If the fight for who’ll be the “continuity candidate” is between someone whose office is run by a dude who wears “Goodnight Trotskyite” icepick badges, and a union bureaucrat who nicked money off his own members... maybe we should be asking what it is we’re actually “continuing”?
I’m wary about tarring Long-Bailey by association; despite loads of folks insisting she must be “the left candidate”, we don’t really know anything concrete, in policy terms, about what kind of platform she’ll stand on, perhaps beyond GND stuff.
As for Lavery, his record/history aside, his recent comments about “the white working class” should set alarm bells ringing for anyone who doesn’t want to see Labour lurch further towards triangulation with nationalism and social conservatism.
What absolutely does need “continuing”, and developing, is the generally leftwards movement on policy. Commitments to social ownership should be extended, and turned into living policies the party educates and agitates for.
The other thread where it makes sense to talk in terms of “continuity” is something that early “Corbynism” promised in part but never really delivered: full democratic empowerment of the party grassroots, via a properly sovereign conference and open selections of candidates.
So far I’m not convinced either Long-Bailey or Lavery deserve the confidence sections of the left apparently have in them, on either of those fronts.
