By\u00a0Paul Mitchell<\/p>\n
(WSWS<\/a>) – Labour Party leader Ed Miliband resigned last week following the party\u2019s rout in the May 7 general election, but a crisis is already enveloping the contest to find his replacement.<\/p>\n Front-runner Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna announced his withdrawal on Friday, just days after declaring his leadership bid. Umunna told reporters that the pressure and scrutiny he had undergone in the last few days was not \u201ca comfortable experience\u201d for him or his family. He insisted that there was no scandal behind his decision to withdraw.<\/p>\n Earlier this week, former army officer Dan Jarvis, MP for Barnsley Central since 2011 and currently shadow minister for justice, announced that he would not be putting his name forward in the contest after all. Jarvis declared, \u201cIt\u2019s not the right time for my family. My eldest kids had a very tough time when they lost their mum [in 2011] and I don\u2019t want them to lose their dad.\u201d<\/p>\n The Labour leadership contest is a poisoned chalice. Despite years of austerity and attacks on social conditions, the Conservatives still managed to win 331 parliamentary seats and 36.9 percent of the vote, giving them an unexpected 15-seat parliamentary majority. Labour ended up with 30.4 percent of the vote and 232 seats\u2013the party\u2019s worst defeat since 1987.<\/p>\n In Scotland, once a heartland for Labour, the party lost all but one of its seats. Many of its leading lights were kicked out. The Scottish National Party, campaigning on a supposed anti-austerity ticket, swept the board. Labour fared no better in England, seeing a significant part of the anti-Tory vote going to the United Kingdom Independence Party and the Greens.<\/p>\n Labour\u2019s response is to lurch even further to the right. Immediately after the election, Miliband was roundly condemned as being too left-wing, focusing on the party\u2019s \u201ccore\u201d working class vote and failing to appeal to \u201caspirational\u201d Conservative voters. A chorus of demands erupted for a return to \u201cNew Labour\u201d and the legacy of Blair.<\/p>\n Both Blair and his chief strategist Peter Mandelson threw their weight behind Umunna, a suitably shallow and opportunist vessel. After becoming an MP in 2010, the former solicitor served as Miliband\u2019s parliamentary private secretary before being rewarded with the post of shadow business secretary less than 18 months after entering Parliament.<\/p>\n His politics find suitable expression in a posting on the ASmallWorld website, known as \u201cMyspace for Millionaires\u201d, requesting the name of nightclubs in London where he didn\u2019t have to mix with the \u201ctrash\u201d and \u201cC-list wannabes\u201d.<\/p>\n Umunna\u2019s ability to \u201cnot come across as political\u201d won the praise of the head of the Confederation of British Industry\u2019s employers\u2019 group, John Cridland, who assured reporters that he was \u201ca guy with whom we can do business\u201d.<\/p>\n During the election campaign, Umunna insisted that Labour would be a \u201cresolutely pro-business government\u201d. Afterwards, he insisted that Labour had to say it was not \u201cafraid to say we want to help people make their first million\u201d. He declared, \u201cWe need a different, big-tent approach\u2013one in which no one is too rich or poor to be part of our party,\u201d along with \u201cdrastic\u201d political reform including a \u201cmassive\u201d devolution of power to our cities, regions and towns.<\/p>\n Umunna has penned articles promoting \u201cBlue Labour\u201d, the \u201cFlag, faith and family\u201d project pioneered by the academic Maurice Glasman, which stands for the dismantling of social provision utilising nationalism, anti-immigrant measures and a more corporatist relationship with the trade unions.<\/p>\n Trade union leaders had said they would block Umunna\u2019s leadership bid. Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite union, criticised those who claimed that Labour lost the general election because it was too left-wing. He declared, \u201cLabour didn\u2019t lose votes by proposing to tax the wealthiest a bit more, or intervene in the housing and energy markets. It did lose support because of its muddled message on austerity.\u201d<\/p>\n This is just hot air. In 2013, he enthused over Miliband\u2019s adoption of Conservative \u201cOne Nation\u201d rhetoric and that Labour was \u201cthe natural, historic, vehicle\u201d for the working class. Shortly before the election, he repeated that the Labour Party \u201cis our party. We built it, to serve us, the people\u201d and that Miliband\u2019s flagship pledges are \u201cour policies.\u201d<\/p>\n Miliband\u2019s flagship pledges included the assertion that his party would be a more \u201csensible\u201d advocate of austerity, and would implement a \u201cbudget responsibility lock\u201d, clamp down on immigration, defend the European Union and maintain Britain\u2019s role as a leading military power.<\/p>\n Reports suggest that McCluskey and other trade union leaders are contemplating backing the right-winger Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary. Elected an MP in 2001, he was regarded as a Blairite technocrat, dedicated to the New Labour project as culture secretary, chief secretary to the Treasury and health secretary. In that role, he laid the groundwork for the privatisation of the UK\u2019s first NHS hospital at Hinchingbrooke.<\/p>\n In the leadership contest following Gordon Brown\u2019s resignation, Burnham came in a miserable fourth place after campaigning on the mantra of \u201caspirational socialism\u201d. Today he says, \u201cOur challenge is not to go left or right, to focus on one part of the country above another, but to rediscover the beating heart of Labour,\u201d adding, \u201cThat is about the aspirations of everyone, speaking to them like we did in 1997.\u201d<\/p>\n Yvette Cooper, who became an MP in 1997 and is forever tainted with the Blair-Brown years, wants Labour to \u201cmove beyond the old labels of left and right\u201d and states, \u201cLabour lost because we didn\u2019t convince enough people in all parts of the country that we had the answers to match up with their ambitions.\u201d<\/p>\n Cooper has been shadow home secretary for the past four years, during which time she attacked Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May from the right on border controls, immigration and extremism. In March 2013, she delivered a major speech, apologising that Labour had let in too many Eastern European workers and calling for immigration to be \u201cproperly controlled.\u201d She criticised the Tories for failing to reduce \u201cnet migration\u201d and presiding over a system that \u201cisn\u2019t working at the moment and [it] has got significantly worse since the election.\u201d<\/p>\n Liz Kendall, elected MP for Leicester West in 2010 and currently the shadow minister for care and older people, called for \u201ca New New Labour.\u201d She has said that in the NHS, \u201cWhat matters is what works\u201d, whether it be public or private.<\/p>\n Historian Tristram Hunt, MP and shadow education secretary, declared the party should take its time to carry out a \u201cbrutal post-mortem\u201d about its \u201cunderlying philosophy and thinking\u201d. Labour would only win if the party championed \u201caspirational\u201d voters, he said.<\/p>\n According to the New Statesman<\/em>, \u201cthe left of the party is also hoping to get a candidate on the ballot paper\u201d in the form of Labour Party deputy chair Jon Trickett or former National Union of Mineworkers president and parliamentary Trade Union Group chair Ian Lavery. But that they will get nowhere is borne out by the decision of Socialist Campaign Group chair John McDonnell not to stand. He told the magazine, \u201cI\u2019ve done it enough times and been blocked from getting on the paper. How many times can I be hit by that?\u201d<\/p>\n In 2010, when he stood as the candidate of the party\u2019s putative left wing, McDonnell withdrew when only 16 out of a total of 258 Labour MPs were prepared to support him. The WSWS wrote<\/a> then, \u201cThe simple reason for McDonnell\u2019s defeat is that the left wing in the Labour Party is an insignificant and impotent rump\u201d and that his \u201calternative programme\u201d setting out \u201ca radical new course to challenge the consensus\u201d within the Labour Party were \u201canathema to the party for which he functions as a loyal political apologist\u201d.<\/p>\n