refered to them as “this current fad”.
(In 2020, LabourFirst urged members to use all their preferences to block Rebecca Long-Bailey. They were, one LabourFirst-er tells me, “neutral” between the other candidates in the race.)
Now imagine if the Muslim woman who was disciplined into toeing the line over Israel’s war in Gaza, and who did so because she is a British patriot, is now asked to make one more sacrifice and, with her identity as cover, make inconvenient white men go away. Shabana, on your Sunday morning media round, blink twice if you need help. If Blue Labour’s most treasured asset ventriloquises the moral necessity of having another BAME or female MP above the political necessity of Burnham from running, I want to tell her and the future candidate to understand they will never be seen as sincere again.
In a recent article for the Renewal journal, chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, Sarah Owen, wrote “the elephant in the room is the lack of female representation in the most powerful, most visible role in our party: the one at the top.” I hope Labour MPs are not naive enough to think that at this time someone’s identity should be touted as a leadership criterion but, Inshallah, I hope we have a woman leader sooner rather than later. Not because I believe women leaders are, by virtue of their sex alone, better equipped to represent women’s interests than men (which I do believe), or because I believe representation is not just window-dressing but a proven social justice vehicle. The reason I’d like to see a woman leader is simpler than that: she can’t be as bad as Starmer.
[Further reading: The British public is being gaslit over Angela Rayner]
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