Ken Livingstone has popped up in the media again, acting as usual these days like the Corbynite’s wandering Id. This time it’s about how (he thinks anyhow) Corbyn and his acolytes plan to bypass the PLP and rule the party forever more. It involves removing the PLP from the nominations process altogether, via the National […]
How these GMB comments are telling about the relationship between Corbyn and the unions
During the Labour leadership race in the summer, the trade unions as a bloc openly supported Jeremy Corbyn as their preferred candidate. There were probably many easily understandable reasons for this. One of them could have been that they wanted to try and push the other candidates to the left on certain issues, thinking Corbyn […]
Momentum are delegitimising the Left – all of it, not just their bit
An article in the Telegraph today, “Revealed: The radical hard-left Momentum activists mounting a ruthless purge of Labour“, paints a shocking picture of the pressure group Momentum. I was going to put “Labour” into the description of the organisation, but several of the members of Momentum’s steering committee have spent some time in the past […]
Could there be a 2016 or 2017 general election?
The Westminster rumour mill grinds out the possibility of another general election within less than two years time on the basis of Cameron stepping down earlier, his successor calling a general election based on the move, and Labour not being able to possibly stand in the way of it. This scuttlebutt comes via that amazing […]
Could this man be the next leader of the Conservative Party (and thus next prime minister)?
I have speculated in the past about who would succeed David Cameron as Tory leader. I’ve said David Davis; I’ve also intimated that Owen Patterson might be a nailed on certainty. All of these predictions were predicated on certain things happening which in the end did not (such as Cameron failing to get a majority […]
As May 2015 showed, UKIP is not the obvious home for disgruntled Tories – the EU referendum won’t change that
A man many of you will have never heard of by the name of John Strafford has reacted rather badly to David Cameron’s “assault on constituency associations” this week, when the prime minister said that Tory MPs should basically not listen to their Eurosceptic members and instead hop on the Remain coach with the vast […]
I’m really sick of the Jeremy Corbyn-Bernie Sanders conflation. The two men are very, very different
I don’t want to pick on Owen Jones again, but I’m forced to. Yesterday he penned an article entitled “First Corbyn, now Sanders: how young voters’ despair is fuelling movements on the left” which pretty much did what it says on the tin. The basic idea is that the rise of Corbyn and Sanders can […]
Is it just possible the Tories want Zac Goldsmith to lose in London?
Yesterday witnessed a London mayoral hustings in which all of the conceivable candidates for said position spoke. Those who were there and I consider reliable witnesses claim that Sadiq really won the night, with Zac being a little flat (and predictably, Galloway getting way too much floor time as he refused to shut up). There […]
This is what stands in the way of a Labour split more than anything else
When one surveys the landscape of the current Labour Party, the fact that a split doesn’t loom larger in a lot of the PLP’s thinking could baffle some with a less than voluminous knowledge of British political history. The membership seems to have turned to or been infiltrated completely by the far-left; given the way […]
Of course Ed Miliband was the main reason Labour didn’t win the election
A new report on why Labour supposedly lost the election, authored by Margaret Beckett, has two main claims. One, that it’s thorough. Two, that Ed Miliband being leader had nothing to do with it. I think these two assertions are mutually exclusive. Even more exciting (for someone like me who gets excited by such things), […]