LABOUR'S leadership election was always going to be a marathon rather than a sprint — but the pace maintained by the surviving runners has quickened.

So far all of the contenders are proving to be not quite as they initially appeared. For all Emily Thornberry's straight-talking persona and quick-witted confidence her failure to gain traction, secure any trade-union support or attract enough constituency nominations made her spirited performance look a bit forced. And now she is out.

A shame really because, like Keir Starmer, she should naturally attract support from the right-wing of Labour, a significant if not dominant tendency, that by some accounts is reinforced by returning Blairites and others more in line with the traditional Labour right.

One of the interesting features of the constituency nomination meetings is the way in which the media structuring of the narrative has manoeuvred a substantial section of middle-of-the-road Labour supporters — including a good number of women, who invariably position themselves at the progressive end of the spectrum and with an attachment to modern day feminism — to present as supporters of Starmer.

By one account, a sharply worded exchange took place in which a Greenham Common veteran expressed a surprising preference for Starmer on the grounds that his professional demeanour made him both credible as a prime minister and an electoral asset for Labour seeking government.

 “Two bloody Keirs and we are yet to get a women leader” was one response. Another put the question in more classically political terms: “For years we were told that women don't put themselves forward, that there were few with the right experience, and now we have three capable women candidates who represent distinct trends in the party and a bloody man…”

It is on this terrain that Emily Thornberry's bid faltered. Capable, assured, articulate with a hint of patrician condescension when besting Boris in debate, on top of her brief as befits an advocate and a proven standard-bearer for Labour's until-now subdued right wing, she was sidelined by Labour's unawakened tendency who think, despite their protestations, that the job requires traditional manly attributes.

Two poles of understanding seem to be emerging. On one hand we have a liberal pole of which the best exemplar is Starmer. This is gaining an impressive number of constituency nominations in meetings which, by some accounts seem older and reinforced by those who departed the scene after Jeremy Corbyn renewed his leadership and now see their Thermidor.

One the other hand we have a more explicitly socialist pole given clearest expression by Rebecca Long Bailey.

What is important here are the bat-squeaks. These are emitted at such a high frequency that to hear them requires devoted attention. Comrade Starmer has doubled down on his pledges to respect the Corbyn heritage and presents a package of policies modelled in all surface appearances on the most distinctive elements in the 2017 and 2019 manifestos.

Less detailed, surely, delivered in a tone of courtroom courtesy, certainly, and clearly confected to corral behind his candidature many people who see themselves on the progressive end of Labour Party politics.

It is only when these policies are expressed in a more combative tone, set in a more thoroughgoing critique of capitalism, encapsulated in classically class-conscious language and predicated on an assumption that fighting for these policies is an existential challenge to the main features of contemporary British capitalism that the underlying tensions appear.

Rebecca Long Bailey has made a good job of clothing this class perspective in the kind of thought-out detail that can convince the electorate. Her command of the Green New Deal, which she authored, must be a central feature of Labour's pitch whoever comes out on top in the leadership contest

While there really are quite differentiated programmes at stake, the long traditions of Labourism still conspire to suppress their clearest expression.

At the same time a countervailing tendency is emerging that is showing up the tensions between what we might call the liberal centre and the more traditional Labour right-wing.

Starmer's particular appeal (as was Thornberry's) to a spectrum of opinion that wants to move on from, away from, or even reverse Corbyn's positions is clothed in the cultural and linguistic signifiers of a metropolitan stratum that derives from socially liberal and economically unadventurous middle-class values.

But Lisa Nandy comes at the post-Corbyn revisionist project with an entirely different approach. Her initial intervention pitched her as the voice of angry and engaged provincial opinion, a megaphone for distressed and economically deprived areas left behind by the neoliberal restructuring of British capitalism.

But the logic of her challenge has compelled her to re-energise several strands of traditionally reactionary politics in British Labour. The result is a cacophony of conflicting messages which are acquiring coherence only by her now more-precisely articulated reactionary ideas.

This seemed to result in a claim — made during the Channel Four hustings — somewhat improbably, that Labour's alleged anti-Semitism came up on every doorstep she canvassed. If true, this suggests that the worthy electors of Wigan are vastly more responsive to the efforts of the Hasbara department of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs than voters in other parts of Britain.

Hers is an odd mix. On one hand she bids to be a “red bridge" between both sides of Labour's electoral coalition, as the voice of a working class unrepresented by metropolitan Labour. But she thinks Labour should not take the side of labour in industrial struggles.

Now it is true that traditionally Labour governments have not taken sides in industrial disputes and that often they were either protagonists (as employers) or presented themselves as the guardians of laws which limited trade-union rights. And Blair and Brown declined to repeal Thatcher's anti-union laws despite appearing to promise this in the pre-election period before the long Thatcher and Major governments came to an end.

But for a candidate for Labour's leadership to insist on a studied neutrality in the routine clashes between labour and capital, and between labour and the capitalist state, shows just how remote from the traditions of Labourism she positions herself and how remote from the organised working class is the constituency which she seeks to woo.

Lisa Nandy's subliminal message is that beyond a formal adherence to present-day Labour verities she stands for a distinct set of traditional Labour values. This is true in as far she departs very infrequently from the positions which led her to chair Owen Smith's campaign to depose Jeremy Corbyn.

The idea that Labour's Brexit debate can be read as an expression of the contradiction between working-class priorities and middle-class values carries an element of truth. Of course, the class interests of the dominant section of Britain's capitalist class underpinned the Remain campaign and the People's Vote device.

Both these phenomena were as much devoted to derailing Corbyn's Labour as they were to their ostensible objectives. In the case of the latter, more so, as there was never any prospect of a second referendum and the leaders of this mendacious manoeuvre worked on precisely that assumption, even if the middle-class masses who rallied to the starry blue flag didn't, couldn't or wouldn't, grasp this essential truth.

Labour has precious little time to mount an effective challenge to Boris Johnson's bid to transform his bridgeheads in traditional Labour territory into a 21st-century equivalent of the Tory shires and suburbs that have long given the Conservatives an electoral base.

He has a problem in reconciling this political imperative with the priority Tories traditionally ascribe to fiscal conservatism. Some of this accounts for the departure of Sajid Javid from the Treasury and the Cabinet, but more is in store. One Nation Toryism, even if in reality a fiction, is difficult to sell to a two-tendency Tory Party.

The Prime Minister is also First Lord of the Treasury and he knows that if the problems of the economy overwhelm his government and erode his plurality among the electorate, his majority in parliament will begin to disintegrate.

This is why Labour's leadership election is so important and why it is essential for the main differences in approach be teased out in debate.

The only basis for a progressive Labour government to take office is that its challenge to the power and profits of the capitalist class is embodied in demands that millions of working people see as their birthright.

This is not simply a question of effective parliamentary performance, or a forensic front-bench probing of government deficiencies. Above all it depends on the level of class combativity, the strength of the mass movement against austerity and war, the willingness of trade unionists and the working class — as a whole — to fight for its immediate interests.

Labour really needs to be embedded in this world and that means Labour's leadership must emulate Corbyn at his best — not only in bringing the authentic experiences of working people into parliamentary debates, but standing on the picket line, speaking at anti-war and anti-racist rallies, taking up every case of injustice and discrimination and always standing with working people against employers, the boss class and the institutions which shore up their power in class society.

If this leadership contest results in a more-clearly articulated distinction between the liberal pole in Labour politics and the class-politics pole so much the better.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.