Labour Party leadership election 2015

[Gary J]

Were any of the people being discussed in parliament when the Iraq War was voted on? If so, how did they vote?

This seems to be the official division list for the vote, which I believe is the one being asked about. The resolution being voted on is set out after the votes.

http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030318/debtext/30318-48.htm


I notice that Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Angela Eagle and David Lammy all voted for the resolution. I imagine that just about all ambitious Labour politicians holding or hoping to acquire ministerial office from Blair, who were in the House in 2003, voted for it.

Perhaps this is an argument for skipping a political generation, to choose a leader first elected after 2005.

Of the potential candidates I have noticed, Sadiq Khan was elected in 2005, Chuka Umunna in 2010 and Dan Jarvis in 2011.

[Gary J]

Perhaps this is an argument for skipping a political generation, to choose a leader first elected after 2005.

Miliband was first elected in 2005.

I know. The political generation to be skipped is, I take it, the one elected before 2005. I was however responding to Famous Mortimer's question, which implied a 2005 cut off point as all prominent candidates elected before then would have supported the Iraq War.

My own view is that it is better to have a leader with a long political career than a novice, but Labour is not helped because Blair and Brown were the sort of leaders who preferred sycophants to independently powerful colleagues. It may be that there is no one with an ideal record available, as Blair and Brown did not give prospective strong successors the chance to develop.

[Gary J]

If the Labour Party elects a guy called Tristram as leader they should disband immediately.


e: Suggesting we refer to withdrawals as "a reverse Farage".

It is even worse, as the son of a life peer  he has the courtesy title of The Honourable Tristram Hunt. It sounds like one of Bertie Wooster's chums from the Drones Club.

No doubt all this is superficial and Mr Hunt is just as qualified as anyone else who stumbled in to a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

[Gary J]

Just read this on Electoral Calculus:

New Boundary Estimates: Conservative Majority of 50

There has been recent interest in the likely effect of new boundaries which may be brought in under this parliament. Electoral Calculus prepared a full set of notional implied results under the 600-seat "Sixth Periodic review" of boundaries which was conducted around 2013.

Although these boundaries were not used in 2015, they can still give a good approximation of the likely effect of the boundary changes. If we use the actual election result (adjusted slightly to compensate for model deficiencies) and feed it into the user-defined predictor, then we can see the effect of the boundaries.

Using these figures and the old boundaries gives CON 331, LAB 232, LIB 9, UKIP 1, Green 1, SNP 55, and Plaid 3, which is almost exactly correct. Then when we switch to the proposed 2013 boundaries we get

CON   LAB LIB SNP Plaid N.Ire
325   202   5   49   3   16

This gives the Conservatives a majority of 50 seats, well ahead of their current majority of 12. This is equivalent of nearly another twenty seats for the Conservatives.

Without any change to legislation, the Sixth Review should restart this year for completion in 2018. It looks unlikely that the Conservative government would want to slow this process down.

How likely is this new 600 seat house of commons coming to fruition in time for the next general election?

Unless Parliament amends the rules that the boundary commissions work to, the next Parliament will have 600 MPs elected on changed boundaries.

If there had been a hung Parliament then Parliament would almost certainly have amended the law, probably to retain 650 seats and give a larger degree of discretion than the plus or minus five percent permitted variance in the average size of electorate now permitted. However a Conservative majority has no particular reason to legislate further and has not proposed to do so in today's Queens speech.

That means that a new boundary review will start in Spring 2016 and that it is due to be reported in 2018. Parliament could, in theory, refuse to accept the implementation of the review. This is what happened in 1969, when the Labour government put a set of boundary changes before Parliament and whipped their MPs to reject them (delaying implementation until 1974 after a Conservative majority House revisited the issue after the 1970 general election). As present law requires a new review in each five year period, an adverse vote would kill the next set of proposals but it seems unlikely that the Tories will not get their way.

The Boundary Commission for England has indicated its current plans.

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The only bit of electoral legislation mentioned in the Queen's speech has studiously ignored a select committee report about changing the boundary review legislation.

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[Gary J]

But as a more serious point, I will reiterate that the main electoral impact of larger seats with tighter quotas would be to a) greatly increase the impact of national swing while also b) reducing the power of incumbency.

So in effect each seat will have around 75,000 electors compared to 70,000 at present.

What's the main reason for reducing the number of MP's from 650 to 600?

Extracts from the Conservative Party manifesto 2010.

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Labour have meddled shamelessly with
the electoral system to try to gain political
advantage. A Conservative government will
ensure every vote will have equal value by
introducing ‘fair vote’ reforms to equalise the
size of constituency electorates, and conduct a
boundary review to implement these changes
within five years. We will swiftly implement
individual voter registration, giving everyone
the right to cast their vote in person and making
it easier for UK citizens living overseas to vote.
[/quote]

[Gary J]

As a brief response to the discussion about land ownership in England, the legal theory which underlies the modern law is that all the land in England is owned by the crown.

The only legal interests in land, which a subject of the crown can have, is an estate. The Law of Property Act 1925 tidied up the law by permitting only two kinds of legal estate. From the first part of the text of the Act.

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The two estates are usually referred to as freehold and leasehold respectively. A freehold estate is not in legal theory ownership of the land itself, but for all practical purposes it is treated as if it were. This has been the position for more than seven hundred years.

An extract from the Wikipedia article on fee simple, summarises the historic position.

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[Gary J]

I do not see that a Labour minority government, dependent upon SNP acceptance that a Labour government would be better than a Conservative one, would be impossible.

The British hostility to Irish nationalism, in 1886-1914, was considerably stronger than English antipathy to the SNP. It did not prevent Liberal minority governments being formed in 1892-95 and 1910-14.