Today we focus on the declared front runners for the Labour leadership election.
In an unsurprising move, Labour has decided to allow Waitrose shoppers to pick their new leader.
Any customer spending over a £100 on wine or luxury food will be given a red plastic token (that closely resembles the party itself) to place in one of five plastic cylinders marked with the candidates names .
Waitrose customers with cars less than two years old famously elected Nick Clegg as Lib Dem leader back in 2007 (see below)
So if you buy wine at Waitrose and are amongst that tiny fraction of the population that Labour remains interested in, here are the runners and riders – may be the best career politico garnering the most red plastic tokens win!
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Chuka Umunna
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Private school educated, grandson of a High Court judge, a multi-millionaire lawyer and entirely London based.
His heroes are Michael Heseltine, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair.
Member of A Small World , an invitation-only club for millionaires that exists to free the rich from the tiresome bother of mixing with the lower orders. Their website outlines:
“Access more than 100 events around the world each month: intimate cocktails, gallery vernissages, gourmet suppers, and extraordinary weekends.”
Chuka posted on A Small World to ask his fellow millionaires what venues he could go to in London which did not let in any “trash”. Just in case anyone had not understood him he specified that what he wanted was a “trash-free weekend”. (thanks to Craig Murray for the heads up)
oddly enough Chuka attributes Labour’s failure to win the election to “a failure to be pro-business.”
or pro millionaire.
He is naturally already winning the adoring support of The Guardian etc.
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Tristam Hunt
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Tristam is the son of Julian Hunt – Baron Hunt of Chesterton. Another beer and sandwiches candidate Tristam is a multi millionaire, private school educated, Cambridge University graduate.
He feels the party needs to appeal to “John Lewis couples” and those who aspire to shop in erm Waitrose and he thinks the party made a mistake in not doing enough to listen to businesses.
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Andy Burnham
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Just about scrapes into the millionaire club but is as close as Labour gets these days to a working class leader.
Cambridge University educated career politico. A staunch catholic Burnham said: “I think it’s better when children are in a home where their parents are married” and “it’s not wrong that the tax system should recognise commitment and marriage”, creating controversy because his views replicated the policies of the Conservative Party.
Happily his wife was tweeting in 2013 about their boat in Cannes harbour which presumably helps to cement their working class family values.
In June 2008, he apologised to the director of pressure group Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, after she threatened to sue him for libel for smearing her reputation.
Has thus far said nothing about the leadership election or endorsed any leading upper middle class shoppers.
Supports Everton and like them – has no chance.
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Yvette Cooper
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Its so refreshing to see people from such a wide variety of backgrounds contesting the Labour leadership election.
Here we have the fourth Oxbridge educated millionaire candidate. Like Ed Milliband she went to Harvard to study (rather than teach) neo-classical economics and is married to neoliberal zealot Ed Balls.
The Balls family have gone from wonks to millionaires entirely out of the public purse. The power couple had a joint income of almost £300,000 per annum for the half a decade during which both public schoolboy Ed and Yvette held high office. After years of jumbo expense claims, ‘flipping’ their main home not once but three times, you can see why the Ballses managed to collect properties worth well over a million
Ed is a former public school boy – and a former MP.
Liz Kendall
Not famous for much – but she completes the class diversity by being an Oxbridge educated neoliberal – In 2015 she argued in a Parliamentary magazine that “there will remain a role for the private and voluntary sectors where they can add extra capacity to the NHS or challenges to the system”, arguing that with the NHS “what matters is what works”
which will be a relief to all those tearing their hair out as the NHS is broken up into a thousand dysfunctional pieces and sold off.
16/1 with the bookies she isn’t anywhere near rich enough to appeal to the Murdoch press and therefore has no chance.
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Sodium Haze Verdict
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We feel Labour is aiming rather low with this election. For the love of God could they not get sponsorship from Harrods or ‘How To Spend It’ magazine?
That aside we don’t give a flying fuck which of these wealthy Oxbridge educated neoliberal politicos gets to lead the fake opposition.
We suspect very few people outside of the Westminster / London media bubble do either.
Watch this supermarket for updates.
Can we stop this denunciation of people just because they went to Oxbridge? Admission to Oxbridge is on merit, not just on ability to pay. Noting people who went to private schools – like Umunna and Hunt – is reasonable: they benefitted purely because of their family wealth. But a comprehensive-educated kid who made it to Oxbridge? That’s worthy of praise, not condemnation. That’s doubly the case if you wrongly believe that Oxbridge admissions are based on having gone to a posh school, because that would mean a comprehensive-educated kid would have to be even better to get in. Comprehensive-educated Oxbridge grads SHOULD be vying for the top positions, because they are demonstrably some of the smartest people in society.
And if you’re going to grubbily count all of their assets, then you should include their debts too. Andy Burnham has two moderately-sized properties which between them could probably be sold for about £600k, but what about the mortgages he will have on them? Andy Burnham is not a millionaire by any reasonable measure.
Look Chris I don’t have a particular beef with Andy Burnham or with going to University – Oxbridge or otherwise.
But we cannot ignore the fact that Oxford and Cambridge graduates have formed the establishment in this country for centuries and at a time when Labour has so obviously lost touch with its base it has to be worth noting that all the leadership candidates are wealthy Oxbridge graduates.
if we don’t care about the staggeringly unrepresentative nature of the line up, one can one only presume that we don’t care how Labour is perceived or how it functions.
As Labour found out in Scotland that’s a dangerous nay suicidal game.
I also don’t see quite what is grubby about calling wealthy people wealthy and showing why – particularly in reference to a political movement that used to about socialism and social justice – not mega expense claims and flipping properties.