The other side chose to make abortion the issue, so it does now have to be Rebecca Long-Bailey rather than, as it would otherwise have been, Lisa Nandy. Although we are only talking about the best of a bad lot here.
For Deputy Leader, Richard Burgon is the candidate of Lexit (that is, of wanting to do specific left-wing things that will be made possible by Brexit), he is the candidate of Palestine, and he is the candidate of having gone from a comprehensive school in the North to Cambridge, to qualification and practice as a solicitor, and then to election to Parliament.
I like and admire Angela Rayner, who marched with the County Durham Teaching Assistants when I did, and whose National Education Service is pretty much by dream policy. I have never met Rebecca Long-Bailey, but I have no cause to dislike her. I do, however, resent profoundly the implication, which is not made by them personally, that their experience is typical of our generation, and that people like Burgon, or Jonathan Ashworth with whom I was at Durham, do not exist.
Born in 1980, Richard Burgon went from a comprehensive school to a good university. That is normal. In its way, it is at least as inspirational as Rayner's and Long-Bailey's life stories. It deserves the votes of those of you who have them. As a generation, it is time to stop writing our experience out of the history that is only just beginning to be written.
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