Attention please: there’s too much politics in our leadership contest

This is going to sound like a weird thing to say but bear with me: There’s too much politics in our leadership contest.

I don’t mean the rather unedifying way that supporters of one candidate or another are slagging off the others. I mean that’s unattractive, short sighted and downright dumb (exactly who do you think will sit in the Shadow Cabinet when your guy or gal wins? When they are implementing the policies set by your champion, how then are all those silly, ugly and extreme insults still lurking on your timeline going to look?)

What I mean, is that at present, the leadership contest is starting to look a lit like a living museum of politics. Roll up, roll up! See the exhibit entitled “Who’s NHS? Our NHS!”. Win a free conservatory at the Aspiration Bingo! Jeer at the lefties/Blairites – takes your pick.

We haven’t been doing this a month yet and I am getting tired of it. The candidates seem pretty tired too. Otherwise I don’t see why they are letting themselves fall so easily into the internal traps and labels that dog everything we do in politics and nothing we care about in life. Who is the “left” candidate? Who is the “moderniser?” Who will Len McCluskey back? Who will Tony Blair back?

A friend of mine who isn’t in the Party described it as “all a bit What’s Good For ‘Them’ as opposed to What’s Good For ‘Us'”. I think that’s the problem in a nutshell. The current electorate that our star players are interested in are Labour Party members and affiliated supporters. And they are talking to them in all the most traditional ways, using the language that signifies “political leader”, Look there they are on Marr, and there with Andrew Neil. New Politics is dead, long live politics.

I don’t begrudge the candidates doing what they have to to get elected leader. But I do slightly worry that in so doing, no one is doing what Labour needs to do to get elected to lead the country. I want some multitasking and some imagination. Some speaking to the country in the way we speak to our friends and neighbours. About the things we speak to our friends and neighbours about.

When was the last time you told someone you were aspirational? Or talked to someone outside of politics about whether they were left wing? Do you know what it means instinctively that the government’s cuts are going to take us back to the 1930s? Or – like me – does that take some parsing?

Yes we all have ambitions and we have to be a party that recognises, encourages, understands and enables these. But we must show this understanding. Not repeat buzzwords ad nauseum.

Yes we a party proudly on the left. But we need to demonstrate why our brand of social democracy will make Britain – all of it – a better place.

Yes we must oppose the Tories. We must do so loudly and proudly. But not with arguments that speak only to ourselves, but with the vision of opportunities lost or yet to be grasped. Opportunities the Tories are incapable of understanding or offering.

I am pleased that there has been some good talk about understanding where we lost. We should and must learn the lessons our candidates in these seats have to teach us. I am pleased that some of the hustings are to be held in these seats. But if all we do is bring our worn our ways to Nuneaton what opportunity does that give us to build a new relationship with its constituents? What will be different about this event that will open up those conversations from the many other hustings (themselves quite a tired and uneven format with the “Us” and “Them” of my friend’s appraisal very much in evidence with the staging and the strong sense of stage management.

Last week I spoke of the need to campaign in poetry. I don’t just mean in our language – though that is essential – but also in our campaigning. We need the imagination to move away from the ways we know because the voters don’t know them. They don’t know us and at the moment they don’t want to. Tell me how we change that/ Grab my attention. Please.