I sent out this letter to every Labour MP today, explaining why I am standing for the Labour leadership. I signed each letter personally. It took ages.
Dear colleague,
As a Party, we have just come through one of the toughest elections in a generation. Thirteen years of governing took its toll. We need to renew. We lost touch. We need to reconnect. Our ability to broadcast our values to our core root disappeared.
That’s why today I am putting myself forward to be considered for leader of our Party.
I realise I am not the most experienced candidate in the field, having only become an MP earlier this month. If you believe that having been a minister and dealing with the pressure that that brings, day in day out, makes you more suitable for the role of leader, then I am not your man.
However, if, like me, you think that towards the end of our tenure in power, those in the higher echolons of the Labour Party looked jaded (including, without naming names, David Miliband), that we now need a leader who is enthusiastic, willing to learn and unafraid to admit when he’s wrong, then I am the right candidate for you.
We need to be progressive. We need to be the progressive force in British politics. David Cameron claims to be leading the “progressive Conservatives”. That is an oxymoron. And now the Liberal Democrats have formed a coalition with them, their claim to be progressive is much undermined. We need to draw these dividing lines and say: “We are progressive. Labour means progress.”
I have not been tainted by the expenses’ scandal, nor have I been in the Westminster Village so long that I have lost touch with the common person. No one thinks they have lost touch, but I still see myself as an outsider in Parliament and can safely say that all the other candidates in this contest have. They don’t understand people’s concerns on immigration, so they ignore it and when they do talk about it they alienate people more.
As part of my ability to really connect with the electorate, I’ll be using social media in a way no other politician ever has before. My twitter account will be more engaging, my blogs more frank and videos more revealing than those of any other elected official. The other candidates may be talking about listening, but our problem was not that we didn’t listen, it was that we didn’t say things in the right way. Of course I’ll be listening too, but we need to find different ways of annunciating our beliefs and that’s why I’ll be using the internet in this way.
Let us be proud of what we’ve done, but do so whilst moving forward.
Yours sincerely,
James Garner
You, sir, are disqualified by B.1.7.1.A.ii of the Labour Party Rule Book: you’re not an MP.
What is the above gentleman on about? Jim is the MP for South Luxton and Wetfield.
Exactly. And non-PLP is certainly no gentleman. Typical bureaucrat, trying to frustrate the will of the people. Jim 4Leader!!!!
Considering how MPs are so unrepresentative of ordinary people, it’s about time this oligarchical rule was done away with. If only all the candidates were as ordinary as comrade Garner.
Yes because ‘South Luxton and Wetfield’ is a real constituency….
Ah. I may have made a tautological mistake. The issue is not one of whether Jim is an MP, a Labour member, or indeed a Labour MP. B.1.7.1.A.ii instead refers to “Commons members of the PLP”, and though Jim indeed claims to be Labour MP for South Luxton and Wetfield, and indeed probably thereby reckons himself a Commons member of the PLP, the issue comes not in him recognising the PLP but in the PLP recognising him, and it has not done so. An additional obstacle comes in the reality that the House does not recognise him either, with the official Hansard record making no note of him having been sworn in, and with no record of his signature on the House’s new Code. Thus Jim – sadly for those of us who seek to support him – is neither a ‘member of the PLP’ or, indeed, a ‘Commons member of the PLP’, and thus in typical and frustrating bureaucratic fashion, I – keeper of the Rule Book – must once again rule his inability to stand.
Being a Labour Party member, Jim may seek – with the nomination of his CLP or a Labour affiliate body – to table a motion to revise the terms of B.1.7.1.A.ii. In the meantime, however, we must summise with that old Latin phrase: ’stet’.
Clearly the NEC should reconsider any such exclusionist procedural control freakery in the interests of a diverse and balanced choice. Jim seems as diversed and balanced as many a PLP member. How much longer can we stifle democracy in the name of petty bureaucracy? The voters of South Luxton and Wetfield have already spoken. It’s time now to give the people of Britain their voice. JG4LL
PS: Couldn’t one of the Milibands lend a few spare signatures?
What does Jim have to say about Ed Balls’ woeful performance in response to Michael Gove’s Queen’s Speech debate thing about education?
Was he completely rubbish or what?