Oh and while we're on about 'the left wing candidate Owen Smith..'

There's been quite a trend of absolute chancers going for the leader position recently. Creepy 'committed Christian' Crabb, lead balloon Leadsom, backfoot Boris, greasy Gove, not so eager Eagle...

Looks like this has made it onto the BBC news already.
Queue furious denial.

Can't deny his voting record though. Hansard doesn't lie.

Indeed.

I enjoyed some Labour MP on C4 News last night being pressed by Cathy Newman about what they'll do if Corbyn wins again. Naturally there was no answer because she didn't think that would happen.

I wonder if the media will suddenly become more pro Corbyn (or at least anti-Smith) to ensure he wins again so the Labour party splits.

Previous Labour Leader Alert!

My mum sent me this page the other day. Why? Well, the Dr Keen in this article was my GP when I lived in Watford - for pretty much all of his career (I remember him joining the practice when I was quite young). He retired a few years after I moved to Chelmsford. Oddly, a face I never thought I’d see again, let alone on the internet in a political website.

http://order-order.com/2014/08/01/eds-c ... dy-genius/

The current trials in the labour party can be traced back to one person and one vote : Harriet Harman and the vote on the Cameron government welfare reforms. That was the point the PLP and the grass roots party diverged. Pretty much every indicator said that the grass roots was vehemently opposed to the bill and that it should be opposed. Harman and 'soft left' in the PLP couldn't face doing that because they believed it would upset middle englanders who had bought into the 'shirker' rhetoric who they desperately wanted to win over, so they didn't oppose it. They abstained, too cowardly and lacking in principle to take any sort of stand.

And then after the votes were counted, it turned out that if they HAD all voted against it, the bill would not have passed. The morning after, when the uproar in the membership hit social media, Harman and some of the other soft lefties appeared on TV and radio trying to sell the line that abstention was the same as opposition and it wasn't their fault. The grass roots party didn't buy that for a second, it had been ignored and then was having it's intelligence insulted to add insult to injury. It was in a state of fury.

No wonder they want rid of them all. No wonder they prefer Corbyn. He actually appears to listen to them. He actually appears to care about the same things they do. He's not trying to justify himself purely by saying 'you have to listen and do what we tell you to or we won't win an election' like the soft left is trying to, when the grass roots doesn't believe they'll win an election in a month of Sundays anyway with the likes of Harman in charge, and even if by some miracle (or Tory collapse) they did, they will just do what they feel like - which is perceived to probably be broadly similar to tory policy - and damn what the members think anyway. "we have to do this to get into power to do what you want us to do" doesn't wash when you've done the opposite even in opposition, let alone in power.

Any political party who's elected MPs decide to represent anything other than the grass roots membership's desires is doomed, despite that actually being correct in principle for our form of democracy. The realpolitik is you cannot go against the mass of your membership for long, or a split is inevitable.

All this predates Corbyn and his election to leader. Corbyn being leader is a symptom of the problem, not the problem.

They really are trying to make voting this time round a pain the backside.
I'm in a Labour affiliated Union so I got an automatic vote last time round. This time round it appears I have to re-register as an affiliated supporter (or whatever the terminology is), admittedly we get a bit longer than anyone who wants to sign up as a supporter to get a vote (registration closes today by the way) - closing date for affiliated Union members is 8th of August.
I'm just wondering if they'll try to disenfranchise me because it may look like I've tried to register twice (once last time and now for this round). At this stage I wouldn't put it past the NEC stooges who fiddled with the rules at the last minute to screw over a large swathe of new party members - yes, we'll take your money but you don't get a vote unless you pay an additional £25 (up from £3 last time).

I'm not even in the Labour party other than via the union but the way the PLP and their minions in the NEC are p!ssing about I'm more and more in favour of a deselection bloodbath and possibly even a split despite what I know that'll hand the Tories on a platter just to be shot of them.
What I can't understand is, despite the evidence staring them in the face, they can't seem to accept that perhaps the reason they've been unelectable is that they've failed miserably as a party to listen to their traditional voters. They don't really seem to have gotten the message from what happened in Scotland and they don't seem to have grasped why their traditional supporters have been migrating to UKIP of all places.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not particularly enamoured about Jeremy Corbyn. I happen to agree to a certain extent that he's not a particularly good leader (although I do wonder how different it would look if the PLP was actually behind him rather than constantly trying to undermine him). Politics isn't all black and white and while principles are important, so is being willing to at least consider a compromise position which it doesn't sound like he and/or the people around him are particularly good at either although that may be just aggressive/biased reporting, I'm not sure.

Jon is spot on about the vote on welfare reforms. It was shameful for Labours official position to abstain on that.

The thing that boggles my mind right now is I can only assume Owen Smith is the candidate the PLP actually want to put up. Eagles was a stopgap, a stalking horse to bring a leadership contest into being so they could then shoehorn Smith in.

That must have known about his background and that it would be brought up as soon as he launched his campaign. They must have known he'd worked for not one but two multinational drugs companies, organisations which are pretty much viewed as the devil incarnate by a lot of Labour voters. They must have known his voting record was public knowledge and would come under pretty much instant scrutiny.

It blows my mind. They either didn't know any of that stuff would come up, in which case 'incompetent' is an understatement, or they thought it would come up but nobody would care, in which case they're just delusional.

Let's put this bluntly : the PLP/'soft left' have put up someone who the majority of the people voting in the election will find totally unpalatable. Then they sit there with a straight face and say Corbyn - who has never personally lost an election in a 30 year political career - is 'unelectable'.

I'm just... I can't find the words for how utterly out of kilter the thinking behind this must be.

I'm in a union but it's not affiliated to the labour party, so I have no line in to vote via associate membership. So I've put my money where my mouth is and stumped up the 25 quid. I wonder how many people would vote in general elections or would have voted in the EU referendum if you'd had to pay to take part..

I also note a story today about a kickstarter style campaign where people could donate 25 quid, which a person (who had to show hardship and inability to pay themselves) could use to register to vote. The Labour NEC have told the organisers that if they don't take it down and give the money back to the donors, they and anyone they enabled to register with the scheme will be banned form voting in labour party affairs permanently. Yay democracy! So you can pay 25 quid, but you can't let someone pay 25 quid for you. How exactly does that work then?

I'd say he lacks the dynamism required for a really good leader. You're not good as a leader if you're the slowest person in the pack. I don't think even if he did become PM he would be viewed as a historic one, I just think he'd be an 'OK' one. But frankly given the array of charlatans and n'erdowells we've had over the last 20 years, 'OK' seems a step up.

And you're right there is a difference between 'principle' and 'dogmatism'. I think the Corbyn camp has shown signs of the latter over the last year or so - and he's been in the wrong in political terms over Trident - he should have gone with what the party policy is, not his own opinion. However the bare fact is he did try to compromise with the other wing of the party - the makeup of the shadow cabinet was initially chosen to allow the 'soft left' to have a say, to make their arguments and to hold some influence. Their response? Nine months of off the record briefings, continual disruption and basically behaving like spoiled children, followed by a titanically mismanaged 'coup' at exactly the time they should have been going after the Tories like a bunch of wolves.

There's really only one group here who has failed at compromising, and it's not Corbyn.

Hmm, tricky.
It really depends on who's stumping up the cash doesn't it. Would you necessarily trust a bunch of people who's voting fee had been paid for by an commercial firm or another political party?

The sites no longer up so I can't check, but I think it was an aggregated fund. The people paying in didn't know who the money was going to go to and the people being paid for just got 25 quid from the fund, not 25 quid 'from some particular donor'. There didn't seem to be any way to pay for votes as such. You paid to enable people to vote, nobody was being asked which way that was.

According to the Guardian daily live blog, 183,000 people paid the 25 quid (or more, there was an 'extra donation' option if you felt like it). Apparently the total take was just over four million pounds. It may be stupid and self-destructive but it's plainly lucrative.

Oh and apparently 183,000 is believe to be more than the entire membership of the Conservative party. They stopped publishing their numbers some time ago due to them having been on a downward slide for years but it was less than that at last published, and there's been no indication of any major return.

183k may be more than the entire membership of the Tories but I have a sneaking suspicion that Tory members (or at least a small number of them) are able to contribute rather more than most Labour party members are able to.
On the plus side, that's a huge number of potential people to do useful things like actual canvasing (if they decide to do anything other than register).

It also p!ssed on the chips of the Lib Dems recent membership increase. IIRC they said they'd signed op somewhere between 10 and 20k new members immediately following the Brexit vote, may even have gotten up to 50k.

On the down side, I hope the NEC don't get it into their minds to try and pull this crap on any sort of regular basis. Fleecing your members every time there is a vote isn't a good plan IMHO.