Rebecca Long-Bailey promises to end ‘gentlemen’s club’ of politics in apparent dig at Keir Starmer

Shadow business secretary launches campaign as main rival says party needs ‘unifying peace’

Rebecca Long-Bailey will promise to end “the gentlemen’s club” of politics when she launches her Labour leadership campaign on Friday.

The shadow business secretary’s comments will be seen as a dig at Sir Keir Starmer, her main rival in the race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn and the only man in the contest.

As the leadership race stepped up a gear, Sir Keir called for an end to Labour “factionalism” and insisted he was best placed to unite the party.

Labour announced on Thursday that 14,700 people had applied to become registered supporters of the party, at a cost of £25, in order to vote in the contest.

Ms Long-Bailey will launch her campaign in Manchester on Friday night, a day after being officially endorsed by the left-wing Momentum campaign group.

Emphasising her ordinary background and contrasting it with the “gentlemen’s club” of Westminster, she is expected to say: “Where I grew up, Westminster, even London, felt like a million miles away.

“The story of the last few years is that many people feel there is something wrong with their laws being drafted hundreds of miles away by a distant and largely unaccountable bureaucratic elite in Brussels. But I’ll be honest, Westminster didn’t feel much closer, and it still doesn’t today.”

She will add: “That’s why I want to shake up the way government works and deliver a clear message to voters: we will put power where it belongs – in your hands. The British state needs a seismic shock, to prise it open at all levels to the people – their knowledge, their skills, their demands.

“Proper democracy takes power away from the offshore bank account and places it on the ballot paper, so workers can have more and chief executives less, and we can tackle the climate crisis with a Green New Deal that unites all of Labour’s heartlands. We will end the gentleman’s club of politics and we will be setting out plans to go further by devolving power out of Westminster to a regional and local level.”

Ms Long-Bailey will also promise to maintain many of the policies that Labour adopted under Mr Corbyn, including a Green New Deal and a programme of nationalisation to deliver “modern, democratic public ownership”.

She will launch her campaign after her main rival, Sir Keir, said that the next Labour leader would need to bring about “unifying peace”.

The shadow Brexit secretary told BBC News: “We need to unify the party and I think I can do that. We spent far too much time fighting ourselves and not fighting the Tories. Factions have been there in the Labour Party – they’ve got to go.

“I know from running a big organisation that if you’re going to change the values and the culture of the organisation, you’ve got to do it from the top down, so that unifying peace is vitally important. If we’re not united as a party, we are not going to win anything by way of an election, but we also need to be a very effective opposition.”

Sir Keir also hinted that he would continue Mr Corbyn’s pledge to take several key industries into public ownership, claiming “the arguments about nationalisation make themselves”.

He said: “I don’t accept the argument that private is good, and public is bad; you don’t have a good private sector if you don’t have a very strong public sector.

“But my priority is making sure that we have tackled, or are capable of tackling, that gross inequality, and also providing the chances, so we can genuinely say there’s an equal opportunity for everyone, wherever they come from and whatever their background.”

However, he suggested that Labour had lost the general election because voters did not trust it to “deliver”.

He said: “In this general election I didn’t hear people saying, ‘everything’s fine, nothing needs to change’.

“What I heard people saying was, ‘we do need fundamental change, we don’t think our public services are properly funded, we do not enjoy seeing homelessness, we don’t think that we’re being paid enough, we don’t think that we’ve got security at work in a way, but we don’t trust the Labour Party to deliver’. So I want to restore that trust in the Labour Party, as a force for good and a force for change.”