Open(ish) Thread on Labour Leadership Election

On the last question without googling I would have said Foot, although I suspect that’s the obviously wrong answer as there were a lot of properly hardcore socialists in the senior Labour ranks in those days.

From a long-term perspective, one of the interesting things about a Corbyn candidacy is that the olden days his literally-worst-in-Parliament loyalty rating (as measured by the number of votes he has defied the whip on) might well have been a disqualifier, as party discipline was a major attribute that even ordinary members would have cared about. Instead I’ve seen it mentioned by a lot of activists on Twitter as evidence that he would be a good leader, as he always has his own view and sticks to it. This kind of say-it-like-it-is really seems to be on the rise, on the right as well as the left (Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage).

It will be interesting to see how the longing for this kind of style (which can be very appealling if the person is on your side of the debate) can be squared with running a successful political party. It seems to lead to either
1) a hypocritical outcome where only the leader is allowed to say what he/she likes (UKIP and Nigel Farage) which leads in turn to other senior party members being very dissatisfied or
2) a cacophony of views from the party which leads fairly rapidly to irrelevance and oblivion (more or less what happened to the Pim Fortuyn List in the Netherlands aftern Fortuyn’s assassination and their first election victory)

How do the popular left parties in southern Europe like Podemos and Syriza manage this?

“Many of the so-called “hard left” ideas Corbyn espouses are quite popular. ”

This. This. THIS!!!!

Left wing ideas are invariably popular when honestly described to the public. The great thing about the internet/social media is we may FINALLY be able to shift the death grip that the right wing press has had on elections for the last 40 or so years.

Gordon Brown was unambiguously the most left-wing leadership candidate in 2007.

I don’t understand the defeatism re: 2020 – you’d think the Conservative majority was 120, not 12. They will inevitably spend a lot of political capital in this Parliament, and will likely no longer be able to rely on the immense charisma and personal popularity of David Cameron. Most likely the leader will be Osborne, who cuts a very different figure. Fairer boundaries will hurt Labour, but an overall gain of 20 seats in England is the minimum expected. Meanwhile the SNP has clearly overreached; it will lose maybe 20 seats at the next election, which Labour is best positioned to win. So a minimally competent Labour Party (ha!) would get perhaps 270 seats in 2020 just by natural political wind-down.

With strong leadership they should be able to beat that – being the energetic voice for Unionism in Scotland, representing the moderate middle of British politics that is skeptical of the Tory agenda but recognises the need for public sector reform and for the government to live within its means. Will that be enough to win the next election outright? No, because governments lose elections, oppositions don’t win them. But if the Tories have trouble on Europe, or economic headwinds are strong, then such a Labour Party would be strong contenders.

But Corbyn has poisoned the well. I still don’t think he’ll be leader, but his effect on the leadership campaign has forced the other candidates into the mire to try and combat him. It’s not that the marginal voter will remember the leadership campaign, but Burnham will find it very difficult to lead the Labour Party from the electoral centre when he has promised the activists something else to get their votes.

People in the UK and I would say most countries, at least in the West, are sick to death of tribal politics. Tribal politics creates/attracts politicians who simply cannot think straight – they automatically defend the party identity with meaningless spin-doctor crafted rhetoric, and become combative in discussions on that basis. They have no positions of their own. Liz Kendall during all her appearances during the May election comes to mind.

When we see these people – e.g. on Question Time – most viewers instantly switch off. We know exactly what they are going to say. We know they are completely insincere, and have no ideas.

The politicians who get at least an engagement from the public are those who speak thoughtfully and sincerely. This includes people like Vince Cable, the sadly departed Charles Kennedy (who, while probably drunk on a pre-election QT appearance still made Kendall look stupid), Nicola Sturgeon, Yanis Varoufakis, but also people like Galloway and Farage and Marine le Penn – all of whom have some variety of thought-out position, however repellent some may find it.

I think that the public have largely woken up to the fact that there are two classes of politician: those with whom you can discuss actual content, substantive issues, and those with whom you cannot. The latter type are now understood as more or less noise-makers with no ideas of their own. The young particularly can detect BS and dissembling at 100 yards, and have no tolerance for it.

I think only one kind of politician has a future in the long term, at least in proper democratic and internet-enabled states: those who can think, do think, and will have authentic conversations with the electorate.

Whether Corbyn has any real ideas I don’t know, but he does speak his mind, and comes across as reasonably thoughtful and measured. So he already has a huge advantage over the others – people are actually listening to what he says.

Salem –ha! Yes, I guess you win. I forgot there was an election for him, I thought it was a coronation. I meant in a contested election. And its not Michael Foot (Peter Shore — not clearly to the left of Foot, but not clearly to his right either)

I wasn’t being defeatist, exactly: just expressing skepticism about 2 of his opponents’ abilities to lead them to victory. And, whereas if Corbyn wins, I doubt he will still be leader in 2020, I expect Burnham, Kendall, or Cooper to remain leader till after that election. Although the Tories have a small majority of seats, the right won a majority of votes, for the first time since… I don’t know when… and while I hope you are right about the SNP I’m not convinced (and, ironically, I think Corbyn has a better chance of winning back Scottish seats).

McDonnell didn’t get enough MPs to be on the ballot.
Fair enough about Shore, I suppose, but on pretty much everything else he was as left as Foot, and Foot was (like Ed Miliband) always less left in practice than in rhetoric. Gould was to the left of Smith (though Smith was, like David Miliband, more left wing in practice than in rhetoric. Still, I think his canonisation depended on him dying young).

There’s an earlier election where it is completely clear that the clearly most left wing candidate won….

Well I finally looked it up (thank you Wikipedia) and was a bit surprised…it’s before my time but it’s interesting that that person is rarely cited as a left wing success story – although I guess he was, in retrospect

Well done!

Generals spend their time thinking about how to fight the last war, so it seems that politicians spend their time thinking about how they could have won the last election. In many ways it’s easier than figuring out how to win the next election, and, being a purely theoretical exercise, avoids actually having to do anything.

As noted by Salem, Labour couldn’t have won by getting SNP, Green or Lib Dem voters to vote Labour. But as well as the people who voted Tory or UKIP, there were also 16 million people who didn’t vote at all. I have no idea which set of votes would be easier to obtain, but I remember reading that percentage turnout amongst people who preferred Labour was lower than amongst people who preferred the Conservatives. For completeness, for 2020 there are also several millions of current 13 to 17 year olds.

As an American who is ignorant about UK and Labour politics, but more knowledgeable than most Americans which isn’t saying much, I would vote for Corbyn. The Labour strategy of portraying themselves as Conservative lite in favor of austerity lite hasn’t worked and besides austerity lite doesn’t work as a policy.

It’s not clear cut, but the SNP won by being anti-austerity and the Liberals lost by enabling austerity. In the U.S. Obama went along with austerity and deficit reduction rhetoric and lost Congress to the Republicans. Labour needs to be anti-austerity and “pro-growth and government investment” and spin the media narrative that way. They need to move the Overton Window towards policies that really “work.” I believe Corbyn’s policies would work much better than the Blairites’.

I’ll admit that concerns about “electability” are justified, but the long-term goal (or medium term goal) should be to change the narrative and dialogue so that politicians like Corbyn are electable to leadership postions. National Nurses United just backed Bernie Sanders despite questions about his electability.

If Labour continues on its current course it will go the way of PASOK and certainly will not win in 2020. More crucially, if it did survive (unlikely in my admittedly far away view) and eventually gained government again it would not make much difference on any issue of importance. Corbyn as leader will upset the apple cart, which is unambiguously a good thing.

@19 Layman

Yes I agree with about the mitigating factors you mention, but I bet if Obama had seen a strong recovery they could have taken Congress in 2014. The recovery was incredibly weak in part because of the austerity forced on the economy by the Republicans.

Yes unemployment came down from 10 percent to around 5.5 percent before the Nov. 2014 election, but those number don’t reflect how bad the recovery has been for most people.

Phil just about sums it up for me.

It feels like we’ve reached a moment where the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do. To the extent that I’m left scratching my head seriously wondering what passes for intellect and imagination among the Labour establishment. We had a humiliating defeat about ten minutes ago and people are still fixated on the 80s? They’re not even fighting the last war.

I greatly doubt going all anti-EU will convince the average UKIP voter (why go for the copy when you can vote original strength). As Ed says at #8: the only realistic way of convincing those voters to vote Labour will be a program that is attractive on other issues. A full on switch to Brexit would hardly be convincing. Plus I would argue that policy positions should not be made purely (or even mostly) based on how to win elections.

While a stronger showing in Scotland wouldn’t have meant victory for Labour, the weak result there has been the main cause of the “Labour lost enormously” spin. Yes, after 5 years of a fairly unpopular government you would expect a better result, but it was hardly the huge defeat it is made out to be. After all Labour actually increased their share by 1,5 points. And while UKIP increased its vote by 9,5 points, the Conservatives increased only marginally, while the Libdems lost 15. That would seem to indicate more of a chain of voter movements (Libdem->Tory->UKIP) than a direct one from Labour to UKIP. I’m rather curious how 2010 voters changed their votes. The German media usually have figures on where votes moved relative to the last elections the night of the election. Is there anything like that for the UK?

Meanwhile some 34% of the electorate didn’t go to the polls at all. Some of those are unlikely tovote under any circumstance, but convincing a few percentage points of them to come out would make a huge difference (not to mention a high turnout being an important part of a healthy democracy). And this will not be achieved with soft triangulation. I would argue that a lot of the fervour that has arisen around Corbyn’s campaign has less to do with the man himself (though his unproduced style has certainly helped) than with his positions.

@6 “If every single Green voter had switched to Labour, they only pick up a handful of seats” What, like, 6? ’cause Cameron has a majority of 12.

Considering the argument that 2020 because Labour must gain votes from the Tories and they can’t do that by moving left, I say this is an attitude derived from an attitude that reflects a voter pattern that ended a while ago and is sustained by the current dominance of the two-party system in the US. But even in Canada, the voters are defying the FTPT model to split between three or four parties and that’s now what’s happening in the UK and it changes what Corbyn can and can’t do. In any case, the assumption that the two biggest centre parties represent the norm and normal people switch between them according to triangulation must be revaluated in light of these facts:

1: Most MPs did not get a majority of the vote in a majority of the seats, therfore the Conservatives did not get a +50% of the votes in +50% of the seats. This was a democratic issue in 2010 that lead to the AV referendum – it’s still true. But Labour do not in fact ‘have’ to take Tory votes.
2: The 2015 Tory vote stratified by class – it gained votes among the A and Bs and lost them among the Cs and Ds form 2010, but Labour gained votes in a broadly flat manner. Vote movements between the two, as they happened, were not symmetrical.
3. If normal people are swing voters that must mean normal people don’t vote Lab/Con. When polled, Conservatives overwhelmingly say they won’t vote Labour and vice versa.
4. UKIP voters support nationalisation and price controls at rates similar to Labour voters, not Conservative voters, so nationalisation. So there is evidence Labour voters aren’t limited to SNP, Plaid, Lib Dem and Green.

@Anspen: here is a website that tracks voter movement. Overwhelmingly, net movement is to and from the newer parties, not between Labour and Tory.
http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/Analysis_votermigration.html

@ 30 Wow I hadn’t thought about Wellstone in a long time.

Phil @ 18 discusses the welfare bill. That’s how I felt about Clinton doing welfare “reform” with a Republican Congress. It’s as if Labour is following in the Democrats’ footsteps. Even now as welfare “reform” has been shown to have increased poverty rates, leading Democrats like Obama defend it when they discuss it which is rare. Basically they don’t talk about it. They believe it was a good electoral move for the Democrats even as they equivocate about the increase in poverty.

The basis of the ‘Corbyn phenomenon’ is the fact that Labour members and sympathisers had effectively made a pact with the Blairites and party establishment whereby they would hold back their left-wing enthusiasm and agitation in return for electoral success against the hated Tories. The last two elections (and arguably 2005)have demonstrated that the Labour right is unable to keep its side of the bargain, thus removing the inhibitions not just of the Labour left but many centrist members and trade unionists as well.

The anti-establishment momentum in British politics also should not be underestimated.

Hi,

I’m expecting that Corbyn will be the next labour party leader and I’m hoping he’ll be the next Prime Minister. I think his campaign for the Labour leadership has energised young voters, and they’ll turn out for him in large numbers at the general election. Turnout in 2015 was only 66.1% after all, and aside from the Greens, who had little realistic chance in most seats – but in Brighton Pavilion, where Caroline Lucas won from the left, turnout was 71.4%.

Count in some votes recaptured from UKIP and some seats from the SNP, and some English voters not afraid of Labour being ‘dragged to the left’ by the SNP since Corbyn-Labour and Nicola-SNP will likely be running on similar platforms, and Corbyn has a fair chance of leading at least a Labour-led ‘rainbow coalition of the left’.

Jonathan @ 35:

Young voters energised by a different approach to politics, getting away from the tired old cliches? That’s what they said about Blair in 1997 and Clegg in 2010 as well. In the end, young voter turnout was low.

Can’t Alistair Campbell tell Tony that if he wants Corbyn not to win he should keep his mouth shut? Or come out in support of him?

What I find most fascinating is the level of self-deception. Some people think Corbyn is ideologically right, and others that he’s wrong. And some people think he’s electoral poison, and others that he’s electoral gravy. But while there are plenty of people who say “Well, my heart is with Corbyn, but he’s just unelectable, so I can’t vote for him,” I have yet to meet a single Labour moderate (or Tory, or Lib Dem, or UKIPper) who thinks he’s electable. The only people who think Corbyn is electable are his ideological partisans. Surely that should tell you something. And as for what he’s offering:

Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t offer anything new. This is literally the most laughable of all the propositions advanced by his camp. Those of us who lived through the turmoil of the 80s know every line of this script. These are policies from the past that were rejected not because they were too principled, but because a majority of the British people thought they didn’t work. And by the way, they were rejected by electorates round the world for the same reasons.

Can anyone seriously argue with a word of what Blair wrote here? It’s not just that Corbyn promises electoral disaster (although he does), it’s that if, by some miracle, he were to win the election, he promises national disaster too. And that’s without going into the matter of his “friends”.

As reported at 40, Campbell and Blair have been in full panic mode in the Guardian on successive days. The hyperbole is similar to what we heard before the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and the effect is, similarly, to make many people suspicious. Given that many people think that they should have slipped away and kept a low profile after they resigned from government, there is a great deal of annoyance that they are taking such a high profile. Labour doesn’t appear to have come to terms with some of the horrors of the Blair era (like the invasion of Iraq and the authoritarian policies); people like Burnham and Cooper (like Brown and Miliband before them) don’t seem to have the nerve to say that those actions were wrong and appear to hope that they will just be forgotten. But Blair keeps reappearing telling the party what to do.

Also, the constant repetition of phrases like “Tony Blair won three elections” simply piles the votes up for Corbyn. There were some good things in the 1997 and 2001 manifestos, and some good legislation was passed pre-2001. In practice the second New Labour government was authoritarian and Blair began to try to accelerate a reform agenda that was undefined but in practice, was mainly about privatisation of public services. So it isn’t really logical to say that the Blairite agenda is popular because, when it really emerged, New Labour started losing votes.

“Can anyone seriously argue with a word of what Blair wrote here?”

Blair is setting up a series of straw men. There is a great deal of sensible politics to the left of Tony Blair.

I have yet to meet a single Labour moderate (or Tory, or Lib Dem, or UKIPper) who thinks he’s electable.

Labour leadership race: Jeremy Corbyn could be the next Prime Minister, says Ken Clarke

MPA Victoria: “Left wing ideas are invariably popular when honestly described to the public”.

For some values of “invariably” and “honestly”, and for some values of “left wing”.

It’s the latter that bothers me more. Look at some current ideas in the UK: membership of the EU, for example. I think there is a good case to be made for saying that the EU’s effects have varied from mediocre to catastrophic. Is that a left wing or a right wing idea? Surely there are people from across a broad spectrum who would agree.

Or Scottish independence: the SNP government has allowed cuts in the NHS (while in England expenditure rose) and has militarised the police; and their policies for an independent Scotland must involve an increase in taxation, a decrease in Government spending, or both. On the other hand, they’re ferociously anti-Tory. Are they left or right wing?

As for the other matter: in the former Soviet satellites, left-wing ideas were incessantly described to the public with no interference from the local capitalist press (which was not allowed to exist). When the Soviet armies departed, very few people agreed with left-wing ideas. Why was that?

Engels@47: on nationalisation, there’s a good case for saying that natural monopoly services should usually (there are exceptions) be in public ownership. This doesn’t seem to be being argued. Why not?

Salem above has already noted Corbyn’s friends. There’s also his decision to host programs on Press TV, the propaganda arm of a pretty nasty reactionary theocracy. As to my special subject, when the Ukrainian people mounted a popular revolution against a corrupt kleptocracy last year, they faced a militarised reaction from a chauvinistic, state-capitalist and imperialist power (even before the annexation of Crimea – the massacre of protesters on the Maidan was likely instigated, or at least encouraged, by Russian security services.)

Corbyn responded to this turn of events by regurgitating Moscow’s talking points on the situation and claimed the annexation of Crimea was basically NATO’s fault. I don’t think these are the arguments of a principled, albeit misguided man of the left. In fact, the most charitable interpretation that can be granted to them is that they’re the arguments of an uninformed dilettante who shouldn’t be let anywhere near the leadership of a serious political party.

To expand a bit on my last post – I’m profoundly angry with the “centre” of the Labour party for being so damn incompetent. That means Liz, Yvette and Andy and their teams.

An in-party election is not a General Election, this is an electorate interested in politics. You have to provide them with something to get their teeth into. Instead they’ve got sucked into concentrating on the negatives of Corbyn at the exclusion of providing a meaningful vision for the party. The media love the negative slant – but it’s not doing anything for the candidates or the party…

I’m with Phil, mostly.

re Frank Wilhoit @28

The job of the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition is to stand up in the Commons, day after day after day after day after day, and tell the Government that they are wrong… Corbyn may, or perhaps I should have said “will at least sometimes”, do this. None of the other leadership contenders would do it at all.

Here’s where I quibble slightly. There’s opposing as in being shouty in PMQs, and opposing as in votes. The Tory majority is not a large one, and its perceived power post-election is slowly giving way to reality: it is the job of the main opposition party to identify a dozen vulnerable Tory backbenchers on every issue and make them suffer for their votes while keeping the other opposition parties on board, or pick out a handful of awkward-squad right-wingers and see if they can be persuaded to demand more from the government.

Corbyn has been an on-off rebel in the division lobbies his entire career. I’m not convinced he can maintain party discipline. Should he win, his deputy needs to be someone who’ll wield the Labour whip against the disgruntled Blairites.

Daragh can certainly offer guidance on what it takes for a political party to be removed from a position of power into near-annihilation by the voters.

As a former labour party member, I’d say Corbyn is a good choice. By the time of the next election he will either have proved his worth as a leader or he will have gone.

I don’t think the left in the UK has ever come to terms with the financial crash. Blair thrived in a period when free-market economics was the undisputed route to generating wealth for everyone. Post crash that is no longer the case. The lesson of the crash is that all that business activity relies on a functioning banking system, and that a functioning banking system ultimately requires the people to stand behind it. What price the people should demand for giving their support to the banking system and wider business activity is a critical question for the left. Corbyn is the one who has come closest to asking these questions. The others have taken the standard view that the financial crash was simply a matter of bad people doing bad things, and that once they have all been dealt with it is back to free-market business as usual.

I’m not a Labour member or “supporter”. As I voted (and advocated) a vote for the Green candidate in my constituency, I didn’t feel entitled to register.

I wouldn’t vote for Corbyn even though I share lots of his values and positions.

As a former “entryist” in the 1980s, I can say that the stuff about entryism this time is nonsense. Even in the 1980s the upper estimate for organized members of the far left in the UK was 15-20,000 max. The group of which I was a member (IMG, then various name changes) never exceeded 900, and it was one of the larger groups. The numbers following Corbyn swamp anything any outside parties could put together.

I’ve been aware of Corbyn since the 80s and the days of London Labour Briefing, which is very much the milieu he came out of.

Though I’m wary of ideas about “leadership”, parties do need leaders in the modern era. They need leaders who can come across as authoritative as the despatch box and convince people on TV. They need leaders who can hold together a very divided party, broker and make compromises, and exert authority over their MPs. I don’t think Corbyn is that guy.

I don’t think Corbyn could win an election even if, per impossible, the PLP rallied behind him. But it isn’t going to. He didn’t have enough support in the PLP to reach the nomination threshold on the basis of MPs who actually supported him (and the latter group is a tiny proportion of Labour MPs).

If Corbyn is elected leader, what is going to happen? Most of the PLP will refuse (either openly or with some degree of caution) to recognize his authority. They will not serve in his Cabinet. There might be an open split, with some MPs going off to other parties, there might not. Probably there will not be and we’ll have a few months of ineffective leadership and infighting before there is some pretext for the PLP to declare no confidence in Corbyn. Then Corbyn and his new “base” will face a choice, to split, form a new party (perhaps in formal electoral alliance with the Greens) or knuckle under and revert to their traditional role. I predict the latter.

None of this is Corbyn’s fault. Fault lies with the generations of SPADs and androids who are represented by the other candidates. Of those, Cooper is the only one who I can see as a credible leader of the opposition. Kendall is a joke and Burham has reacted to Corbyn by making unthought-through pledges to do things on the hoof.

In short, there are no good outcomes here, and many disastrous ones. Labour is f****d.

# 63 Yes, quite. Labour are in completely unknown territory here. However Labour has been heading into trouble ever since they failed to remove Blair when WMD failed to appear in Iraq (or possibly since the failed to challenge his bizarre assertions about WMD in late 2002). Apparently only Brown could remove Blair, and which made it seem like a grudge rather than a move to remove someone who had made a disastrous decision.

So Blair and his supporters never went away, and appear to continue to exert significant influence.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1195366/Mandelson-did-deal-Brown-neuter-Iraq-inquiry-bid-protect-Blairs-name.html

If he does become PM, I hope he repays Blair for this disgraceful act of treachery by doing what should have been done years ago: charging him with war crimes and sending him to the Hague.

“The others have taken the standard view that the financial crash was simply a matter of bad people doing bad things, and that once they have all been dealt with it is back to free-market business as usual.”

Even this view is lightly held, since hardly any of the ‘bad people’ have been ‘dealt with’ anyway.

If he does become PM, I hope he repays Blair for this disgraceful act of treachery by doing what should have been done years ago: charging him with war crimes and sending him to the Hague.

Slightly off-topic but a government can’t simply send someone to The Hague. The ICC has to prosecute first and it can only do so if :
a) there is enough evidence (naturally)
b) The crime was committed by someone from or in the jurisdiction of a signatory country.
c) the country itself is incapable or unwilling to prosecute said individual.

If the Chilcot inquiry every publish its results, and if it contains evidence that Blair decided to go to war without a direct threat to the UK and if the Crown Prosecution Service then decides it will not go after Blair, then and only then could the ICC start proceedings.

All which is quite unlikely, international politics being what they are. Which is a shame, not just because as far as public records show, Blair should at least be prosecuted, or because even a failed trial would keep the fear of justicein the heart of many a warmongering leader but also because it would show that the ICC isn’t just a western show prop that only goes after African warlords.

Anspen @71 is right to say that Blair isn’t going to the Hague any time soon, but wrong about the reasons. Any signatory govt can refer a suspected war criminal to the Hague for prosecution, particularly in a case where the war criminal’s own govt is not prosecuting. The problem is that, although the founding charter of the ICC includes the crime of waging aggressive war, that offence hasn’t yet been defined in detail; it’s a placeholder, awaiting the outcome of a future (and as yet unplanned AFAIK) international conference. Blair *could* be prosecuted for crimes in the conduct of the Iraq war, but that’s not likely to happen for a variety of reasons.

Daragh – whereas calling the Russian government a ‘theocracy’ demonstrates that you do know what you’re talking about?

Daragh pointed out that Corbyn is arguably wrong on some things. True. Where he is wrong, or where a debate can be had that he is, it is fair to be critical. What is not acceptable is to argue that because Corbyn is wrong on X this means you must vote for people who supported the invasion of Iraq, or voted to triple tuition fees, or think spending billions on Trident is the way to go, or make excuses for racists (“justified concerns”).

Chris Bertram’s position I do not understand. If Labour is doomed (and as I wrote earlier I agree it is) what good does it do to prolong the suffering by voting for the best business as usual available as opposed to gambling on blowing business as usual up?

“The foul prostitute and the dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners”

Corbyn is the best news the Labour party has had in a long, long time. We can be sure Corbyn is going to fight for the Chilcot report’s publication with a fire that no other candidate can replicate, one of the many positions the public actually supports. All familiar with the career ambitions of the professional political class know that Corbyn’s most dedicated enemies are Labour fat-cats. It will be exceedingly interesting to see how well he dispatches them, or sets them against one another. My hope is that he puts the current gang on notice – half will not be on the front bench this time next year. Harriet? This is what a feminist looks like? It’s going to be a great big bun-fight. Contra Chris, Labour comes out ahead no matter who the leader is in 18 months. Corbyn will force a discussion and an airing of issues that’s long overdue, and without which Labour truly is dead.

“Corbyn will force a discussion and an airing of issues that’s long overdue, and without which Labour truly is dead”

Well said. Another immediate positive is the effect it’s already having in forcing others in the party leftward (eg. Burnham).

@82 Quite right. I took a good look around. They’re hedging their bets. It’s like reading Daily Mail coverage of Farage. They can’t bear him, but realize a substantial block of readers are sick to death of the poseur class. Andy et al seems to be digging himself an extremely deep hole. Attacking the ‘credibility’ of the individual the public evidently prefers isn’t going to be easy to walk back. The Guardian endorses Yvette, I think, a smarmy safe play. They need the Labour reader. Greens, the SNP, and to a lesser degree UKIP, have real cause to worry. I hope he takes it.

@83 Cheers. You must be delighted!

This is profoundly depressing. The Tories are a nasty lot, and from the outside it appears that Labor is engaging in a sort of circular firing squad instead of rethinking matters. If Labor elects someone regarded by the majority in England as an extremist, is there anything stopping the Tories from calling an election and getting a blowout majority?

Glad to hear it, Stephen.

Or pass an act that revokes the original act, which would need a simple majority (unless someone knows different). Not that that is particularly likely.

The link above is:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/14/andy-burnham-jeremy-corbyn-steve-coogan-labour
Steve Coogan is pro-Burnham. Because he thinks Burnham is both radical and electable.

To be honest, as I am not a UK citizen, my favourite thing about the 2015 UK elections was Bez from The Happy Mondays standing for election. I never would have guessed that in the 90s

Scotland really isn’t as critical as you suggest. Not only did Blair win a majority of the English seats in his three elections, but in 1997 and 2001 Labour MPs from England and Wales had more than half the seats in the entire HoC.

While I don’t think that Labour needs SNP support to govern in the future, it was certainly the case in this election that a Labour majority looked unlikely and a Lab+SNP coalition looked like it could have happened, and the Tories and right-wing press scaremongered this for all they were worth. Saying that the Scottish people’s chosen political representatives can’t be legitimately part of a government seemed to be chasing short-term electoral gain at a cost of weakening the union.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s hard or not, to win in 2020 Labour need to take seats off the Tories in England. Otherwise the Tories will still have a majority whatever happens in Scotland. As a matter of political strategy, choosing to go left to capture votes from the SNP would be a mistake.

Marc @87: A circular firing squad is the natural resting position of the Labour party and always has been.

Richard Cottrell: If Cameron loses his majority he may be subject to a vote of no confidence, in which case an election would ensue if he couldn’t cobble a coalition together.

@djr – to repeat Chris B; Labour is f!d.

If you go to the left, you don’t gain the floating voter in the marginal Tory constituency.

If you go to the right, you will lose more seats to the rise of UKIP in the North and Midlands. (Indeed, many of the close seats lost by Labour this time around had a clear element of loss of votes from Labour to UKIP – Ed Balls’ constituency is the canonical example.)

Of course this doesn’t appear to make sense – UKIP isn’t a left-wing party on the face of it – but they are a protest party and good at attracting different votes in different places.

Now you could push to the right and hope that the EU referendum leads to the implosion of UKIP – and that may potentially be the best bet. But it’s only a bet.

(One of the signal failings of those to the right of Corbyn has been to pretend that they have the silver bullet, when it’s clear that there is a hard problem.)

Of course this doesn’t appear to make sense – UKIP isn’t a left-wing party on the face of it – but they are a protest party and good at attracting different votes in different places.

Then the trick for Corbyn would be to reclaim the protest vote for Labour without losing the pseudo-Tories on his right. It would be a good trick if he pulled it off.

@104 and others. Your critique of Corbyn is spot on. Yet, as Farage, Trump, Syriza and others have shown, voters are not looking at people of clear opinion as fonts of pure reason, or for infallibility. Corbyn will not be doing the numbers when/if he becomes Labour leader and then perhaps leader of the UK. What people are sick to death of are a permanent political class who are also permanent spongers on the tax-payer tit, whether it be through publicly funded think tanks, political offices, or government employment. Corbyn can expect to lose as many, or more, arguments than he wins. What Corbyn supporters, I suspect, are betting on, is that Labour will have real debates and fights about the future of the UK, debates that will reflect the will of various constituencies. The outcome of these debates is very much in question. Labour will have to get it right, or lose again. A great many of Labour’s problems stem from refusing to allow ordinary people a part in political decisions – Alastair Campbell’s insulting demeanor and remarks towards those wishing for an opportunity to vote on EU membership, after Labour’s historic defeat, stand out.

The procedure is, you win the party election and then you move to the centre.

Corbyn, we fear, will not move to the centre – but the others fail at the strategy of winning the party election. That is serious incompetence.

Metatone @107 – that’s a depressingly accurate summary of the situation.

“One thing is clear health tourism is going to be a critical issue”

Do you have any evidence for this remarkable claim?

How to be a successful left-of-centre party is clearly a hard problem.

New Labour was an attempt to solve this problem in the context of 20 years ago: post-Thatcher, post-winter of discontent, post-Cold War. The question for the leadership election is how to do it for today, having learned the lessons of the Blair years.

Corbyn and supporters seem to me to want to reject Blairism in totality. But can that be done in a way that doesn’t also abandon the “winning elections” part? Is there a way to get the good (minimum wage, improving living standards for the bottom 10% shown on the graph in Daniel’s recent post, progress on social change such as gay rights) without the bad?

@kidneystones I didn’t bully anyone or call anyone a bigot or a xenophobe, I merely asked for evidence to support a claim that you (not FF) made. Incidentally, if you were better informed on the subject, you’d know that the UK already has a points-based immigration system.

@ 115. Chris, you routinely suggest that discussions of immigration betray/confirm xenophobia and racism. These are the acts of a cynic, a coward, and a bully. Your ludicrous assertion that immigration into Britain from the EU is controlled by a points system similar to that employed by Canada, or Japan, is similarly cynical and dishonest.

Re: FF. You’re right. The health tourism claim set up the Farage ruse, but you know that, don’t you. Lots of Labour supporters want a discussion about immigration, one free of accusations of racism and xenophobia. Corbyn’s unapologetic embrace of open discussion is going to allow that discussion to take place. Bet that scares the daylights out of you.

(And ditto gay rights, which moved forward in US, Ireland, etc – crediting Blair/New Labour for that is Al-Gore-invented-the-internet territory…)

You’re right, all of those things would clearly have happened in John Major’s third term. Now that we have them, why bother having a Labour party at all?

“why bother having a Labour party at all?”

Er – to oppose Thatcherism instead of pink-washing it? Sounds crazy I know…

As Labour’s recent antics over the Welfare Bill have made clear, the party’s current de facto leadership wouldn’t change anything if it did win the next election, and Tony Blair actually said that he wouldn’t want to win an election with left-wing policies. The ‘pragmatists’ within Labour are struggling like hell to try and win an election in their own party.

So I think we can see that the ‘electability’ argument is a bit of a red herring. What the centre and right of the Labour Party are really worried about is losing face and favour with the establishment.

Chris re kidneystones: all right, I can see why you’re annoyed. But it would clarify things enormously if you would explain what exactly your position is on immigration. (You might say, look at my posts over many previous years, that’ll make things clear: but for those who don’t have the leisure to do that, could you clarify, please?)

It seems to me that there are a range of positions as far as the UK is concerned:
1) No more immigration should be allowed.
2) Some more immigration should be allowed, but with more strict criteria than now.
3) More immigration should be allowed, and we’ve got the rate about right.
4) Much more immigration should be allowed, with less strict criteria than now.
5) There should be no obstacles to immigration.

Similarly, with regard to the current illegal (unauthorised? undocumented?) immigrants, there is a range of options:
A) All illegal immigrants should be sought out and sent back.
B) Some egregious illegal immigrants should be sent back, but we shouldn’t look too hard and should turn a blind eye where appropriate.
C) All immigrants, legal or otherwise, should be welcomed.

I don’t know what your opinions are on these matters. Could you explain?

Mandelson’s failed ‘mass resignation’ bid to stop Corbyn

“Yet, as Farage, Trump, Syriza and others have shown” I can’t think of a more damning thing to say about SYRIZA. You forgot LePen by the way.

Chris@130: the thread is, as I understand it, about candidates for the Labour leadership, to which opinions about immigration are not entirely irrelevant. But if you don’t want to take that further, I understand.

I hope you don’t think I have been contributing to a stream of personal abuse.

I think Veelow is paraphrasing the daft arguments of the likes of David Miliband rather than giving an analysis of British politics.

The UK government estimates the cost of “health tourism” with “deliberate intent” at between £20-100 million. And if you want to add those who are considered to “take advantage”, a category which includes expat British citizens going home for treatment, you can apparently add another 50-200 million.

So “health tourism” all adds up to £70-300 million, if the government is to be believed – the NHS budget 2013/14 was £95.6 billion so that is somewhere between 0.07-0.3%.

@ 137. Good point and well supported. Best, free of any suggestion that raising the question implies racism or xenophobia. This seems by far the most effective way of responding to questions/concerns. I wonder what you think about this from the Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/the-majority-of-uk-graduates-are-being-forced-into-nongraduate-work-says-study-10461206.html

“The majority of UK graduates are being forced into jobs which do not need their talents, according to a newly-published study. Research for the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), which represents human resource managers, shows 58.8 per cent of UK graduates have ended up in non-graduate jobs – a figure exceeded only by Greece and Estonia….The report’s findings emerge as UK universities are about to enrol a record number of graduates this autumn following the Government’s decision to lift the cap on the number of students universities can recruit.”

I support free universal access to education through extension schools, etc. However, I believe access to universities should be restricted on the basis of skills and that promotion and graduation should also be difficult to achieve.

@ 140. I’ve responded to novakant and I have no opinion on health tourism.

My position is that all topics, including health tourism, should be discussed in precisely the terms novakant employs, free from accusations that broaching a topic confirms hidden racist views. Why is this important? Because Labour elites did their level best to suppress and demonize labour voters concerned over immigration, health tourism, and abuses of the NHS. In an Observer poll taken just prior to the last election 48 percent of the UK public favored UKIP’s position on immigration over that of the Labour party, which enjoyed 12 percent. Now, I’m certain that you can do the maths and determine that part of UKIPs 48 percent came from Labour supporters unhappy at being told that Labour would not permit British voters to vote on EU membership. This decision, taken by Labour some two years ago had catastrophic effects on Labour policy. Confronted steadily by polls indicating British voters, including Labour supporters, were increasingly unhappy at the Cameron government’s ability to predict and control the number of immigrants from the EU. Rather than take a strong moral stand defending immigrants rights, Labour instead made two very bad cynical decisions: imitate Cameron and become the party of Tory-lite and brand any and all attempts to discuss an EU vote as racist and xenophobic. That strategy had two very serious and predictable consequences. Rank and file traditional Labour voters in the north objected strenuously at being told by the London/Oxbridge elite that as British citizens, they had no right to vote on EU membership, because the London elite had made that decision for them. North of the border the SNP were quick to point to the Tory-lite policies of modern Labour to a community of voters in Scotland, traditional Labour supporters, who had much more in common with Corbyn. So, at election time Scottish Labour supporters deserted the party in droves. South of the border, Labour defections to UKIP and the Greens cost Labour in key constituencies. Even after the defeat Campbell and company were still sneering at Labour supporters who wanted an EU referendum. Only when the internal polls came out did we have the three failing Labour leadership candidates copying Corbyn and arguing for an EU referendum, about two years too late.

Health tourism is a core part of UKIP’s message: http://www.ukip.org/ukip_launch_nhs_policy

Novakant presents the sensible and effective response to Labour voters’ anxieties. Don’t insult the fearful and the anxious – listen carefully and (for some, the really hard part) respectfully to “white van man.” Present the facts and keep the lines of communication open, rather than shut.

Does any of this make any sense to you?

Yes, and Labour support for membership of the EU is based, rightly or wrongly, on the idea that it is economically beneficial for industry and a valuable source of funding for depressed areas, rather than because the party is pro-immigration.

There is also a perfectly good argument to be made that there is no need for a referendum on EU membership and that it would essentially be an opportunistic sideshow.