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The narrow Blairite base of Liz Kendall

Labour nominees

Very interesting chart from Jonathan Jones (@JJ_159), plotting MPs votes in the 2010 leadership election against their nomination behaviour in 2015.

Note that Liz Kendall has very few nominations from outside the camp of MPs who voted for David Miliband, suggesting that she would be a very divisive leader.

The broad spread of nominations for Corbyn perhaps reflects those like Sadiq Khan who will not vote for him, but wanted him on the ballot paper.

However, it is bad news for Andy Burnham that his pitch to be the unifying candidate seems to be shared equally with Yvette Cooper.

This post first appeared at Socialist Unity

9 Comments

  1. John P Reid says:

    Gavin Shikar, lord Glasman of blue labour, Stephen Timms, Gloria de Piero,who all backed Ed miliband last time are backing Liz
    Maybe the word divisive could be replaced with the word winning.

  2. Andy Newman says:

    Maybe the word divisive could be replaced with the word winning.

    She won’t win, and if she did win, we would have no chance in a general election.

    1. John P Reid says:

      We would have no chance in a general election, that’s why she’s the only on the Tories are scared of,
      But coming from serial election winner Newman….

  3. Sue says:

    Corbyn will win. He is the only candidate offering any sort of hope. The game is up for the 1%! There are too many people now suffering badly and too many have waited for far too long for crumbs from the table. It really is time for change and I do feel that this leadership election will act as a catalyst for that change.

    1. J.P. Craig-Weston says:

      Hope springs eternal and if only it were really that simple, nonetheless I decline to denigrate you obvious enthusiasm and I even hope that you’re proved right.

      My own view of the current state of the British Labor party, post Blair, is that it has fundamentally and repeatedly betrayed, (and in so many different ways and on so many different levels,) the trust of millions of people who would otherwise previously have voted for it almost without thought, (but particularly so give how utterly vile this generation of conservatives are,) but somehow we didn’t.

      The reason being that it isn’t us who have, “deserted the Labor party,” (post Blair and sans Socialism,) as someone here put it recently: it’s the Labor party that has deserted us.

      So what’s the answer?

      Certainly not yet more of the same under Liz Kendell or the equally unsavory Andy Burnham or any of their ilk and I doubt that Jeremy Corbyn really has ghost of a chance, nonetheless his nomination has posed some interesting question’s and discomforted, challenged and frayed the increasingly precarious Blair consensus.

      I’m sorry but as far as I’m concerned Cooper and her equally wretched husband, like so many other as well; should both of them, have properly faced criminal prosecution for their blatant and repeated expenses fiddles, it’s really no more complicated than that.

      1. Sue says:

        sometimes it just takes a small spark to ignite a fire and I think that is what will happen now that Corbyn is on the ballot. The hunger is there to oppose this awful govt and their austerity agenda. Up until now all we’ve had are career politicians. Jeremy is a game changer.

        1. J.P. Craig-Weston says:

          Yes I agree, in fact Niccoli Machiavelli of all people one put it thus, (and his is one of my all time favorite quotations:

          “A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.”

          And it’s certainly too easy to carp endlessly about what don’t like like, pretty much everything, about the Labor party post Blair but it was ever thus.

          “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”

          ― Socrates

          This was written about 400 BC and sounds just a familiar to us today as it did back then.

          Bloody kid today eh?

          So too with politic and politicians.

          In my view What we as a country and as a society now desperately need and what is not forthcoming is a positive and inclusive way forward and out of the current impasse in British politics that Blair created.

          He did this by exploiting the completely amoral, apolitical and entirely self serving greed of a narrow unrepresentative and often broadly criminal group of low life and spivs now styling them selves as an elite class. A class which includes too many of our grubby MPs and others associated, (loosely or far more closely,) with them whose grasp on what Blair liked to call, “the levers of power,” and whose malign influences have since become firmly entrenched

          We all know our political system is rotten to core; the real question is how do we fix it?

          As someone, (I can’t remember who,) put this a while ago, “The middle classes lost their grip for a long time, but they’ve got it back again now and its going to be a very long time before they let go again.”

          Personally I regard that as a council of complete and utter despair, particularly for all the victims, and victims is increasingly the right term, for the victims of those policies; the disabled, the unemployed and those working for appalling and increasingly abusive employers, the old and the vulnerable, the sick, that were first introduced and which had their antecedents under the Blair administration.

          But how do we fix it?

          1. James Martin says:

            Hasn’t Wikipedia told you how to fix it then you moron? Come to that why don’t you stick to trying to fix things (or wind people up) in your own country and leave the Labour Party (with a U remember) to those of us who actually live here.

          2. J.P. Craig-Weston says:

            RE: James Martin

            What can I say?

            “Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.”
            ― Socrates

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