Labour Party (UK) Leadership Election, 2016

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Does Corbyn require 30 signatures from MPs to get his name back on the ballot?

There's a row going on about whether or not the incumbent is automatically on the ballot or not. If not, then he would need 50 MPs/MEPs according to a rule change put in place last year.

Who gets to make that decision?

The party's Constitution, but it's rather ambiguous about what happens in this event apparently. The Corbynites are citing a barrister who is advising that Corbyn can be on automatically.

So who get's to make the decision in cases of constitutional ambiguity?

First the party legal adviser who will probably demand 50 signatures (that's what happened in 88 and custom is strong in ambiguity) . Corbyn could challenge that decision in the NEC. As parties are corporation and considering the UK stricter law in meddling with corporations internal affairs I doubt one could appeal to a court here, unless courts in the UK will decide this is the case they want to implement the notion that parties are quasi-administrative bodies...

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It's funny how Jfern sounds even less right when he talks about UK politics; the idea that Corbyn is loyal to the party is shocking, considering he's spend the last 40 years opposing every single labour leader.

John Mcdonnell despite being seen as a more competent leader would be easier to bear in a leadership challenge- he'd need 37 signatures ( a stupid rule saying that you need 50 to trigger a leadership challenge,  but after that you only need 37) However JM is like Ken Livingstone, Dianne Abbott in that he's a acid tongued lefty- called for the Lynching of a tory MP, said he wanted to go back in time and kill Thatcher, praised IRA etc.

I want Tom Watson to challenge, as he is the only person who could beat Corbyn in my view. I'm hearing murmurings that the Trade Unions are not actually behind Corbyn- they're merely supporting him at the moment.

If Corbyn resigns it will be today- the SNP are trying to become the official opposition in the House of Commons ( as Labour don't have a full front bench, and have publicly declared they have no confidence in their leader) If the Whips all resign, trade unions tell him to go and JM team start to push back I expect Corbyn may quit tonight.

That will be hilarious, I wonder will happen if the SNP ran candidates outside Scotland

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It's funny how Jfern sounds even less right when he talks about UK politics; the idea that Corbyn is loyal to the party is shocking, considering he's spend the last 40 years opposing every single labour leader.

John Mcdonnell despite being seen as a more competent leader would be easier to bear in a leadership challenge- he'd need 37 signatures ( a stupid rule saying that you need 50 to trigger a leadership challenge,  but after that you only need 37) However JM is like Ken Livingstone, Dianne Abbott in that he's a acid tongued lefty- called for the Lynching of a tory MP, said he wanted to go back in time and kill Thatcher, praised IRA etc.

I want Tom Watson to challenge, as he is the only person who could beat Corbyn in my view. I'm hearing murmurings that the Trade Unions are not actually behind Corbyn- they're merely supporting him at the moment.

If Corbyn resigns it will be today- the SNP are trying to become the official opposition in the House of Commons ( as Labour don't have a full front bench, and have publicly declared they have no confidence in their leader) If the Whips all resign, trade unions tell him to go and JM team start to push back I expect Corbyn may quit tonight.

That will be hilarious, I wonder will happen if the SNP ran candidates outside Scotland

No one is proposing that. Quebec Bloc was Official Opposition in Canada in the 90s without ever running outside Quebec.

Although there is precedent of the Irish Nationalist Party holding seats in England. Again though, the SNP wasn't even considering that. They just want the platform being Official Opposition provides.

I know...it was a what if, I don't think they'll win seats but they could definitely get nice numbers now

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Watson is not contesting it will probably be Eagle now.
Kezia dugdale who called on corbs to resign now wants to be shadow Scot sec., she's an MSP so not sure how that will work

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Why would the establishment pick Eagle over Watson? They need union support, which Watson could provide, and Eagle is tainted by her vote for the Iraq War.

Another triumph of identity politics.

She's popular with the soft left and not a stranger to unions. The soft left is where this battle will be one

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Although, i voted for Corbyn at Labour leadership election (Because of his genuine centre left values),
I've been so disappointed by his lack of charisma and leadership, he will destroy Labour at a General election.

Now, I feel it's for him to go, but my only worry, is that we will return to a Blairite(red Tory) leader. If that happens, I will never vote Labour again.

Lets see, what will the future unfold. But one thing must happen a huge PLP reselection must happen at a grassroot level by local constituents, most of them MPs are Blairites and they don't reflect the views of the majority of Labour voters.

My MP is a 'blairite', but because I'm not a raving ideologue I'm not going to deselect good MP's who've done more than Maomentum to serve the party.

You're part of a fringe of party, not the 'blairite' MP's who've won large mandates.

Why is it that for so many on the far left of the party the table seems to raise 6'' when they start talking about Blair. It's been nearly 10 years since he quit

Blair like Schröder highlighted what happened to SD after 1990, it has no concrete direction. Labour, SPD and other centre-left parties are divided with no clear agenda between social liberal and old style socialists. Blair is just a symbol of Labour (and centre-left parties in general) inability to find some clear path of unifying agenda.

As I see it Blair, Blairites, and Blairism are ghosts, not that many MPs are Blairites (most are Brownites), and Blairism is pretty much dead. But it's a useful insult to hurl at people to your right as the membership (well some of it from what I saw in London Blairism is not that unpopular as outside the metro) is a bit traumatized by it.

Neither Eagle, Watson, EdM, EdB, Cooper, Burnham and other top Labour figures of recent years were Blairites (last real Blairite challenger was DavidM). Now I always liked Brown more but to win a GE you need a Blair image, you need to sway LibDem, swing voters, and soft working class tories.

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Labour Members Would Back Corbyn in Ballot 50%-47%: YouGov Poll

that's terrible for an incumbent. first poll is always the strongest, that's the baseline behavioral economics talks about. Eagle reaping through the soft left and unions will reap through this to 55-45 soon enough.

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At this point, is it fair to say that the Labour base is about as out of touch with the British public than the GOP base is to the American one?

Yes- I've been meaning to write a very long blog post on it for Labourlist. We share the 5 big problems...

+ Needing to run to the far left to win the leadership- namely being anti-war (No air strikes in Syria, Iraq and deffo not supporting 2003 Iraq),
+ A dedicated and loud online media presence of people outside the party calling people 'Blairites' in the same way that RINO was a spitting barb about 8 years ago
+Picking a leader who no-one sees as actually being able to be PM
+ Being convinced that if we just pick a more left wing person then everyone will come out and vote for us
+Being deluded

Regardless of whether that assessment is right or wrong, you need to appeal to the centre ground of the Labour membership to win a Labour leadership election. Liz Kendall didn't even attempt to do that, despite her constant ramblings about the need to appeal to the centre ground of the general electorate. Blair, to be fair to him, did make an effort to do that (at least in 1994) and so did GOP relative moderates such as McCain and Romney to the GOP primary electorate.

As is well documented that center ground is now the soft left

It was always the soft left, they just traumatized by Benn that they kept in line for so long.

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How many British posters here on the left are being bombarded with SAVE CORBYN notifications on facebook?

I just got back from a CLP meeting where our MP was heckled, I was called a racist and Momentum turned up in force... if there is a leadership race this summer (I assume by Owen Jones) then it's going to be very ugly.

Worth noting (I may be optimistic) The YouGov Poll, and the Unite Poll both make for very good reading- considering the media narrative is that Corbyn is extremely popular with members, when in fact he's marginally popular. The only problem is that even if we get the entire 40% anti-Corbyn vote from last year we still need to get 10% of his own base (which is possible) whilst offsetting any loses from the massive turnout he'll cause.

Best hope is that Watson will lead the peace talks this weekend, and Corbyn will go

Corbyn is too stuborn, Mcdonnell is using him as a human shield (if he does snap he'll just come as the natural replacement), and Seumas Milne is a psychopath. "There will be no peace", this trots live for factional fighting

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How exactly is he gonna force the elected leader to keep him and John in the shadow cabinet? Who is going to be the corbynite candidate? Someone from 2915 intake?
As I recall Eagle was brownite and definitely not a Blairite, that's weird

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I feel like the Blairites (actual Blairites, not just people to the right of Corbyn) are defensively backing Eagle just because she's getting heat for the Iraq War.

They better get ready, because the report of the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry about Iraq War is out on Wednesday.

I heard Salmond wants to impeach Blair in the commons, after 210 years it was not done and the ECHR that will make it unconstitutional as it is not a due process (the Commons could actually sentence him to prison). Seems superfluous to me, Blair is dead politically and he's not coming back (I can't even see him becoming a peer)

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Didn't Jeremy Corbyn run for Parliament in three straight elections under Tony Blair's leadership? Maybe I am projecting the Canadian political system too much onto Britain (though are systems are supposedly closely related)...but in Canada if you were a backbench MP and your leader and government did something you totally disagreed with and if you thought the leader of your party was a "war criminal" - it would be a race to see what would happen first - would you be expelled from the party or would you resign to sit as an independent or to form a new party - there is no way that you could be as critical as Corbyn was of his own leader and be allowed to stay in the party and furthermore if you did stay you would be called a hypocrit for staying.

I can only based this off what I've read from Blair and particularly Livingstone's (who has the same mindset as Corbyn during these years) accounts, but basically the wing of the Labour Party that Senator Blair calls the pacifist Left (Abbott, Corbyn, Galloway, Livingstone, etc.) was still seen as an integral part of broad church Labour and they still all - despite two of them being expelled at various points of their careers - describe themselves as almost tribalistically Labour. Galloway set up Respect but refused to be called to the left of Labour and even had a pop at David Aaronovitch for being an ex-Marxist-Leninist.

Livingstone reckons that the Labour Party was hijacked in the 1990s by what he calls the ''Millbank'' tendency of what we know as the social-liberal Blairites and technocratic Brownites. Livingstone reckons they have always been a minority in the party as a whole, and that a Soft Left candidate would have won the Blair landslides.

Thus, putting this all together, Corbyn probably believes his popularity with the membership, some unions and his leadership position is all he needs to rid the Millbank tendency in the PLP. He has absolutely no interest in leaving Labour because he is more concerned about the interfactional struggle within his own party than even his own short-term electoral success. This is because he thinks whoever controls the Labour Party will eventually lead the country.

That's odd as Corbyn supporters at the rally and many of his enlisted supporters came from fringe parties to his left like the Green party, TUSC, SWP, hell even the communist party newspaper was calling to get behind Corbyn. The hard left likes to think of itself as a successor of Bevan and the like but that is far from true (it is true of the soft left), they are just far-left characters that acknowledge that the UK system doesn't really allow for a party to the left of Labour to flourish.  

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Owen Smith is going to sit this one out? I think the union bosses are miscalculating their steps if they think their ranks will just fall in line. So now the battle is who can get more 3 quid supporters to join

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Thank you for pointing that out, i've always thought labour voters in north london are combinations latte liberals, affluent middle class and jewish voters.

The Tories had been making steady gains in the later group in
Recent years so I reckon it's 50-50 in the Jewish vote (Lib Dem never had a large traction for Jews for obvious reasons)

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Well...this is disappointing

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I'd imagine the registered supporters change would damage Corbyn's chances but momentum had been registering members for a while so maybe the freeze isn't such a good idea?

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Can you still register as RS?

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I'm starting to wonder what actually counts as left wing for the most hardcore of Corbyn's support.

A conjunction of requirement: have no support in any "old" media body which is not virtual, and not to have supported anyThing ever done under new Labour

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A girl I used to see told me she voted for corbs (and she's Welsh nonetheless), I just gave her a 30 minutes bollocking on it. I fear Smith will stay under 45%

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Tony Blair says he wouldn’t want a left-wing Labour party to win an election:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tony-blair-says-he-wouldn-t-want-a-left-wing-labour-party-to-win-an-election-10406928.html

That's from last year