There’s a smart piece in this week’s Economist on what might be the biggest obstacle to Harriet Harman becoming Labour leader after the next election, the narrowness of her range:
“Ms Harman also personifies a rather narrow sect of Labour thought. Unkindly nicknamed “Hattie Harperson” for her political correctness, she has often championed a cultural rather than economic leftism associated with the bolshier London boroughs in the 1980s. The Equality Bill she is shepherding through Parliament, with its new rights for women and minorities, is a kind of manifesto for Harmanism. Critics of her preoccupation with sexism often make her point for her with their ugly tone (“treachery in high heels” was one columnist’s verdict). They also underestimate the role her harsh and lonely introduction to Parliament—where, heavily pregnant, she joined just nine other Labour women in 1982—played in shaping her views.
But cultural politics of this sort does not animate many of her party’s bedrock members, for whom Labour is just what its name implies: a movement for the economic betterment of working people.
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