Labour Leadership Election: Transphobia

This was first posted on Facebook on nth month 2020, with support from my Ko-Fi network.
Emily Thornberry is off the ballot: Labour Party members and affiliated supporters will be voting for Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy, or Keir Starmer, to be the Leader of the Opposition from April.

Labour Leadership election: Stage 1

This was first posted on Facebook on 29th January 2020, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

The next general election for the UK is likely to be in 2024. According to the terms of the Fixed Term Parliament Act, GE2024 would be held Thursday 2nd May (but Johnson says he intends to repeal FTP): according to the Parliamentary Act of 1911, the next general election can be held at the whim of the Prime Minister but no later than Thursday 12th December 2024.

The Leader of the Opposition until the next general election, and of course we hope Prime Minister thereafter, will be one of four people:

Just for the record: Corbyn can’t resign now

This was first posted on Facebook on 31st December 2019, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

I’m probably going to be writing a lot of posts about looking forward in politics and campaigning in the new year.

This post is more of a backwards-looking one.

The Labour Party suffered a horrible defeat on 12th December. In consequence, not only are we going to have a Tory government in Westminster for the next five years (give or take), and Boris Johnson is Prime Minister of that Tory government (a nightmare scenario of Trumpian proportions), and that Tory government has an 80-seat majority giving Boris Johnson the power to do more or less whatever he feels like doing in government – not only all of that, but the UK is going to leave the EU on 31st January and may crash out in no-deal Brexit on 31st December 2020.

Under the circumstances, it is only human to want to find someone or some group of people to blame.

Corbyn wins: what next?

To no one’s surprise, today Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership election, with 61.8% of the vote. On votes cast:

• Jeremy Corbyn: 313,209 (61.8%)
• Owen Smith: 193,229 (38.2%)

From the Guardian’s report:

Overall, there were 654,006 people eligible to take part in the election as either full members, registered supporters who had paid £25, or affiliates largely through the trade unions. Of this total, 506,438 cast a vote.

Despite an electoral system that seemed to have been skewed to favour Corbyn’s challenger, by denying a vote to anyone who joined either as a member or an affiliate since January, by raising the fee for being a registered supporter to £25, and by purging or suspending from membership thousands of members who had said something “wrong” on social media (here’s a post from Roz Kaveney on how this was managed: see also), Corbyn got clear majority for his leadership across the board: 59% of the Labour Party membership as of December 2015 voted for him, 70% of those who had paid £25 to become registered supporters, and 60% of those who had a vote as affiliated supporters mostly via trade unions.

So, the Labour Party MPs who persist in saying that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t the leader they want, now have a few options.

So, Jeremy Corbyn won. What now?

So, it’s over: Jeremy Corbyn won.

Despite all of the attacks, personal and political, from Louise Mensch in New York to Liz Kendall in the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn is now Leader of the Opposition and leader of the Labour Party.

Atul Hatwal wrote in Labour Uncut on 22nd July: Sorry, that Labour leadership poll is nonsense. Jeremy Corbyn is going to finish fourth.

As the new deputy leader of the Labour Party wrote in the New Statesman a few days ago:

Good debate, above all in a process like this, should also be about listening. It’s easy to forget in the passion of one’s own beliefs, but you also have to listen to the others. All of them.

And you have to start from the position that, inside the Labour party, we are all good people with good motives – indeed, with the same motives – and nobody is right about everything. And nobody is wrong about everything either. Liz Kendall is not a Tory and Jeremy Corbyn is not a Trot, and saying either of those things – on Twitter, on Facebook or in real life – just plays into the hands of our real opponents – the Tories. And they hold enough cards at the moment as it is.
– Tom Watson

Tom Watson thanks his mum, dad and Baroness Alicia Kennedy, his campaign director #labourleadership

— PoliticsHome (@politicshome) September 12, 2015

How to rig an election

I don’t believe the Labour Party administration are rigging the leadership election to keep Jeremy Corbyn from winning. I don’t think that’s what they’re trying to do, and I don’t think they’d succeed in doing it if they tried. I think Jeremy Corbyn’s likely to win: if he loses, it won’t be because of the Labour Party’s purge of voters.

We’ve seen in the US since Bush was awarded the victory in November 2000, that a determined group of people with the power to have hackable e-voting machines built and installed, the power to ensure legal investigations are only used against the opposition, the power to shut down voter registration for the opposition, and of course the power to “cleanse” electoral rolls of voters likely to choose your opponent, can deliver victories for the Republican Party: the outright vote-fixing may be mathematically detectable.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening in the Labour leadership election.

On the process of political smearing

I wasn’t planning to write another blogpost on the Labour leadership election. (I hope I’m not going to be starting a lot of blogposts over the next few weeks with that sentence.)

I don’t have a vote because although I’m a member of an affiliated organisation (which has sent me a mailshot about the election) I didn’t register for a vote because I am a member of the Scottish Green Party. So I’m just waiting for 12th September, like everyone else who doesn’t qualify for a vote, which is 99.0472% of the population of the UK.

610,753 people do have a vote, and according to most polls the majority currently plan to vote Jeremy Corbyn.

And they’re off: Labour leadership

To the likes of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, this is what Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral success looks like: an inexorable, mindless force that’s destroying their cosy living quarters. To others this may look exciting and fun and interesting, but Blair and Campbell and the rest live in those houses: it’s their comfy homes that left-wing pressure would be knocking down.

It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect them to welcome this. (And they don’t.)

If Corbyn is announced the winner on 12th September, and worse yet for Blair if Corbyn’s Prime Minister in May 2020, then everything Tony Blair did to create a new Labour party may be destroyed: the verdict of history that Blair looked forward to, might amount to:

“Tony Blair, who tried to drag the Labour Party rightwards, succeeded in doing so from 1994 to 2007, but in the process lost many voters and MPs, especially after he took the UK into war with Iraq in 2003: but the old Labour Party was restored in 2015, eight years after Blair stood down, by Jeremy Corbyn, who then led the Labour Party to a large majority in the Commons in May 2020.”

That’s a paragraph Blair would never want to read in any history book, from start to finish. If Corbyn wins, Blair will want Labour to lose in May 2020. Blair may not have anything else in common with Donald Trump, but the two men have the same size ego.

Tony Blair: Even if you hate me, please vote the way I tell you

Guest blog by Ian Shuttleworth, a parody of Blair’s “Even if you hate me, please don’t take Labour over the cliff edge” in today’s Guardian

The Labour party is in danger more mortal today than at any point in the over 100 years of its existence. I say this as the current record-holder for putting the Labour Party in mortal danger. The leadership election has turned into something far more significant than who is the next leader. It is now about whether Labour remains a party I approve of.

Governments can change a country. Though mine didn’t, at least not the way you wanted, ahaha. And three of the four current candidates have made clear that they think it’s so important to get into power to be able to change things that they’ve promised not to change anything if they get into power. Labour in government changed this country. We changed the nation’s zeitgeist. We made socialism a thing of the past. We forced change on the Tories by occupying their territory and freeing them to move further to the insane right which they now get to define as the “centre”. We gave a voice to those who previously had none: instinctive Tories too scared to admit it by joining the Tories. We led and shaped the public discourse. Shaped it by amputating its left leg. And, yes, governments do things people don’t like, and in time they lose power. That is the nature of democracy. Even if you were all wrong to get rid of me, and I will always follow you FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.

Children should suffer

One of the basics of civilisation is that children don’t have to suffer for their parents’ mistakes or inadequacies.

Recalling that, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations has proclaimed that childhood is entitled to special care and assistance,

Convinced that the family, as the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children, should be afforded the necessary protection and assistance so that it can fully assume its responsibilities within the community,

Recognizing that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding,

Considering that the child should be fully prepared to live an individual life in society, and brought up in the spirit of the ideals proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations, and in particular in the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity…

A good welfare state is the culmination of civilisation. Whether a parent is able or willing, unable or unwilling, to earn enough to meet their child’s needs, the needs of all children should be adequately met. Otherwise we are not civilised.