Labour leadership candidates are being warned against trying to “out-working-class each other” as the party weighs up who would be best placed to win back seats lost in last month’s bruising general election.

Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips and Rebecca Long-Bailey have all defended aspects of their backstory as the candidates compete to win over Labour members by highlighting their humble origins.

Ian Lavery, the party chair, whose majority in Wansbeck was slashed to 814 in December, said it was the candidates’ policies and life experiences, not their parents’ jobs, that were most important.

“What has been pretty infuriating is that candidates have been trying to out-working-class each other,” he said. “It’s like we used to say in the school yard: ‘My dad is bigger than your dad.’ For heaven’s sake! What we need is a leader and deputy leader who’ve got life experience themselves, who understand people from different classes. Because the way we’ll win an election is not just by representing one class of society, but a coalition of classes – with policies that will enhance the lives of everyone.”

Alison McGovern, the Wirral South MP and chair of the Progress group of Labour centrists, said: “Actually, the candidates are pretty similar – they are all from fairly working-class backgrounds but have lived fairly middle-class lives. And let’s be honest, Keir is quite a bit older than the others, so he’s going to have more wealth built up – that’s just a fact.” Read more

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