The Nasty Party

Image result for deckchairs + images


Lord Mandelson entered the debate about electing a new Labour leader on the BBC's Andrew Marr show the other day and made a perfectly sensible suggestion about the need for proper scrutiny about who can vote when the big day comes.

Because as things stand trade union members who are not actually Labour Party members may get to cast a vote and, worse still, lots people may get two votes if the are members of a trade union and the Labour Party at the same time.  

Labour's former business secretary told the Andrew Marr show: 

“If we are going to have people declaring that they are Labour supporters in that way, and given a vote, then every single one of those individuals needs to be validated by the party staff and the party headquarters. We cannot open ourselves up to the sort of abuse and inappropriate influence that the trade unions weighed in with in our leadership election in 2010.

“The trade union machines or certain of them, basically Unite and Unison, put Ed Miliband’s photograph on their ballot papers and put his election material in the ballot envelopes. No other candidate got a look in. That is the sort of abuse by trade union machines that we must guard against."

Now Peter Mandelson is simply speaking the truth here if you ask me, because last time around the closely co-ordinated actions of Britain's union bosses effectively overturned the will if individual Labour Party members, the majority of whom voted for David Miliband as leader in preference to his brother Ed. 

The obvious point being that if you can't carry the support of your own party members, then how are you going to win the support of the wider electorate?

But rather that reflecting soberly on this advice the boss of the GMB union Paul Kenny decided to play the man rather than the ball, with the rather nasty comment that Mandelson "needs to go back to his deck chair. The world has moved on."  

Now I don't know what deck chairs have got to do with electing the next Labour leader and if union bosses had any sense they'd stop trying to fix the result for someone they like or approve of and allow Labour Party members decide for themselves.   

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