Labour Party leadership election 2015

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Actually one of the great things about OMOV. I must admit however, I was dead set against its enactment since I predicted that MPs would screen out any left-wing candidate (and they probably will from now on, which makes it all the more important he wins now and if nothing else enact further democracy in the party).

This isn't OMOV though. It's One Person Who Wants To Pay £3, One Vote. I spend more than £3 on my lunch on a daily basis.

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Also - Corbyn, Paxman, Clarkson and Kyle...what is it with British Jeremies and being controversial?

Don't forget Hunt, but not probably not Beadle.

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I definitely think the "affiliated supporter" idea was a stupid one; it's going to lead to entryism no matter how good your checks.

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Labour supporters may not see anything wrong with them, but a lot of the country does; Labour ran on a unilateralist stance in the 1950s and lost two general elections, one in a landslide.

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Personally, I don't know what's worse for the party; Corbyn winning or Corbyn losing.

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If I disobeyed orders as often as Corbyn has, I'd be out of a job.

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On trains as someone who uses southern it's clear the current situation is awful-we're paying them something like £600 million a year to run an awful service

Ironically, Southern is part-owned by SNCF!

I'm a rail enthusiast myself and personally I don't really care who runs them provided they do a good job. I regularly use c2c myself and must say they're generally excellent.

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It's also worth remembering that even a 30 year old is going to have no real memory of the Thatcher years or indeed Labour's difficulties there. They reached their political maturity and had their views shaped with 9/11, as well as all that followed from that.

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His supports keep making out as if his outreach to Hamas/Ira is some sort of realpolitik but he's just a shameless mouth piece for some pretty awful terrorist actions

That's something the right-wing press will run with. At some point Corbyn will be asked if he would support negotiations with Daesh/ISIS/whatever and if his answer is anything but an unequivocal "No", there will be problems.

Interview with him in The Guardian today; said he's not sure if he'd take the Privy Councillor status if elected.

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Something else the Tory press will run with

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 see: The Thick of It, where government minister Nicola Murray is ferociously flailed by spin doctor Malcolm Tucker for planning to send her daughter to an independent school:

Peter Capaldi doesn't have a Twitter account (although his co-star Jenna Coleman does), but I suspect he'd have more followers than any of the Labour leadership contenders.

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Who's our Jimmy Carter?

https://medium.com/@davidbutler100/jeremy-corbyn-labour-s-george-mcgovern-60b52a98bbfc

Harold Wilson and he died in 1995.

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They both won elections; which is far cry from five of the six Labour leaders after Wilson.

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Tell me, was Blair winning elections and leading in the polls for Labour at the time of his departure? Before the financial crash, remember.

Blair exited the PM's job in summer 2007 and no he wasn't; there was however a significant boost to Labour's support when Brown took over, which lasted until Northern Rock collapsed.

The crash would have taken any government with it.

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Latest ICM poll has Tories on 40 and Labour on 31. That's a bigger gap than the general election.

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Labour's hope may be in the 'missing millions'. The steep dive in turnout in 2001, which has never been given the proper analysis it deserves and is one of the damning legacies of what Blairism actually made people feel may be a better hope for Labour fortunes than going after the soft vote (which might not actually be nor have ever been that soft) of those that delivered them victory under Blair. Why think the electorate, which includes non voters actually want Burnham or Cooper over say Corbyn? Why make such broad assumptions about where Labour can get the votes to win?

The total turnout in 1997 was 31,286,284, down from 33,614,074 in 1992. In 2015 it was 30,691,680. Those "missing millions" aren't even one million and if the gap between 1997 and 2015 was filled with Labour voters, Labour would still lose the popular vote by 1.5 million votes.

There's no guarantee a 1997 turnout doesn't get Labour an even worse result; the 1983 turnout was about the same and Labour failed to get 9 million votes.

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Even as a party hack the amount of stuff I'm getting send is amazing, had 10 emails yesterday and had letters from Cooper, Burnham, Jowell, Khan, Lammy and Watson.

Ditto; I had two letters today. Oddly enough Corbyn's not sent me anything through the post, probably because I said I wasn't voting for him in a reply to one of this emails.

Getting a bit sick of this now - and we've still got four weeks to go... until the civil war starts.

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Kezia has won with Alex Rowley elected Deputy.

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I see there is a Survation poll that comes across well for Corbyn but voters won't see one clip of him, they will see four and a half years worth of media coverage, some of which will be very negative.

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Here's the thing. Today is the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Between then (the 1945 election was before VJ Day) and 1997, Labour won precisely one working majority.

Also, I read the transcript of Corbyn's interview. Answering a question "Are you a Marxist?" with "I'm not sure" is not likely to help win over Middle England.

Labour is unlikely to win 40 seats in Scotland unless the SNP self-destructs; 20 is a realistic goal. To get an overall majority in a 600-seat Commons, Labour has to pick up 80 seats in England - and they'll pretty much all have to be from the Tories.

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unless Labour take back Scotland they need in excess of a 13 point lead to take enought seats from the Tories. I maintain Corbyn is the best leader to help do that in Scotland, and with those you're then looking at a more realistic prospect for Tory marginals. Many of which can be won back with just the reversal of the Greens and disillusionment.  

Labour taking back Scotland is a hard ask; there is a significant number of people who voted SNP because they're Scottish nationalists who want independence.

The SNP got 50% of the Scottish vote and Labour got 24.3% in 2015; there was a 24% swing or thereabouts from Labour to the Nationalists. Not very likely to be reversed in one election, if ever.

Also - on the current boundaries using the UNS calculator on Electoral Calculus - if the Green vote was at 2010 levels and the extra supporters voted Labour, Labour would only pick up nine seats and the Tories would have 324. With Sinn Fein not taking their seats, that's a Conservative majority.

There is no path to a Labour government, majority or minority, that does not involving flipping Conservative held marginals in England. Here is the current Labour list, again the boundaries will change a lot before 2020. We need to probably flip 60 marginals in England to get an overall majority -  we don't want a minority government, because there is every chance we won't get a second term at any rate (Labour has only increased its majority by a significant amount once - in 1966) - and probably more like 80 for a working majority. I strongly doubt that there are 6,526 non-voters in Crawley who are just waiting to cast their first vote for Corbyn.

In addition, while Corbyn may well hoover up Greens and the SNP, there is a real risk he looses white working class voters with right-leaning views to UKIP or the Tories.

Emulating Syriza may seem a good idea, but Syriza got 36.34% of the vote in a PR system... and wouldn't have even been able to form a government without that 50 seat bonus. 36% may have won us a General Election in 2005, but I doubt it will be enough in 2020.

This report from the Fabian Society is worth reading as well as a final point.

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It's also the case that the trouble with having to put your leader's weird views/past statements into 'context' isn't necessarily that voters care greatly about them - the fact is that foreign/defence policy has not been an electorally decisive matter since the end of the Cold War and the subsequent lifting of the existential threat - but that time spent doing that could be better spent on almost anything else.

True. It's worth pointing (h/t Political Betting on that one) that while UKIP voters may be economically left wing, they are pretty right-wing on those matters; the UKIP supporters I know tend to be very supportive of the British Armed Forces - even if they don't necessarily support the conflicts they're involved in - and may have difficulty voting for someone like Corbyn who once held a minute's silence for IRA members.

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Difficult to know; he's had no experience of doing it as a minister or shadow minister. Six questions a week to David Cameron, who is no slouch at PMQs, with a party behind not entirely supportive... well, it'll be entertaining to watch.

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Labour actually dropped eight points in the polls during the campaign itself.

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Oh dear.

FWIW, the Jewish Labour Movement endorsed Cooper.