Integrity? Authority? Unity?

I received a leaflet today promoting the candidacy of Kier Starmer to be Labour’s next Leader. It’s a good quality piece of campaign literature (although I wasn’t persuaded and will be voting for Rebecca Long-Bailey, who was nominated by our local Labour Party).

However, I was slightly unnerved by the fact that the leaflet opens out into a large portrait of the candidate, bearing the slogan “Integrity, Authority, Unity”.

As someone who found in Jeremy Corbyn, the first Labour Leader I had supported (as a leadership candidate) since the decision on who our Leader should be was taken away from the Parliamentary Labour Party I was always conscious that the criticism that some “Corbynistas” were tending towards a personality cult was not without its force.

I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn ever authorised anything quite as gruesome as this poster however. This is real personality cult stuff, using half of the two sides of A3 available on the leaflet for what looks like a cross between a window poster and the sort of thing that might appear on the bedroom wall of a particularly disturbed teenager.

What struck me most of all though was the slogan; “Integrity, Authority, Unity”. Like all the best slogans it is a three word slogan. It’s not quite “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” or “Land, Peace and Bread” but it beats the famous Blairite failure at a three word slogan “Education, Education, Education”.

But what is the slogan trying to say about the candidate, in an election against two other candidates?

He is the candidate with integrity? The integrity he showed when he joined the mass resignation from the Shadow Cabinet in 2016 (before being invited back as Shadow Brexit Secretary)? Are we meant to conclude that he has more integrity than the other candidates? On what basis?

He is the candidate with authority? Please. This is a blatant appeal to the unconscious bias which sees in a white man in a suit the characteristics it expects to see in an “electable” leader.  Should we conclude that Mr (“Sir”) Starmer has more authority than his female opponents? If he has, why has he?

He is the candidate to bring unity? The sort of unity he encouraged by nominating Owen Smith for the leadership in 2016? That was the unity of majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party against the majority of the Party membership.

Let’s be clear. What I am criticising here is a leaflet, not a candidate. The bookie’s favourite to be our next Leader may win the election, and if he does, I will campaign for him to be our Prime Minister (just as I campaigned for successive Labour Leaders whom I had not supported in their election within the Party).

Ultimately, the identity of the Leader of the Labour Party is less important than the active willingness of the Party membership to assert our democratic right to control the direction of our Party.

However a Leader who genuinely wanted unity with the membership, who wanted authority founded upon democratic engagement with that membership and who sought integrity in that relationship of mutual respect would be more likely to assist us, as Party members, in building the Party our people need.

That’s why I will vote for Rebecca Long-Bailey.