I apologise for that - a cock up on my part, rather than a conspiracy.
It’s official, Angela Eagle will be challenging Corbyn and I really hope she takes him out! Corbyn has been a completely arrogant jerk lately, knowing the PLP is completely against him but thinking he can really on his £3 voters to stay as leader.
Here’s more on her: Angela Eagle - Wikipedia
Some interesting - but surprisingly civil - discussion going on there about recent edits to that page. The main editor seems to have a bee in his or her bonnet regarding the 1992 election.
Personally I’ve found Eagle to be rather underwhelming thus far but she may yet surprise us.
Evidence so far suggests that he can. The establishment has never supported him, not from day one. A leadership challenge may tear the party in two, but it won’t be all Corbyn’s doing.
The circumstances surrounding Eagle’s 1992 election have come to the fore after this article below appeared. It’s an article which has went viral amongst Labour members and political geeks.
https://medium.com/@pitt_bob/how-angela-eagle-got-to-be-mp-for-wallasey-e30d4ad9483#.czmphcemd
None of the articles or sources I’ve read about that election have said anything about Eagle doing anything wrong - Field, yes; Hattersley, yes; the local party, absolutely; Eagle, no. So the last paragraph implying that what happened 24 years ago is somehow indicative of a deep moral flaw in Eagle - who has apparently won several elections in between without much fuss - is an extrapolation too far. She may have been a willing beneficiary to all the jiggery-pokery but she doesn’t appear herself to have jigged or poked, and politics is politics.
If, on the other hand, Eagle was the secret mastermind behind this subversion of democracy I’d certainly be interested to read about that. Strange that Mr Pitt didn’t see fit to mention it though.
No doubt an element of the “dark arts” are being used in the spinning of Eagles 1992 election. We keep hearing of the Corbyn faction’s abhorrence of Allistair Campbell type spin, but the Eagle story is simply another variety of pre-emptive spinning.
On the other hand if Corbyn is not on the leadership election ballot, as seems quite possible, then we potentially have a leader of the Labour Party who has twice been placed into positions of power via some very dubious means. I think the link I posted is a way to pressure Eagle and her camp into having a “free and fair” contest.
I was too late to edit my above post. I have just watched Eagle’s leadership speech and Q&A. She was poor to middling , her audience were bloody awful. Every unfunny quip she made was met with howls of laughter and hollering. It was as if the The Daily Show’s audience were transplanted into Labour headquarters. I realise communication directors insist on passion and electricity but my god drop it down a notch.
I reiterate my opinion of her as “underwhelming”. Best outcome for Labour is that she’s some sort of stalking horse for a better candidate, but time is running out and Labour are not known for being that crafty (or at least not since the days of Campbell and Mandelson).
ETA: Apparently Labour rules state that the incumbent, unlike challengers, doesn’t have to acquire nominations to be on the ballot so Corbyn will not be excluded. Plus it would be bloody stupid to do so, even by current Westminster standards.
Not entirely successful. People already established and in positions of elected authority in the party didn’t like candidate identified with a minority group later held to be incompatible with the party’s objectives and used the rules to get a candidate they preferred. Bearing in mind the history of entryism in Merseyside Labour politics, that’s hardly surprising. For today’s Corbynistas to hark back to those days looks like an own goal, since it places them - and by extension, him - right back in the days of holier-than-thou get-your-martyrdom-in-first whinging from the extreme left, and undermines any chance he might have had of appealing to more than just the sectarians.
Thanks. For those who, like me, didn’t know what COHSE is (I think all articles should define acronyms on first reference): Confederation of Health Service Employees - Wikipedia
Angela Eagle pulls out of Labour Leadership race, it’s now Owen Smith vs Corbyn.
Here’s more on him: Owen Smith - Wikipedia
Huh. And the Conservatives just put in the second woman to serve as Prime Minister.
The first? Also Conservative.
Interesting. Labour leadership doesn’t seem like a career path for women. Why is that?
Jesus. You really need to have that jerking knee looked at.
I’m going to speculate that it’s because it’s not specifically about their gender and more about the individuals, their circumstances and their abilities. Eagle is not exactly charismatic, didn’t have a strong following, is challenging a leader who doesn’t want to go and was running a terrible campaign. Cooper and Kendall also ran terrible campaigns in the previous contest (as did Burnham). Theresa May was already in a strong position within the existing government to step into the vacant leadership position, and had a very strong level of backing from her party MPs before any of this started.
There are and have been plenty of women in important positions in the Labour Party, as there are and have been in the Conservatives and indeed other parties (both the Greens and SNP have female leaders at present, for example). Someday in the not-too-distant future one of the women in Labour may become party leader. Instead of making yet another feeble attempt to cry “liberal hypocrisy!”, perhaps you could rejoice that we’ve reached the point where large numbers of women of all political stripes are finally being considered serious contenders for leadership positions.
I’m not sure I fully agree. There are of course specific reasons why any individual female candidate may not have won, but over time a pattern does seem to emerge.
Women have had to fight hard to gain anything like equality within Labour, and in terms of number of MPs or number of cabinet posts they are still well short of parity. Corbyn got lambasted for having no women in the Great Offices of State, but Brown before him was hardly any better (Jacqui Smith as Home Secretary, and Ruth Kelly, Hazell Blears, Harriet Harman and latterly Yvette Cooper in other roles). In the 2010 leadership contest, no women stood and I’m sure that’s in part because there were few with substantial cabinet experience.
Given that leadership elections are relatively rare (except this past year!) it’s hard to pick up a clear signal. But I think it has become a question worth asking.
A total of 183,541 applications were made to join the Labour Party as registered supporters in the last 48 hours via Sky News
That’s people who are not existing Labour members of 6 months standing - or similarly affiliated union members - who have paid £25 to have a vote in the leadership election. For context that’s more than the total Conservative party membership.
I wonder how that breaks down in terms of votes? I’m guessing pro-Corbyn myself, but who knows?
A correction to the above. Diane Abbott stood in 2010, so that’s my error. She was running from outside the cabinet, and from the left of the party. In 2010, that wasn’t a winning position. (It was in 2015, of course, but the left-wing outsider was Corbyn because it was his turn). The mainstream candidates with the experience and clout to stand a chance of winning were all men.
There’s a very interesting analysis of gender in UK political parties here. My crude summary:
Getting into Labour was traditionally hard for women, because it was a trade-union affiliated party set up to fight for the right of workers and workers were (originally) mainly men. There was always an element of the trade union movement, and the party, that saw women’s campaigns for equal treatment in the workplace as a threat to working men’s hard won status. So having fought their way into the party, women - being good left-wing politicians - organised and fought within Labour for better women’s representation, and used their political power to fight for equality and women’s rights. One upshot of that was that women were pigeonholed as being only good at women’s issues which was then seen as disqualifying compared to men who did “proper” politics.
By contrast, the Tory party was just as hard for women to get into, but once there women were less likely to see themselves as champions for women within and without the party, and more likely to follow their own ambition. As a result, the Tory party still has fewer women MPs than Labour but the ones that fight to the top cannot be dismissed as relying on quotas or tokenism, and have done the “proper” jobs.
For example, Thatcher’s rise to the top: she was a junior minister; Heath was an unpopular leader. In the ordinary way of things, the old boys network at the heart of the Tory party would have taken soundings over the port, lined up a successor and duly presented Heath with the proverbial whisky and revolver. But what actually happened is that Thatcher launched a challenge, the other potential challengers flapped about and failed to stand, and she won the votes of those who wanted change. Her victory relied a lot on bypassing existing party power structures and going for it herself, (well, with a couple of strong allies) rather than working the system from within.
I’ve got to disagree. Thatcher was touted as a possible leader immediately after the October 74 election. Her major challengers - or rather, those who would have been her major challengers - made spectacular blunders which ruled them out of the running. Powell had gone after his Rivers of Blood speech, Keith Joseph made a speech referring to the lower orders overbreeding, etc. The other significant right-winger, Du Cann, chose to not stand against her, so the right wing of the Tories was united behind her. Her enemies’ attempt to smear her badly backfired. Even then, it was a close-run thing: 130 votes to Heath’s 119.