Labour Party leadership election 2015

[joevsimp]

My own prediction is that everyone besides Burnham and Umunna will be irrelevent. Umunna will be seen as the frontrunner until the last couple of weeks but Burnham will just pip him. Burnham will then be torn apart by the right-wing press on the basis of his accent and everyone will then blather on about how much better a leader Umunna would have been.

What's Burnham sound like?

Both Northern and working-class. Wilson was the former but not the latter, Callaghan was the latter but not the former (he spoke in a mild Cockney accent).

I didn't know that, in fact I don't think I'd ever heard Big Jim's voice before, interestingly John Cruddas is similarly accented and similarly from Portsmouth (probably won't run though)

I just looked up a couple of clips, including election night in 1979, has Callaghan ever been played by Jim Broadbent?

Given that Labour haven't had a northern leader, beside Scots, since Wilson, I think they could do with one

[joevsimp]

FEWER POLITICIANS!!!  starting with all the ones clustered together in urban constituencies

This should probably be in the boundary review thread, but contrary to some Tory propaganda on this issue there are quite a few Labour seats in urban areas with high electorates.  Indeed according to the list of electorates I've got (which came from Electoral Calculus) 8 of the 15 largest electorates are in Labour-held urban constituencies.

(Ilford South, West Ham, Bristol West, East Ham, Holborn & St Pancras, Slough, Manchester Central, Croydon North.)

East and West ham are ridiculously overpopulated constituencies, over 90,000 I think, and that's before you account for the large numbers of non-UK citizens who can't vote, they should really change the rules to use the census rather than the electoral roll to draw boundaries, but the new individual registration rules make it even worse

[joevsimp]

It's slightly dickish to nominate someone who is already at 35 or more imo.

It's a messed up system.

It's so open to ambitious MPs being terrified of voting Corbyn or Creagh to widen the debate, in case Burnham/Cooper/Kendall pass them over for promotion.

wasn't it encouraged last time though, I think even DM ended up nominating Diane Abbot, although that was fairly blatant tokenism that neither of those two are likely to recieve

[joevsimp]

The traditional right has become the soft loft, relatively speaking.

I would expect Compass will be fairly evenly split between Burnham and Corbyn (60/40?) but are they (semi)-officially  backing anyone?

[joevsimp]

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.

that probably is the best improved toc, probably because its small, manageable and doesn't have any branch lines to cross subsidise, I'm a bit young to remember it pre-nationalisation (apart from trips to the Southend Air Show), but it was pretty dire up to about 2003 and the timetable still isnt great on the Grays service

[joevsimp]

so today is (i think) the deadline for me to give in to those incessant emails from Len McCluskey and sign up to vote, which I won't as I'm a Green member, if I still had my automatic vote as a member of an affiliated union (although I didn't last time as I was in the middle of transferring from USDAW to Unite) I'd be in a bit of a tricky position right now.

a lot of my party have kept their heads down over this but this was posted last week I think sums up the worries that a lot of us have.
http://londongreenleft.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/will-corbyn-leadership-win-steal-greens.html

having said that though, I can't see JC leading a united and coherent Labour party into the next election, let alone winning it (and i will eat my orgainic hemp donkey jacket if he does)

[joevsimp]

Following the 'weeding out', the electorate is down to 553,954 (previously 610,753). However, most of the reduction comes from the affiliates (41,521) rather than the £3ers.

.. and mostly because they weren't on the electoral register, had signed up in more than one category, or hadn't paid their membership fees rather than because they were "infiltrators".  The number removed because they were considered not to be real Labour supporters was about 3000, of whom more than half were Greens.

any news on how many affiliate supporters have been denied, I had Unite emailing me every other day to sign up before the deadline and a lot of Greens are members of Labour-affilliated unions

[joevsimp]

Yeah the data I've seen shows that Corbyn will probably win on the first round but only with about 35%, meaning that Burnham has a good chance of coming back. Funnily enough we looked and 1 out of 16 Kendall voters have put Corbyn as there 2... make of that what you will haha

If Corbyn only gets up to around the 35-40% mark after the first round (which would surprise me after all the hoopla surrounding him) it looks somewhat doubtful he will end up winning.

Will each round of voting be announced and then a gap while the second preferences of the eliminated candidate are redistributed amongst those remaining?

they'll probably tally up by computer, but announce each round one after the other