My speech to Windsor CLP re Jeremy Corbyn

I am supporting Owen Smith and it is for the following reasons;

My experience within the Labour party has been from my own region in Hull, but also in the South Yorkshire labour strong holds where a lot of my family are from and also Manchester where I lived for four years. I believe in these Yorkshire seats labour faces a significant and grave threat which I feel Jeremy and those around him either take for granted or are not capable of solving.

This is because I believe that the Labour vote in these areas is actually much softer then is often assumed. There are a lot of voters who aren’t that involved in politics and I think we take them for granted. From what I have seen there are sections of voters who vote labour, not through any emotional affinity to the party, but often simply because we are the only alternative to the conservatives.

I think we take this for granted at our peril, as is evidenced by what happened in Scotland.

We face a real threat in these regions from UKIP, which seems even starker considering these labour strong holds voted overwhelmingly to leave in the EU referendum.

Not only this, but UKIP is second in many of these seats, meaning the threat is now real and palpable and I urge you to take it seriously.

I believe the only thing holding UKIP back is their previous leader. Should they elect someone more relatable, someone from a working class background perhaps who is able to combine their populist right wing message, with some populist left wing economic policies, then labour could be in real trouble in our heartlands.

My own experience from friends and family who do not vote labour and people I know who canvas regularly is that labour has a serious image problem, which I do not believe Jeremy is capable of solving. On more than one occasion Labour has been characterised to me as some variation of “the pc brigade” and many have simply stopped listening to us, reducing us down to a simple parody of our values. Now clearly this isn’t a bad thing to be politically correct, I think its right, and we should hold people to account who are not. That said, to have our entire message reduced down to a caricature shows just how much many people have stopped listening. We need someone to make people look again at Labour and I believe Jeremy, with all of his baggage and lack of experience outside of politics, is incapable of doing this.

A good example of a typical perspective on Labour and Jeremy Corbyn is my mother. She voted Labour in 1997 and 2001 and agrees with much of our aims, but has voted conservative ever since. Her problem is not that she is particularly right wing; it’s that she doesn’t think we are credible to run a country and be trusted with her taxes. When reflecting on Jeremy she and others from my region have argued that he appears un-relateable, too academic, his time as leader too chaotic, lacking common sense, too lofty and too London. I believe Jeremy epitomises many of the image problems the left and particularly labour have and therefore I believe that he is not the answer.

To many I have spoken to, as nice as they think Jeremy is and as compassionate as they think he is, he is not relateable to the wider labour electorate. He has been am MP for all of his life, was privately educated and is simply too easily type cast as too far left and some 1980s throwback. I cannot see him as the type of person to break through the perception problems which we face.

To form a government we need to win 100 seats, the majority conservative and 2/3 with majorities of over 3000. I see no plan from Jeremy to win these seats or engage with conservative voters and without that there is simply no path to government. There is no magical 35% strategy, no left alliance and no secret hive of left wing non-voters simply waiting for a true socialist to lead labour. The unfortunate truth is that we have to engage with conservative voters, to get them to listen again and convince them that we can be trusted and that our ideas are credible. I believe Owen Smith is much better placed to do this then Jeremy and that is why I will be voting for Owen Smith.