A Momentous Day, Again.

The pace of British politics in recent times has, frankly, blown most of us away. In the last month we have had a referendum with era-changing consequences, a Conservative leadership race (or at least half of one!), a Labour party coup of never-before-seen potency and complexity, and now this. Andrea Leadsom has stepped down as leadership contender, and the Conservative Party’s 1922 committee have decided that May will now be unopposed. The leadership battle, as quickly as it began, is over. Theresa May will be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and First Lord of the Treasury.

A few things to think about that won’t have been covered extensively by the mainstream press during the course of today’s events; firstly, think of poor old Dave! After getting booed by the crowd at Wimbledon yesterday so overwhelmingly that Andy Murray had to leap to his defence, he has now found his time as Prime Minister (minus responsibilities) cut drastically short. He had been hoping to attend a few more international events in the coming weeks, cementing his legacy as a statesman, but it already seems that he is old news. He now has one more decision to make, before Wednesday’s PMQs session and his official resignation before the Queen. How and when will he move his belongings out of Downing Street?

Secondly, what about Angela Eagle? She stood up to begin her “I’m announcing a leadership challenge” speech 3 minutes before Andrea Leadsom announced that she was dropping out of the race. By the time Eagle had been introduced, three quarters of the journalists in the room had left, sprinting around the corner to Leadsom’s house for her announcement, leading to this frankly excruciating scene-

And, finally, to Leadsom herself. The surprise contender surpassed all expectations by getting through to the final 2 in the Tory leadership contest, but the last nail was slammed firmly into her coffin on Saturday when an interview that she gave to Times journalist Rachel Sylvester seemed to imply that she would be a better PM than May because of her experience as a mother. Theresa May herself has been unable to have children, and has spoken at length about how this has affected her and her family; it would have been a very sore nerve indeed for Leadsom to poke. Looking back at the interview it seems clear that this implication was not, remotely, what Leadsom had intended, but it was enough to allow the entire Blue Quarter press (read by the vast majority of Conservative Party members) to brand her as nasty and unfit to lead. As a result, this morning she accepted defeat and sent a letter to the Chairman of the Party withdrawing from the contest, and the rest, as they say, is history. Another scalp was claimed for the Murdoch empire, and once again News Corp had decided the course of British politics.

David Cameron, himself, will hold his last cabinet meeting tomorrow, and his last PMQs on Wednesday. He will then drive up to Buckingham Palace in the Prime Ministerial jag, present his resignation to the Queen (who will presumably purr with delight), and on Wednesday evening Theresa May will be having dinner prepared in one of Downing Street’s multiple kitchens.

And that’s that. I’ve been waiting to cover what is happening in the Labour party since late last week, but the situation is moving so fast that I have been unable to pin a story down for more than a few hours. At the time of writing, the negotiations between Jeremy Corbyn’s team and everybody else in the party have failed drastically, and Len McCluskey has accepted that he may not be able to broker a peace. The party will go to the polls to try and oust Corbyn, and now that a leadership challenge has been officially announced the next battle awaits; will Jeremy Corbyn even make it on the ballot?

Labour’s NEC will decide tomorrow on their own interpretation of the rules, and assuming as I am that they agree that Corbyn must achieve 51 nominations from the Parliamentary Party to be included in the leadership contest, he will be excluded from his own leadership battle. This, whilst seeming like a ludicrous situation, is the most likely interpretation of the rules; however Corbyn’s team have their own army of lawyers that argue exactly the opposite, so expect a legal challenge if this is the final decision of the NEC. This Labour fiasco will not be over any time soon, and if Corbyn does manage to make it onto the ballot he will likely win again, causing a split in the party which may very well mean the end of the Labour movement as we know it.

It’s all kicking off, and it doesn’t show signs of stopping any time soon. We must wait and see what happens in the coming days and weeks (months no longer seem like a viable timescale in our politics), but expect that every political party of note in our country will have a new leader by Christmas. In the shorter term, our second female Prime Minister will ascend in 48 hours, and presumably initiate what will likely be a tense and difficult divorce negotiation with a very affronted European Union.

 

Corbyn’s Alive!

As most of you know, I only strapped the defibrillator to this blog yesterday, after nearly ten months of absence, and so I feel it is worth a quick recap of everything that has happened to the Labour party since I left. As I recall, Jeremy Corbyn had just become leader of the Labour Party (thanks to the new “£3 a pop” membership rules implemented by Ed Miliband, suspected entryism and the return of a wave of young, naïve lefties like myself to the party), and all of his many critics had scurried away into the woodwork. We, and indeed Jeremy himself, couldn’t quite believe it; he had been the most popular candidate by a country mile, having only made it onto the ballot paper by the grace of a few Blairite Labour MPs attempting to “widen the debate”.

In the months that have followed, what has appeared on our TV screens and in the national press has been, to say the least, lacklustre. Although it is clear that this country’s right-wing press (The Murdoch/Dacre papers in particular) have not made it easy for him, he has failed to stick the knife in when the Conservatives have been weak, and it has cost him. There are others, like me, who had thought he might be just what we needed to shift the tone of public policy away from the state-slashing and multinational-coddling that has characterised the last 7 years of our debate, but after his failure to capitalise on the tax credits U-turn, the junior doctor’s contract fiasco, and the resignation of Champion of the destitute Ian Duncan Smith, it began to become clear that he was not.

What he has managed to do very successfully indeed, and all credit to him, is instil his anti-austerity brand into the heart of the parliamentary party, and helped the Labour party to move away from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s hug-a-banker attitude. The party now has a clear message on the economy, and even if it is simply “borrow to invest” economics, it’s a start. This in my opinion has garnered enough support from the PLP that regardless of what happens to Jeremy, he will have a legacy of some sort to speak of.

However, since the EU referendum, things have really begun to fall apart. All those Blairites and “moderates”, some of whom have been waiting for this opportunity since day 1 and some of whom were willing to give Jeremy the benefit of the doubt on the off-chance that he would double their share of the vote, have had enough. Like rats from a sinking ship, 80% of the parliamentary Labour Party have expressed no confidence in his leadership. His response has been both shocking and grimly predictable; to barricade the doors of his office and fire up the Momentum social media machine to drum up his support amongst members in preparation for a leadership challenge.

The problem for the overwhelming majority of MPs who want to oust him, partially because of his politics and partially because they’d all rather like to have a shot at government in their lifetimes, is that the new leadership election rules make it nigh on impossible to unseat him. All those middle-of-the-road voters that shifted from the Tories to vote for new Labour have long since moved back, or just given up voting altogether. The active Labour membership is comprised overwhelmingly of lefties, and of those who joined up a year ago to vote him in in the first place. This is why almost every Labour MP you can think of his been begging him to resign, and why nobody has stepped forward to challenge him. If there is another contest, and he can get himself on the ballot paper, he will most likely win again. And if that happens, what options are left open to the PLP?

The answer, unfortunately, is a split in the Labour party. It’s happened before; in 1981 Shirley Williams and 3 other Labour MPs (who became known as the gang of four) left the party because of the rising influence of Tony Benn and the feeling that the party was moving leftward; they were also worried about the influence of trade unions on the leadership of the party (sound familiar?). They ultimately started their own party, the SDP, which eventually merged with the then Liberal party to form what we now know as the Lib Dems. The whole story is incredibly interesting and very reminiscent of today’s situation, and is well worth researching if you have the time, however the crux of the matter is that if the PLP cannot unseat Jeremy Corbyn in time for the next election they may well have a similar moment themselves; although the “gang of four” this time around may consist of hundreds.

With Angela Eagle and Owen Smith both threatening to challenge him as potential stalking horse candidates if he doesn’t eat the poisoned apple soon, it remains to be seen whether a compromise can be found to save his leadership in time; John Prescott and Len McCluskey have both been suggested as “honest broker” for negotiations going forward, but rumour has it that Jeremy is refusing to meet with most of his MPs lest they convince him of the need to stand down. His parliamentary aides (including the shady Seumas Milne) have closed ranks around him, he has not done interviews for the media in days, and when he does leave his office or his house it is to stand up in front of Momentum rallies and espouse his usual brand of anti-austerity politics, almost as if he didn’t have a referendum to react to. It’s a real shame, particularly in times like this, that the government doesn’t have a functioning opposition and that Corbyn can’t fill his front bench, as it leads to situations like this written question from his new shadow international development secretary-

Diane Abbott:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps she has taken to assist people in the Indonesian province of Davao del Norte affected by the drought in that province.

Justine Greening:

There is no province called Davao del Norte in Indonesia.

(courtesy Guido Fawkes blog)

On top of all this, Labour could be scoring points on a daily basis if they were on the top of their game, with Theresa May threatening to use EU citizens living in the UK as bargaining chips in her referendum negotiations, George Osbourne rowing back from his “surplus by 2020” commitment (leaving many of us wondering what all the austerity economics were for in the first place), and a government that seems to want to perpetually re-fight the referendum campaign until it tears itself apart.

We can only hope either that some settlement is reached whereby Corbyn is kept in place and beaten into shape until he is electable, or that he bows to the pressure after getting his life’s ambition to call for the trial of Tony Blair from the despatch box tomorrow, and resigns so that the party can find a more credible alternative before the Tories call a snap general election at the close of the year.

I can only apologise, dear reader, after combing back through this, for my long-winded style. I hope you stuck with me until the end- if so, tomorrow I’ll bring you the latest from the Chilcot revelations (or whitewash, depending on your point of view), and a summary of the Tory candidates left in the race to become our next Prime Minister. One of those candidates should fall off the ticket within a few hours of my posting this article; with any luck it’ll be Michael Gove.

Health and happiness in these turbulent times.

Corbyn steamrolls opponents: now the real battle begins

So the impossible has happened, in what seems to be becoming quite a trend in British politics since the start of this year; the 500-1 outsider and veteran left winger spent the entire campaign aiming not to lose, and in doing so managed to win a serious mandate from the Labour community. He won with every major demographic, the young and the old alike, those who voted for UKIP and the Greens both favoured him in equal measure. In the end, it was a massive 59.5% of the Labour Party that handed him the keys, making it one of the clearest leadership outcomes in recent history.

Now, however, comes the hard part for Corbyn and his band of rebels-turned-Kings. He has four and a half years of a predominantly right-wing press hammering away at his confidence (and public confidence by extension). He has the Murdoch empire to contend with, and the clamouring of the entire British business world for a continuation of the status quo. He will have party rebellions and attempted coups to survive before he even reaches 2020. He is trying to convert an electorate that has been brainwashed with austerity economics since Thatcher, and that will not happen with ease. The man who didn’t really want to be leader has to make himself Prime Minister, against all the hordes of enemies that he has made along the way.

He announced his first Shadow Cabinet positions last night, and they make interesting reading indeed. The slate has been wiped clean; if MPs are willing to swear their allegiance then he is more than willing to forgive. In this manner Andy Burnham grasps the reigns of the shadow home office, a position he had manoeuvred himself into before he had even lost the leadership. John McDonnell will be facing the chancellor at the dispatch box, whilst Hilary Benn (son of one of Corbyn’s mentors and Labour left-winger Tony Benn, and a strong parliamentarian) has been given Shadow Foreign Secretary, and Heidi Alexander has received her first serious ministerial role as the shadow health minister. The rest are fairly unknown, aside from Angela Eagle who has remained in her post as shadow Leader of the House of Commons.

The Tories are already decrying him as a “serious threat to national security”, but these are desparate attacks from a party stunned by his rise. Nobody, but nobody, saw this coming, and Labour must capitalise on the headstart they now have before the next five years of trench warfare settle in.

Greece Bailout: A life in chains or death in the cold

Early in the hours of Monday morning, after a session of discussions described by those present as “Economic water boarding” Alexis Tsipras emerged from a 30-hour long final slog for debt relief with the Eurogroup finance ministers and Greece’s creditors. The deal he had accepted was, if anything, even worse for Greece than the last offer (roundly rejected by the Greek public in a snap referendum last week), but this really was crunch time; a deal would be done, or Greece would leave the Eurozone.

In a meeting almost completely dictated by German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, Tsipras effectively conceded the defeat of his manifesto pledges on austerity relief, and was beaten into an agreement by, amongst others, the German and Finnish contingents of the talks, in a fashion described by Nobel Prize winning Economist Paul Krugman as “beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness… [with] complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief”. This led to a Europe-wide twitter trend of “#Thisisacoup”, and calls by the French and Italians for Germany to back down from the hard line and at least consider the democratic will of the Greek people. No such luck there, as the marathon talks began to reach a predictable, weary consensus.

The deal is comprised of several key economic reforms by the Greeks, in exchange for bridging loans to keep their banks afloat, and a promise of further debt relief pending (you guessed it) more discussions. This is in exchange for pension cuts (a former Syriza red line), major VAT overhauls, a broadening of the Greek tax base, and heavy public sector spending cuts. In other words, this is a package for a fresh bout of austerity economics for Greece.

Problems could still arise; the Greek Parliament is basically split down the middle on the issue of concessions, with figures including the Speaker of the House refusing to move. The Parliament has to approve all of the measures proposed in just 2 days, including the sale of €50Bn worth of government assets to be held in a Trust Fund, through which debt repayments will be made. The whole agreement may fall at the first hurdle, and facilitate exactly the scenario that Tsipras has sold out his principles trying to avoid. This weekend marked a massive, game-changing failure of democracy in our EU.

Greece faced an impossible choice here, but unfortunately they still had to choose. They may still fall out of the Eurozone, but Germany’s abject refusal of the legitimacy of a left-wing economic mandate has had the desired effect; Syriza in disarray, Greece propping up the Eurozone despite its own best interests, and a group of “Club Med” countries too terrified to attempt their own debt renegotiations. 

On the home front, there will be a piece posted in the next few days regarding Harriet Harman’s admission that the opposition will not be, erm, opposing the Government’s deep cuts to welfare and child tax credits. These are dark times indeed.

Corbyn makes the cut by a whisker

After a nail biting conclusion to the nomination saga, it appears that there will be a left-wing candidate on the ballot paper for the upcoming Labour Leadership election after all. 

Jeremy Corbyn, a seasoned backbencher and left-wing Labour radical, had previously not been supported by enough MPs to achieve a nomination (the required number being 35). However a few hours before the deadline today, he gathered the support of some of Mary Creagh’s former followers, newly liberated since she withdrew her candidacy, and crossed the line with literally minutes to spare.

This puts Corbyn, having spent years as a backbencher, in the race to become the next Labour leader and in a fantastic position from which to plug his own brand of anti-austerity thinking, which at least deserves a voice in the parliamentary Labour Party. He knows that if it were down to the party, he would have no chance whatsoever; most of the Labour MPs in the policy-making circles are sure that they lost the election because they abandoned the centre-ground, and that Britain despises the left. There are those in the party that disagree, but the real decider in this election will be the party membership and union votes from the general public. If Corbyn plays his cards right, he will at least be able to influence the direction of travel of Labour’s comeback, and hopefully convince the party that this country grew weary of Old Labour, and weary of New Labour, and that a far more forward-thinking long-termist policy portfolio will need to be crafted if they have any chance of even regaining their lost ground in 2020.

It is not at all an acceptable state of affairs for the only left-leaning party in the House of Commons to be a nationalist and anti-unionist party that only represents one of the four constituent nations of our country. Labour mustn’t be afraid to take a step out into the darkness, to be bold and pioneering in its politics, and to present a viable economic alternative to the one presented to us in “efficiency savings” and “streamlining” doublespeak by the party of Government. If it does that, then maybe the “Tory-light” mantle will be shaken off, and they can stand up on May 8th 2020 with their heads held high. One could look at it as a roll of the dice, but it seems to me that they have very little left to lose.

“Don’t Mention The War”

David Cameron kicked off the latest leg of his “schmooze offensive” on European leaders yesterday with a meeting of the G7 group of nations in Bavaria, hosted by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The festivities involved beer and bratwurst (Obama was in fact pictured swigging a lager at 11 in the morning on a work day, but we’ll let him off), and some of the high-level tactical discussions that will always take place when you put several powerful and dimetrically opposed politicians in a room.

They decided, thankfully, that they were going to end humanity’s contribution to climate change by 2100 (so we can all rest easy in our beds), by switching to completely sustainable sources of energy and ending reliance on fossil fuels as a priority. They apparently did not discuss Greece to any serious extent, but that is hardly surprising as the Germans seem to be moving nowhere on the issue of their finances and the reforms that must be implemented before it can lend Greece more money, to pay back the money it already owes. 

A thankfully staunchly held position by Merkel was the absence of Russian President Putin at the talks. When asked if Russia will ever rejoin the group, she responded that she thought not. “There are channels available for the G7 to easily communicate and negotiate with Russia”, she said, agreeing with President Obama that Russia have isolated themselves, despite the pleas of the European Union for a cessation of Putin’s empirical aspirations.

The hot topic at the event, and one which will remain on the agenda for some weeks yet, was the package of reforms being sought by the Conservatives before the Referendum in 2017. The PM is looking to end the payments of in-work benefits to EU migrants from poorer countries in the union, and an end to the right to claim out of work benefits, child tax credits etc. upon arrival. The problem with these reforms is that they would be severely discriminatory to immigrants from certain, particularly former Eastern Bloc EU countries like Romania and Poland. The PM requires the agreement of all 28 member states of the EU to pass these reforms, and since the last time Cameron put his foot down in the EU (over the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker) he lost his vote 26 nations to 2, that will be a very hard sell indeed.

Regardless of whether he gets what he wants or not, you can be sure that Mr Cameron will step down from an aircraft in a few weeks time, returning from Europe waving a list of his achievements like Chamberlain, and claiming “peace in our time”; he wants to back the In campaign, and although half his party would happily leave Europe today I cannot see him changing his position. 

The current polls suggest that the UK is around 2:1 in favour of staying in the EU in the referendum, with 70% of people saying that they could still be persuaded either way. This battle will be long and hard, but make no mistake, it can be won if the campaign is fought positively. Let us fervently hope that whoever is running the Yes campaign will be thorough, charismatic and engaging, rather than dry, uninteresting and Conservative.

A Tribute to the late Charles Kennedy

Yesterday (June 2nd 2015) the world of Westminster was rocked by the sudden and tragic death of the ex-MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber Charles Kennedy. He was elected to represent the consituency in 1983, and at that point he was the youngest MP in the House of Commons at the age of just 23. Kennedy spent the entirety of his Parliamentary career in opposition, until the 2010 general election and the signing of the coalition agreement. He was the only Lib Dem to abstain from the vote that put them into the coalition, stating that it was “against everything he stood for”; he did not however make any attempt to sabotage the coalition or to bring down the Government, respecting the choice made by his party in spite of his own beliefs.

In terms of consituency MPs he was unparalleled. He grew up as the son of a croft farmer (in the highland tradition), and went on to represent the place in which he had been born and raised. Having entered politics as a member of the Social Democratic Party, he was a pivotal part of the conjunction with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats as we now know them.

When Paddy Ashdown stood down as Leader of the party in 1999, Kennedy was the obvious choice to replace him. This period of his career was perhaps his most celebrated and most infamous simultaneously; he led the party to its best election result in living memory with 62 MPs off the back of an anti-war message in the maelstrom that led up to our involvement in Iraq. He also at this time faced several public embarrassments and claims that he was struggling with a drink problem, and over a period of just a few months he was dislodged from his position and replaced by Sir Menzies Campbell, but this still remains the most politically influential period of his career.

He stayed on in the party as a figure of great respect and gravitas over the ensuing years, whilst struggling with his addiction, his divorce, and the illness of his father. The election came and, despite his own misgivings, Nick Clegg’s coalition agreement brought the whole party crashing down around their ears. Charles lost his seat on the 7th May 2015 (a few weeks after the death of his father), and since then had not been heard from in the media; indeed it was expected that he would be made a peer in the near future and serve a long career in the Lords. 

He was found dead at his home in Fort William, Scotland, in hitherto unknown circumstances on the morning of the 2nd of June, leaving behind a ten-year old son, Donald. Tributes have flooded social media and the news organisations, and the party is currently compiling a book of condolences for the family. The world is mourning the loss of a great hero of the liberal tradition, a loving family man and a great wit too. It’ll be a long time indeed before the likes of Charles Kennedy grace the halls of Parliament again.

Abolish the Human Rights Act: A Red Herring

Since the election there has been much confusion and concern from the public, particularly on social media, regarding the scrapping of the Human Rights Act of the Blair years. The pledge was in the Tory manifesto, the public voted for it, and now it’ll probably happen. But are they really planning on making up their own human rights, ignoring Geneva and plunging us into an INGSOC-style dystopia? Funnily enough, they aren’t.

To say that you are going to “abolish the Human Rights Act” does sound fairly inflammatory, and it is easy to see where people would get the idea that their freedoms will be reduced. The act, however, only serves to enshrine in British Law the judgements and precedents of the European court for Human Rights in Strasbourg, and this does seem a tiny bit mad when we spend public money paying our own Supreme Court to make judgements, that can then be second-guessed and changed by an external third party. 

The next thing you must take into account is the reasoning behind the decision. It is in almost direct response to the attempted extradition of Abu Qatada, the hate preacher and Islamic extremist who is wanted in Jordan on terror offences. 

The opposition to this policy is almost entirely rooted in the rhetoric surrounding it, and even a left-leaning commentator such as myself can see that the Tories, or at least the majority of them, are not trying to be evil here. They are trying to repatriate powers that should, in all honesty, reside in our own judicial system. We can still be signatories of the European Convention of Human Rights, without treating the judgements of that court as more important than those of our own. It is not Euroscepticism, it’s common sense.

Now there are some Tories (unsurprisingly on the right of the party) who want to withdraw from the convention altogether. This sets a dangerous precedent; the only two countries in Europe who have not ratified the ECHR are Kazakhstan and Belarus, both of which have serious histories of human rights abuses. This is not a club we should be aspiring to join, and in a climate in which Cameron is cozying up to every European leader for separate concessions, it is clear that to isolate ourselves in this respect would be detrimental to our bargaining position in the EU. 

The rest of Europe certainly does not want us to leave, and so Cameron must be perceived to have got what he wanted from each of them. There will be no treaty change, that’s for sure. There is much more for us to be worried about over the next five years than the abolition of the Human Rights Act, as long as it is replaced by a British Bill of Rights that enshrines all of the freedoms we enjoy in British law.

Queen’s Speech 2015: Breakdown and Analysis

Yesterday (26th May 2015) featured the Queen’s opening of Parliament, and the Speech in which she set out the Conservative party’s policy agenda for the next five years. The speech is obviously written for her by David Cameron, as it would be highly inappropriate for her to have any actually influence on the running of the country, but it gives us a flavour of what the next five years will feel like. What follows is a breakdown of the key policies announced, and an analysis of the what they could mean for you.

• Ban on Income tax, VAT and National Insurance rises for a five-year period (a result of an electoral gimmick by Cameron that now must be enforced)
• 30 Hours of free child are per week for 3 and 4 year olds, a significant increase from the current figure which will give support to families with children of those ages. It won’t come in until 2017 though, so if your children are 3 or 4 now, hard cheese.
• Working age, tax credit and child benefit freeze until the end of 2017, so no extra help for the disabled, the elderly or the victims of crime regardless of the state of the economy
• A household benefit cap of £23,000 per year, making sure that benefit-reliant families are receiving only the minimum wage.
• “Devo max” for Scotland, and more powers for the Welsh and Irish National Assemblies. Scotland wants full fiscal autonomy (the power to set income tax and control their own finances), but they don’t want it yet, because it would leave them with a £7.5Bn funding gap (IFS), so this is a bit of a shot in the foot for the SNP.
• A ban on legal highs, which is incredibly difficult to legislate for; the current supposed wording is “any substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect” which obviously would also ban Alcohol, Tobacco and Coffee, so this will be a difficult area.
• A so-called “English votes for English Laws” bill, which would give English MPs the power to veto decisions which only affect England. This will, again, greatly distress the SNP.
• 500 new free schools and more conversions to academies for failing secondary schools.
• A seven-day NHS by 2020
• A referendum on EU membership by December 2017. This is the big one, folks. It will dominate your TV screens for many months to come; in fact their are many rumours that Mr Cameron will attempt to pull it forward to May 2016, in line with the London Mayoral elections.

With all this and more to look forward to over the next five years, and an opposition that can barely hold itself together, the future looks bleak for the left. All we can do, for now, is make damn sure that we stay in the EU, and attempt to rebuild from there. On the plus side, there is very little left to be lost.

There will be a post at some point in the next few weeks finally detailing the pros and cons of the EU referendum, so if the subject interests you watch this space.

Burnham’s Burning Bridges

As the list of candidates for the Labour leadership begins to solidify, three main contenders have moved themselves into position. Chuka Umunna dropped out last week, and has since backed the underdog, Liz Kendall, in her attempt at the job. Tristram Hunt failed to get the support that he needed to get his name on the ballot paper, and as such has accepted defeat.

One of the main reasons for this (following Ed Miliband’s reforms to the way the party elects its leadership) is that a party candidate needs 35MPs to back their leadership bid as undersignatories. They can then secure a place on the ballot paper, and begin campaigning for the union vote, the votes of Labour MPs and peers, and those of party members in the general public. With over 200 parliamentary representatives, you would think that anyone would be able to find 35 people willing to allow them a shot at the top job, but the other candidates (Burnham in particular) are playing a rather mean trick.

Between Mr Burnham and Yvette Cooper, they have supposedly massed the support of around 130 Labour MPs. They obviously both reached the 35, but they didn’t stop there. In order to reduce the number of candidates and give themselves a better chance (while simultaneously limiting the choice available to the party and the public; both are Blairites in all but name) they have been squeezing the potential vote available to other candidates. This race started with 7 possibles, and it has already been reduced to 3 by their underhanded tactics. There is nothing illegal or unparliamentary about the practice, but it is clearly highly immoral, especially at a time when Labour needs all the choice and variety it can get its hands on. It is also worth noting that in the last contest, in which Ed Miliband famously beat his brother, David reached the 35 some months before, and told all his other supporters to back other candidates, so as to maximise the depth of choice available to the party. You don’t get chivalry like that anymore.

As a final footnote, Burnham has also been the victim of an interesting exposé in the last few days; his housing situation has come under serious scrutiny, and rightly so. It seems that for the last 5 years he has been claiming rent on his London home (used during the week whilst he is at parliament) to the tune of £17,000 a year. There is nothing shocking about this, until you learn that he owns another flat in London, which he rents out to a tenant for roughly the same value. Rather than using his own London house and saving the taxpayer thousands of pounds, he continues to earn a private income, whilst allowing the state to pay for him to live elsewhere. This, surely, must at least tickle his conscience. It’s another The Thick of It prophecy fulfilled, another legal but immoral choice to turn some more people off politics.

I will be backing Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, although my prediction remains that Burnham will win it. What we really need in this country is a Labour with new ideas and new philosophies, for a modern world that exists far removed from politics. What can you expect from Burnham or Cooper? Morally blank, financially dubious, and self-interested policy from a group who think a New New Labour might win again. Labour will not survive on more of the same.