The challenger unveiled policies with appeal to leftwing progressives, and said he could deliver them while Corbyn could not

Key points

Owen Smith, who is challenging Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership, outlined a 20-point policy plan at a speech in Orgreave, the site of a clash between mineworkers and police during the 1984-85 miners’ strike that has entered into the mythology of the struggle for workers’ rights in Britain.

He proposed abolishing the Department for Work and Pensions, which has been the focus of protests against Conservative welfare reforms, and replace it with a Ministry of Labour and a Department for Social Security.

He also advocated workers’ councils, a reversal of cuts to corporation tax and inheritance tax, banning zero-hours contracts and reinstating the 50p rate of income tax.



Verdict

The conventional wisdom at Westminster had been that Smith’s chances in the Labour leadership contest lay somewhere in the margin between extremely slim and zero. After watching that speech, many people will probably reassess. Within an hour, Smith may have made himself competitive.

Smith achieved two things. First, he outlined a policy agenda with considerable appeal to leftwing progressives. This may sound obvious, but as last year’s Labour leadership contest – and this summer’s Tory one showed, party leadership candidates can be surprisingly reluctant to commit themselves to policies.

Second, and more importantly, he put delivery at the heart of his pitch: he could implement these proposals, he said, but Jeremy Corbyn couldn’t or wouldn’t.

In policy terms, there is little that Smith is proposing that Corbyn himself would not endorse enthusiastically. The Jeremy for Labour camp tried to make this point by issuing a statement on Wednesday morning, before Smith even stood up, accusing him of lifting some of Corbyn and John McDonnell’s ideas.

But the Jeremy for Labour press statement may have been sunk by the sheer weight of policy in the Smith speech. And even if Corbyn can prove he has backed all these proposals, Smith was at his most effective when arguing that Corbyn had done little or nothing to advance them.

During the Labour leadership campaign last year, Corbyn produced a dozen or so policy papers that were reasonably substantial. But since then, in most areas, the party has done almost nothing to develop those proposals, as the tax campaigner Richard Murphy, who used to be a Corbyn cheerleader, pointed out last week in a blogpost explaining why he has lost faith in Corbyn. Smith has identified what is probably Corbyn’s biggest weakness and Wednesday’s speech showed he prepared to capitalise on it as hard as he can.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A member of the audience films Smith’s speech. Photograph: John Giles/PA

It is important to watch the speech as well as read it. Smith was passionate, just as Corbyn is. But he was also assertive, authoritative and comfortable with the media to an extent that Corbyn isn’t.

That is not to say that he is a perfect candidate. A glance at what Smith has said in the past on certain subjects, and what he is saying about them now, has left him open to the charge of insincerity, and there were a couple of moments when he appeared to trip. Some colleagues are viewing the line about smashing Theresa May back on her heels as a gaffe (although I felt he defended it well, saying it was “robust rhetoric”. The line about “one-hour contracts” was a slip that he may feel the need to clarify. But these did not tarnish what was overall a strong performance.

Although Smith is mostly differentiating himself from Corbyn on delivery, not policy, on Europe he said enough to suggest this could become a key policy dividing line. Smith has already said that the people should get a chance to vote on the final Brexit deal, either at a general election or in a referendum. Today he implied, without being fully explicit, that Labour under his leadership would campaign to stay in. He said Labour should be fighting to stay in Europe.

Corbyn, on the other hand, has shown no interest in trying to reverse the EU referendum vote, and Smith’s words suggest the leadership contest could become one with implications not just for Labour, but for Britain’s relationship with the EU too.