Is Harman trying to skew the Labour leadership contest, with her bias against Corbyn?
Harriet Harman seems to have misunderstood part of her own offer to members of the public.
Labour – under her – has offered people a chance to register as ‘supporters’ of the party, in order to have a vote in the leadership election.
Jeremy Corbyn has huge support amongst the electorate and it follows that more people will be signing up to support him than the other candidates, whose supporters are more likely to be party members/supporters already.
That’s not “trying to skew” anything – that’s democracy!
If anybody is “trying to skew” the leadership election, it seems that person is Harriet Harman.
Labour MPs should write back, telling her to mind her own bloody business.
Harriet Harman has written to all Labour MPs asking them to check new members are not trying to skew the party’s leadership contest.
Each MP has been sent a list of new members from their constituency so they can check for suspicious names.
It follows claims, denied by the party, of non Labour supporters signing up to back left-wing candidate Jeremy Corbyn.
Source: Labour leadership: Harriet Harman warns MPs over new members – BBC News
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ah the blair babies wont go piecefully
Labour’s attitude is so strange. They don’t want a leader who seems extremely popular among the public, and now they want to keep large numbers of potential supporters and even party workers from joining.
Do they really just not want to win?
My conclusion exactly.
I think they’re actually in corporate pockets.
Seriously, things could not have gone better for big business right up until Jeremy Corbyn came along and urinated on the Weetabix.
Something really stinks here.
My husband and I joined the Party after the General Election and attended the CLP meeting, which included the nomination for leader. No one checked our cards and I don’t think that anyone there could find out about our political past. I am disgusted by the lack of trust and refusal to follow the democratic process in this leadership election. We intend voting for Jeremy Corbyn, as the only truly honest and decent candidate!
I can almost see the Blairite reasoning of checking newcomers in case they are Tory infiltrators, or some such, trying to skew the vote. However, they are also maybe doing themselves out of regaining some of the membership that they have recently haemorrhaged, especially in Scotland. With Corbyn at the helm, I would expect many new SNP supporters to revert to their true allegiance, possibly along with many UKIP voters. As an SNP supporter, I am not allowed a Labour leadership vote nowadays, despite paying my political levy all my working life. I would have very much liked to vote for Corbyn since I believe he would provide some opposition in Westminster. That would be to my benefit, but I suppose that’s what these Tory subscribers think too, albeit for a totally different reason.
“Labour’s attitude is so strange. They don’t want a leader who seems extremely popular among the public, and now they want to keep large numbers of potential supporters and even party workers from joining.
Do they really just not want to win?”
From the perspective of the Labour hierarchy it’s not strange in the slightest since they put their jobs over and above democracy. Harman should just jump ship to the Tories which is where she belongs. As I argued in my blog piece on July 25:
“That the attempt at reining in support for Jeremy Corbyn by the labour party hierarchy is at odds with the continued support he is receiving from the membership and the wider public, is indicative of the former’s total disregard for democracy. Both the Tories and Labour really are all in it together. As I stated previously:
“Increasingly, the political battle lines are being drawn, not between the ruling party and the opposition, but between the ruling party, opposition and the rest of us.”
http://danielmargrain.com/2015/07/25/labour-is-scared-stiff-of-the-publics-support-for-jeremy-corbyn/
i joined too after the election, mainly because up to that point i had not got the money for the fees,do they honestly think people who joined recently are all infiltrators/ been reading too many James Bond books after they? at that point i had no idea who Jeremy Corbyn, or Liz Kennedy was. Yvette cooper yes as she’s from the next constituency to me and her hubby of course well known as shadow chancellor plus ive met him in a talk re closure of suburban post offices.some years ago.Andy Burnham i admired as a good spokesperson for the NHS issue. but none of them did anything for me at all.all sounded mediocre n more tory than labour n no one said a word about the austerity measures needing to be addressed until Jeremy Corbyn came on the scene and there it was, enthusiasm for all the issues i cared about, he sounds like hes going to get things changed come hell or high water, thats why i and many others are supporting him because we’ve seen at first hand what these austerity measures are doing to people.. and how the NHS has been let down by central govt resulting in the general public being let down too. my bro in law only this week, laid on a trolley in A&E in a Wakefield hospital from 1.45pm to well after 11pm.waiting for a hospital bed. suspected appendicitis, that was Sunday. 2nd Aug. he still hasn’t seen a Dr up-to yesterday. Wednesday, except the one who told him they were keeping him in him (Doc in A& E.). not on. so yes if Jeremy can do all he says. or at least some of those things im with him. and if ppl care to go read my fb page they will see that for the last few years ive been supporting labour publicly. and loudly. i don’t see many people at home but ive even converted family members. got them to vote labour etc. along with my daughter who ive just just helped find the money to join too.and next will be her boyfriend.he too is joining. both have been staunch labour supporters for years.just not had the money to join.
This is not going to end well. The whole idea was badly thought out and predicated on the assumption that the Leadership candidates would all be Blairite clones so it hardly mattered which of them was selected.
The PLP has now lost control of the contest, and it is likely that there will be an unholy row whoever is selected. The best result (as far as I am concerned) is that the election is rerun, under completely different rules, and Jeremy Corbyn is elected AGAIN and to everyone’s surprise it turns out that the people why say there is no such thing as bad publicity are right, and all the negative smears, sneers and ridicule of his dress sense have just endeared him to the great British public.
I cannot understand the animosity being spouted from within the Labour Party towards JC, particularly from the Bliarites who see their own Toryism being exposed for all to see.
Yes, you can, they supported all of this, even during the Election:
Low wages for us; (yet they voted 10% raises for themselves)
Austerity (only for the poor)
Taking any crap the EC/EU (better known as the Franco/German never had it so good pact) and that crooks haven (LAST TWO ceo’s (LaGarde is current in despite of her ropey past, have both felt the hands of the Law (but only –French LAW) around their criminal necks.
Low, low wages, slicing and Dicing Benefits.
Mass Immigration, to keep low wages (slave Labour—the only thing Labour about them;
And yet, y’all allow Tory lite Harman to lead the party; even if its only pro tem. Of course they are going to split the party as Owen and Woy Jenkins with Shirly Temple Black and nonentity Rogers did…..
The SDP began life as the Council for Social Democracy on 25 January 1981, and was founded as a party on 26 March 1981 by four senior Labour Party ‘moderates’, dubbed the ‘Gang of Four’: Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams, in a statement known as the Limehouse Declaration.[9] At the time of the SDP’s founding, Owen and Rodgers were sitting Labour Members of Parliament (MPs); Jenkins had left Parliament in 1977 to serve as President of the European Commission, while Williams had lost her seat in the 1979 general election.
The four left the Labour Party as a result of policy changes enacted at the January 1981 Wembley conference which committed the party to unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the European Economic Community. They also believed that Labour had become too left-wing, and had been allegedly infiltrated at constituency party level by Trotskyist factions whose views and behaviour they considered to be at odds with the Parliamentary Labour Party and Labour voters….
It seems to me that they were not the only traitors to the Labour Ideal…time to cull the dross again methinks.
I wonder what they will call themselves…suggestions welcomed.
Whoa there! You’ve made a few assumptions that you can’t support. The Conservative Party is the one that takes “any crap the EC/EU” throws at us.
Harriet Harman was voted in as deputy Labour leader many years ago when nobody realised she would be the liability she has become. There is no reason to believe the party will split; if it does, it will be the responsibility of the breakaways, and nobody else’s.
I do agree that the party needs to get rid of a few high profile traitors to Labour ideals, but that shouldn’t be a split – they should be deselected and asked to resign, to make way for people who support Labour policies.
So Solly:
The CRooks Haven I refer to above is the iNTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND, TOTTALLY controlled by the US Fed…Private Bank.
My US friend wrote:
“Look, if any job is going to take up someone’s life, it deserves a living wage. If a job exists and you have to hire someone to do it, they deserve a living wage. End of story. There’s a lot of talk going around my workplace along the lines of, “These guys with no education and no skills think they deserve as much as us? @!$%# those guys.” And elsewhere on FB: “I’m a licensed electrician, I make $13/hr, @!$%# these burger flippers.”
And that’s exactly what the bosses want! They want us fighting over who has the bigger pile of crumbs so we don’t realize they made off with almost the whole damn cake. Why are you angry about fast food workers making two bucks more an hour when your CEO makes four hundred TIMES what you do? It’s in the bosses’ interests to keep your anger directed downward, at the poor people who are just trying to get by, like you, rather than at the rich @!$%#s who consume almost everything we produce and give next to nothing for it.
My company, as they’re so fond of telling us in boosterist emails, cleared 1.3 billion dollars last year. They expect guys supporting families on 26-27k/year to applaud that. And that’s to say nothing of the techs and janitors and cashiers and bed pushers who make even less than us, but are as absolutely crucial to making a hospital work as the @!$%#ing CEO or the neurosurgeons. Can they pay us more? Absolutely. But why would they?
No one’s making them”
Her bias towards him is simple: He is Labour, she is not, he is the real heart of Labour, she has a Tory heart, like many of them there, how dare she and the others like her try to derail support for Corbyn just because he’s not the one that they want, aw boo hoo hoo, he is popular Harriet because he IS the Labour party whereas you’re not you tory bitch so shut your whining like the rest of those other tory tossers like you, get the hell out of the party and leave the road clear for Corbyn, TRUE Labour!