Labour Party leadership election 2015

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CLP nominations maps updated.

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But who doesn't like the idea of a man who regularly visits prostitutes (to give them stern moral lectures, he claims!) as Prime Minister?

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Useful reminder on the timetable of everything: ballots are sent out on the 14th of August and voting closes on the 10th of September.

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Leadership candidates who actually want to win aren't going to vote against the whip immediately before the election because if they *are* elected then they would find it... hard... to impose discipline.

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Some more TU endorsement news: USDAW (shopworkers union: always one of the most right-wing unions) have backed Burnham and Community (mostly steelworkers: again, always one of the most right-wing unions) have backed Cooper.

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There are good reasons to be skeptical about polls of internal contests (to say the least), but if that's even close to accurate then we have a bit of a problem in that someone who clearly doesn't want to be elected leader has a chance of actually being elected.

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They weren't too bad last time.

The point is that whether they are 'accurate' or not is even more of a shot in the dark than for a normal election.

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Wow ... they really don't want to win in 2020 do they?

Right now it looks as though a dustbin painted red would be doing decently if it were the designated Left candidate.

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Creasy is actually very strongly Right aligned.

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Yes. He's a walking West Midlands Right cliché actually.

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Its members plus 'registered supporters' and is IRV yeah. The PLPs vote was removed by Miliband. I get the impression that, no matter what happens, there will be pressure from the PLP to have it restored in some form.

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Corbyn is doing well - and whatever happens from this point that is a certainty bar a withdrawal - because the atmosphere amongst members seems to be such that (as said already) if you painted a dustbin red and nominated it as the Left candidate then said dustbin would be doing well. This is a statement of fact and not hyperbole. There is frustration at the election result and at the government,* and also a lot of annoyance at a) the general tone of debate from senior figures in the months after the election and b) at the rhetoric and positioning of the caretaker Leadership/ShadCab. I'd kind of picked up some of that (and even share some), but not the extent or depth of it. It helps that Corbyn (who isn't well known outside his constituency and the political bubble: actually that's a really important detail) has not been running as a far-left gadfly, which means that he has been able to attract support from the soft Left. And, of course, there's *always* a hard Left core within the membership that can sometimes suddenly expand (and is also prone to sudden contraction). No idea really what's going to happen now, but I do wish that someone (anyone) without Corbyn's considerable baggage had ended up as the Left candidate instead.

_{*Which is a common thing, particularly after a second defeat: the Tories elected IDS as leader after the 2001 landslide don't forget.}

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What are the main wings/factions in Labour? How relevant is the Old Labour/New Labour distinction now?

Factions aren't the semi-formalised things they used to be - organisations still exist (e.g. the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and Labour First are both still going, and now we have Progress as well, hah) but they don't have the influence they used to and mostly just function to get people elected to the NEC - but you have a basic division between Left and Right, both of which are in turn subdivided but not in the same way. The Left is conventionally divided between the Hard Left and the Soft Left, with the Hard Left label denoting the remaining Bennites, old school Commanding Heights types, and points left. The Soft Left label is a bit more fuzzy, but think of the sort of person who voted for Ed Miliband on the first ballot last time and who thinks that Neil Kinnock was one of Labour's best leaders and you're about there. The Soft Left (which more than any of these labels denotes a tendency rather than a faction: notably there is no organisation promoting their stance) typically decides who triumphs in internal elections as neither the Hard Left nor the Right have the numbers on their own. The division of the Right is in some respects cultural: usually people think of the traditional (or 'Old') Right on the one hand and the people who are referred to variously (and according to taste) as 'Blairites', 'Modernisers', etc. on the other. The trouble is that these are loose labels and don't always apply well to the PLP (where do we place the technocratic bloc that grew up around Gordon Brown?), but they have their uses wrt the membership.

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Yeah, but a lot of the support for Corbyn is clearly coming from longstanding members and (again) the Hard Left tends to expand when things look better for it.

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Miliband - Technocratic/Brownite
Brown - Right/Moderniser but more 'traditional' use of language and policy emphasis
Blair - Right/Moderniser
Smith - Traditional Right
Kinnock - Soft Left

This is about right, yes.

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Again, basically right. But the reason why it gets more complicated before Kinnock is because things were different then: the modern Soft Left is a creation of the conflicts of the 1980s and a lot of factional groupings and language is frozen in that decade. Foot is best seen as representing a different generation of Left entirely to that which was dominant at the time (one reason why he struggled so much as leader with respect to internal disputes was because of that; the Right were his old enemies, but the ascendant Left were people of a very different mentality to him).

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Even a more moderate Hard Lefty would.

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Would caution, though, about reading too much into supplementary questions from that poll. Some were clearly designed in such a way as to create malicious headlines.

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...and John Mann literally brings paedogeddon into this.

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Bassetlaw CLP has an oddly consistent habit of selecting somewhat unorthodox right-wingers, although as most of its Labour MPs have been long-serving maybe that's just a funny coincidence. Mann is the successor to the... er... colourful Joe Ashton who replaced Frederick Bellenger, who may well have been the most right-wing MP in the post-war history of the Labour Party, though he was eventually deselected (and then promptly died). And it's first ever Labour MP was Malcolm MacDonald (son of Ramsay MacDonald) who defected with his father in the 1931 crisis: Bellenger defeated him in 1935.

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Eagle is the most left-wing candidate running for Deputy, don't forget.

Anyway, some interesting developments wrt nominations: Cooper suddenly doing a lot better amongst other things. Updated maps will be around when I'm back from work.

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...and updated. Some errors corrected as well, although there could well be others.

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What is this I don't even

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The thing is, the number of people involved in far left political activity is so vanishingly small that any degree of entryism could only prove decisive if the race was already very close.

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The Daily Mirror is running with a 'private poll' it has been shown (but who commissioned it? Is it real? The answer to the second question is unknowable, but as to the first... ah you'll see) which purports to show the following:

Corbyn 42, Cooper 23, Burnham 20, Kendall 14

And a Corbyn/Cooper off as 51/49 to Corbyn.

Which it then proclaims (with a charming journalistic ignorance of how numbers work) that this means that Corbyn is 'storming ahead' and that he has a 'massive lead' when actually it suggests a three way who the fyck even knows state of play. Oh but the matter of who's figures these are. Well...

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...I mean I have my suspicions, don't you?

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Some more developments: Unison has endorsed Corbyn for first preference and Cooper for second, while Corbyn has stated that he now supports Britain staying in the EU.

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CLP nominations maps updated.

One thing to note: no matter the outcome (and anyone who is sure either way is a fool or is currently preparing to rig the contest) seriously left-wing economic positions have clearly returned to the Labour mainstream, like it or not.