Whatever we might think of the new Labour government’s leadership, I think this shows why we need a successful few years. Perhaps I’m being paranoid but if the country is disappointed with Labour I don’t want them to resort to electing an even more right wing version of the Tories further down the line.
This is what worries me. While the Tory party are manoeuvring to stop Braverman getting nominated the actual membership is further right of them and if the rest of the candidates are more moderate Tories, she could win it. She’s the only potential candidate who has talked about a merger with Reform, so if the members see this as a fix for their troubles then they’ll go for it and she’ll see it as a mandate to bring Farage in, presumably into some high ranking role.
As I’ve said before, I’d bet decent money that someone (possibly Tufton Street adjacent) did polling that demonstrated the steps needed to get Farage into the top job are all in place, leading to his U-turn.
The steps would be:
6 weeks ago, even step 1 seemed unlikely and yet here we are talking about step 5.
Now Farage is odious and has made some pretty concerning comments, so he may be electoral poison that could just be what Labour needs to secure the second term they need to start seeing real changes (especially if we look at the efforts in France to stop the Nazis becoming the largest party). However, these are Tory party members who thought Liz Truss and her Tufton Street-written manifesto was a winner and an electorate who went all in on BoJo, costing us billions of pounds and thousands of lives. I am unsure I want to roll those dice.
FWIW point 5 doesnt work. The current torry leadership selection method is that the MPs keep narrowing down the selection untill they get to 2 candidates then the members choose between those two. So if the MPs dont want her the members wont get a chance to vote for her.
Didn’t they already break those rules to put Sunak into power?
No, the MPs didnt put anyone else forwards to the membership. So instead of going something like 8-5-3-2 candidates by mp vote then those two going to the members it just started at 1 with no other candidate gettign enough support, so there was no need for a membership vote.
The Tory party is generally significantly less democratic than the other major parties, as is fitting for the politcial wing of wealth.
We need Labour to put aside its refusal to work with other parties in the same way the French coalition did.
LibDems and Greens got more votes than Reform, and in 2015, 2017 and 2019 Labour and LibDems had a combined popular vote greater than the Tories although how that would shake out with FPTP is debatable.
People might consider LibDem to be further right than Labour, but their policies have always been pro-LGBT+, pro-green policies, pro-EU, pro-electorial reform, essentially the opposite of Reform.