Our Party Back

Image result for ed miliband and neil kinnock + images

When Ed Miliband snatched the Labour crown from his brother in 2010 with the backing of trade union votes, the former party leader Neil Kinnock famously declared: 

"We've got our party back!"

Five years on and that seems like a hollow claim indeed, as more non-party members are about to that paid-up party members in Labour's 2015 leadership contest.

As I reported on the blog site the other day out of the total of 610,753 people entitled to vote, only 299,755 are individual Labour Party members while 310,998 are either trade union voters (189,703) or registered supporters (121,295) who have each paid £3 to have their say in the contest.

The Times reports that when registration for the vote closed last week, Labour still had 250,000 new voters to vet, which is clearly an impossible task given that the ballot closes on 10 September 2015.

In Scotland, just last week 21,000 people were involved in selecting Labour's new Scottish leader - 15,000 individual party members and 6,000 trade union members.

So, north of the border, the percentage of non-party members voting was 28.6% whereas in the UK contest the figure is 51% with members of the Unite trade union apparently poised to cast 1 in 6 of the total number of UK votes.

The architect of the new system which was designed to reduce rather than increase trade union influence was, of course, Ed Miliband who is apparently enjoying a nice family holiday in Australia while the party he once led descends into chaos.

Funny that because 'chaos' is one of the words I always associate with Neil Kinnock and the speech he made at the 1985 Labour Party conference and rounded on Militant whose broad political outlook is very similar to that of Jeremy Corbyn. 

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