There is currently an election for the new leader of the Labour Party. There are four candidates.
Jeremy Corbyn – The favourite, who will prove that his views are totally unappealing to the ordinary members of the public electorate by getting the most votes from ordinary members of the electorate. According to his rivals, and the newspapers, his policies of social inclusion, anti-austerity and most controversially of all “um, maybe talking to people” are possibly the most dangerously Left-leaning policies of any Labour politician since Ed Miliband.
Liz Kendall – Who believes that if the Labour Party is more like the Conservatives, then the electorate will vote for the Labour Party and not the Conservatives. She plans on standing on a platform at the next election of being George Osborne, but in a dress.
Yvette Cooper – a former Minister in the Labour Government of 2005-2010 and the wife of the former Shadow Chancellor who represents a complete break from the past.
Andy Burnham – another former Minister who considers some issues so important and worth fighting for that he will do anything to stop them, up to and including abstaining from any vote.
There has been an influx of new members into the Party. This influx of new members has reinvigorated the debate and brought much needed money into the coffers of the Party. Obviously, as a democratic Party who are pro-business, these new customers are the wrong sort of people.
These members look like they will be deciding the vote, therefore the new rules brought in because the Other Wrong Man won last time need changing because it seems that the Wrong Man will win again, showing that the process is flawed and has twice been not democratic enough. The Right Man who should have won the last election left Labour politics after defeat. Helpfully, he has thrown his opinion into the ring and conclusively proved that he was the Right Man by expressing his preference for the candidate who has performed completely disastrously and has no chance of winning.
Obviously, being a democratic and free and fair election, carried out using a voting system that the Party put in a place and also recently refused to support being extended to General Elections, various people have been weighing in with their views. (Though none of the new members, obviously.)
We had Tony Blair, telling members how to win elections and reminding him that he managed to win three in a row by losing 4 million votes behind the sofa in 8 years. He pointed out that the members should not vote for Corbyn but for one of the other three candidates. He didn’t express an actual preference why you should vote for any one of them, because they are all different from each other but it doesn’t matter which because he approves of them all because they are different and you should take your pick based on those differences.
Gordon Brown, the former Chancellor and Prime Minister has appeared to ask members to consider the economic policies of the candidates. He did not express a preference, but indicated that he felt people should support three of the candidates who have never tried to refute the notion that the global financial crisis is his fault. What Gordon Brown says members definitely shouldn’t do is vote for the one guy who says “the global financial crisis wasn’t Gordon Browns fault”.
Peter Mandelson, renowned throughout the Party as a political strategist so incredibly astute that he only had to resign twice, has cleverly suggested that the only way to prevent the Wrong Man winning is to twist the rules of the election in such a way that he wins anyway.
But what must not happen is that Labour should not be a) a party of protest and b) adopt a more Left-leaning, publicly anti-austerity policy. After all, being a party of protest hurt UKIP so much that they grew their vote by nearly 3 million. And the anti-austerity, Left-leaning policies of the SNP are a disaster because they failed to win every single seat in Scotland.
Members should vote for one of three candidates who can instil the discipline needed and the only ones who can unite the party. They are the candidates of the broad church, who, if they lose, will openly refuse to serve the new Leader and will plot against him in the name of uniting the Party. Should they successfully unite the party by splitting it in two, they will go off and form a new Party, called New Golgafrincham Ark B.
Out of My Tiny Mind 