How Yvette Cooper could come 3rd on 1st preferences yet still end up as winner In the last 2 big LAB selections the person top on 1st round hasn’t won. This happened with Harriet Harman in the 2007 deputy race and, of course, when EdM beat his brother five years ago. This was all, of course, because of the party’s alternative voting system when electors are asked to give their second and third choices as well as their first one….
Ladbrokes have a market up on who will be the Labour leader at the next general election. This is an interesting market, because you can see scenarios that whoever wins in September ends up being replaced before the next election. I know the recent precedent is that that Labour don’t remove poorly performing leaders (in fact only replace three time election winning leaders) but this time it feels different for the next Labour leader. If they perform badly, there’s more…
I'm taking this to mean the Deputy Leader candidates think Corbyn's going to win pic.twitter.com/Hgi9YcPLA7 — TSE (@TSEofPB) August 8, 2015 Are the deputy leader candidates preparing for a Corbyn victory? Looking at the front page of the Independent on Sunday, I suspect most of the focus will be on Jeremy Corbyn’s plans to bring back clause IV, but the most interesting aspect of that front page for me is all of the deputy leader candidates saying they will serve under Jeremy…
Hopefully we’ll see new YouGov polling in the next few days Over the past week Andy Burnham has been making the running in the LAB leadership betting returning for a few days to be favourite. That’s now changing and this afternoon the money was moving Corbyn’s way an he’s now back as favourite. What this means I don’t know. I’m not convinced that the bulk of the new names are necessarily part of the Corbyn camp. Many, I’m told, are…
Never mind the leadership, the PLP could be transformed One of the odder features of the Labour leadership election is that the nominations of constituency parties are firstly made and secondly reported. It’s odd because these are almost entirely meaningless given that they play no role in the process. They may be useful to observers if they represent the genuine view of the membership (which isn’t something to be taken for granted), and may help a candidate to build momentum…
Some interesting figures from Sky News on the make up of Labour’s electorate. What is striking is that those who were members of the party at the general election represent little more than half. This is the Sky News report from Sophy Ridge:- “Sky News has obtained figures that show almost half of those currently eligible to vote have signed up to the party since the General Election in May. That number is likely to rise still further. Labour will…
It just looks as if he’s scared of Corbyn Although Burnham has been careful to say that he’d move the railways back into the public sector line by line it is the headline that is going to stick and will be used by the Tories. This can easily woven into a narrative about the red team’s economic credibility and we saw in May how blisteringly effective that can be. Lynton Crosby always says that it is not policies themselves that…
Punters are flying blind There have basically been three sources of data for the Labour leadership contest none of which really mean that much at all. The first has been the polling with all but one of the reported surveys being private ones where we don’t even know the name of the pollster if indeed they were carried out professionally. The second source has been the list of constituency nominations but again it is hard to know whether you can…