The boys’ club

Andy Burnham’s march on Downing Street has been met with almost universal acclaim from the Labour faithful.

Half the parliamentary Labour party clamoured for a selfie with Burnham upon his arrival in Westminster as a newly-minted MP last month. His eventual leadership bid didn’t even face token opposition.

The party has, however, found one problem with their new leader: like all nineteen of his predecessors, Andy Burnham is a man.

With every passing leadership election, and every passing male leader, Labour’s “failure” to elect a female (or, for that matter, non-white) leader becomes more and more of an embarrassment to a party resolutely committed to the DEI policies which have been criticised as conflicting with selection on merit. Criticisms which Labour, of course, reject.

This, after all, is the party of the Equality Act, which in its current form permits, and in the public sector incentivises, “positive action” measures. Labour even created a carve-out in that law to allow them to continue running all-women shortlists for certain parliamentary selections. Their pursuit of gender balance also extends to a rule book replete with requirements for party bodies to consist of at least 50% women, and candidate selection mechanisms like “twinning” (two seats being required to select a man and a woman between them) and “zipping” (men and women alternating on a party list).

The fact that all these efforts have yet to produce a female leader is, therefore, a sore point for Labour, made all the more painful by the fact that the Tories — who (beyond Cameron’s short-lived A-list) never deployed such measures and regularly face allegations of various kinds of bigotry from the Labour — are currently on their fourth female leader.

Efforts to brush this embarrassment under the carpet can be, if nothing else, creative

Efforts to brush this embarrassment under the carpet can be, if nothing else, creative. One Labour figure attempted to claim Burnham as “Labour’s first woman Prime Minister,” for example, because he cares more about “traditionally female-orientated issues” than “the bombs and budgets”. This unconvincing and strangely sexist assertion unsurprisingly sparked outrage among (actual) female Labour MPs.

And so Labour’s love-in over Burnham is tinged with anxiety over his gender. In a recent segment for Sky News, four Labour parliamentarians bemoaned their party’s succession of male leaders. Backbencher Jen Craft blamed this on a “viciousness” within Labour towards potential female leaders. Baroness Hodge concurred but described it as a “societal issue” which Labour had failed to resolve (even if the Tories apparently have). Earlier this year, Lisa Nandy described the party as a “boys’ club”.

It’s incredibly tempting for people on the right to take temporary leave of their principles and agree with this analysis: “Labour are the real sexists!” But this is one of those glib, cheap talking points that doesn’t pass the smell test. After all, this is a party that’s gone to great lengths on an institutional basis to eradicate any instance of men being over-represented.

More to the point, it’s a glib, cheap talking point that lets Labour off the hook.

None of the Labour politicians bemoaning the fact that Burnham is a man are saying he isn’t the best person for the job. Jen Craft and the two other Labour MPs featured in the Sky News video, Jess Phillips and Lucy Powell, all endorsed Burnham’s leadership bid, as did Nandy. Only one Labour MP, Neil Coyle, nominated a woman for the position, who herself endorsed Burnham. The rest of us would be forgiven for asking: if the best person for the job (in their view) has got the job, then what’s the problem?

This pattern repeats itself with every Labour leadership election. The succession of male leaders is always a problem, but never this male leader. 

Labour MPs always seem to think the next leader should be a woman — until, that is, the time comes to choose that next leader. They may even say that, on reflection, some past male leaders shouldn’t have got the job over a woman. But they’ll always maintain that the current male leader is there entirely on merit and definitely didn’t get the nod ahead of a more qualified woman because their party’s a boys’ club. 

This position is, quite frankly, ludicrous, and Labour would be the first to point that out if it were any other organisation — let alone a rival party. More importantly, it exposes how shallow Labour’s commitment to DEI really is.

It’s entirely within the power of all the MPs complaining about Labour not having a woman leader to just insist on having one. This is, after all, what they do at pretty much every other level of their party, and either facilitate or actively encourage for the rest of society. And in normal circumstances, they’ll argue until they’re blue in the face that it doesn’t conflict with selection on merit.

That logic just happens to stop when the chips are down for them. The choice of Labour leader puts so many important things on the line for them: the political direction of their party, the strength of their faction, their chances of promotion, their ministerial car, their polling numbers, and of course their parliamentary seat.

So instead of hand-wringing and eventually reassuring themselves that their next leader will be a woman, maybe Labour could put their money where their mouth is, and commit to an all-woman shortlist or suchlike when Burnham inevitably falls. Alternatively, and preferably, they should be honest with themselves and re-evaluate their commitment to the entire concept.

They’ll probably do neither of those things, of course, so the Tories and Reform should take the opportunity to point out the disconnect between Labour’s commitment to DEI for the rest of us, and their unwillingness to put it into practice themselves when making the decisions that really matter most to them. 

The rest of society should take heed of that too, and stick to selection strictly on merit — if it’s good enough for Labour leadership elections, then it’s good enough for us.