It is sad to see process overtaking politics in the Labour leadership debate, especially because the campaign had at least contained something about visions and policies and how best to deliver on them.
That is what has engaged the thousands who have turned out to hear Corbyn. Many of them are young and have been enlivened by a political debate on austerity that has been completely missing from the mainstream (except perhaps in Scotland but even there we detect a gradual awakening that SNP rhetoric and policy on that issue are two different things).
Engaging so many people in that debate surely can’t be a bad thing. So has it re-engaged disaffected Labour supporters?
Andy Burnham has expressed concerns that Tories may have been given votes in the Labour leadership election and many in Corbyn’s camp have been quick to dismiss this as scaremongering, or as means to invalidate the election outcome. Parking politics to one side this election has turned into a very curious way to run a ballot.
I work with an former Tory councillor who has received several mail shots from candidates as a ‘registered supporter’. He hasn’t been mischievous about this but his name for one reason or another over the years got onto Labour mailing lists. He jokingly quipped that he could have registered three votes using different email addresses, family names and accounts if he could be bothered – because it really is that easy to register as a supporter.
One should not imagine that the proposal from the Collins Review, that members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) are to have their section of the Party's Electoral College removed means a significant reduction in their influence over who the leader of the Labour Party will be. That power remains largely intact due to the fact that the PLP are to retain sole control over leadership nominations, as well as the figure where Collins proposes the threshold is to be set.
Dave Prentis, UNISON GS, moving composite 2 on Public Services, won two standing ovations when he called on the Labour leadership to back public sector workers in our fight for fair pensions. Dave noted that very demand had been unscrupulously omitted from the composite. Prior to the debate Dave had set out the UNISON position on the LabourList blog:
The Guardian reports that ‘Ed Miliband has tabled proposals billed as the biggest change to the party's structures for 20 years,’ including diluting the trade union share of the vote in leadership elections by conferring the same democratic rights on non-paying registered party ‘supporters’ as those held by trade union political levy payers. Predictably, despite the hype of ‘Refounding Labour’ project, the democratic deficit in the electoral college, which in last year’s leadership election gave each MP a vote equivalent to that of 608 individual party member and to that of 12,915 affiliated trade unionists, will remain unchanged:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/20/ed-miliband-labour-voting-unions
#TUC11
Reaction to That Speech: On being asked if they found the Labour Leaders speech invigorating, two UNISON delegates confessed –“we fell asleep”. Another answered “It was bollocks”.
The Labour Party is now officially at war again. From Polly Toynbee in Saturday’s Guardian, through the 2revelations” in the Sunday Telegraph, to Rawnsley in the Observer or Rentoul in the Independent, comes the news that the Miliband brothers are officially NOT TALKING while Ed Balls’ private papers have been splashed over the media.
The Guardian reports on radical reforms in Labour Party democracy being advocated by Peter Hain MP. A move to extend voting rights in internal elections to labour supporters as well as members and affiliated union members could have mixed consequences for unions:
‘The deep defects in the global economic system have not been remedied. The current upswing will therefore be brief. Another, perhaps even more serious, crisis is likely. When it happens the left must not be caught, as it was last time, with its pants down’ says Larry Elliot in his foreword to ‘Britain's broken economy - and how to mend it’ published by the centre left New Political Economy Network and available on line at:
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/ebooks/BritainsBrokenEconomy.html
Yesterday’s Daily Mirror, in the print version at least, gave new Labour leader Ed Miliband’s views on the FBU dispute in London and surprise surprise, Miliband condemned the strike. A spokesman for Mr Miliband is quoted as saying that “it would leave Londoners in a dangerous situation”.
The new leader of the Labour Party addressed conference today and in his speech acknowledged the campaign led by school meals workers employed by Sodexo in Richmond Borough London.
Mike Rustin, writing on the Open Democracy website, says that trade unions will have an important part to play in revitalising the Labour Party as a grass-roots movement and opposing the Coalition's spending cuts.
There has been some leaping and a whooping about Ed Miliband’s win with the left clearly pleased that the union vote swung into action (albeit a luke warm response from UNISON’s own Labour Link members with a substantial vote for David Miliband).
Keith Ewing poses the rhetorical question in an article reviewing prospects for the Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill, to be introduced as a private member’s bill by John McDonnell MP on 22 October.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/keith-ewing/coalition-faces-challenge-to-restore-trade-union-rights?
'Ed Miliband was the overwhelming Compass membership choice for leader and we are delighted he has won. Ed represents the possibility of changing the party; its policies and organisation - so that we can provide the country with the change that it needs', says Compass. See the full story below...
In the next few days the 430,000 UNISON members who pay a political fund contribution to Labour Link will be receiving a Labour Party leadership ballot paper – the ballot opens today 1 September. The ballot is being conducted using the Alternative Vote system of ranking candidates in order of preference and UNISON has produced basic voting guidance with a recommendation that members give 1st preference to the union’s nominee Ed Miliband:
http://www.unison.org.uk/labourlink/pages_view.asp?did=11710
