I don't think anything will be 'over' after the coronation barring a hearty vote of renewed confidence.

It did initially seem a long time to pick a new leader given a system that forced the number of candidates to two, but with all those committee meetings and court cases to fit in I can see why. Still it might be a good idea to streamline the process a bit just in case there's a new leadership election every year until 2020 or something.

Perhaps instead of half-thinking, you would think fully and say something comprehensible.

Not sure that's true of the EU. Unions are still strong and respectable in France and Germany (which basically run the EU) and Thatcher's Hayek-Friedman stuff was seen by Europeans as American and regrettable.

No, miners were underpaid at the time, for what they did. But there were huge inflationary pressures and the government predicted, rightly, that the miners' exceptional percentage claim would be taken as 'the going rate' by everyone else, which is what did in fact happen once the incoming Wilson government agreed the claim.

That was an historical thing to do with unionised labour and the whole rather 'uniformed' conception of society created by the Russian revolution and the world wars. Since then, the changes we glibly call 'globalisation' (which, like 'the internet', basically means 'everything') have undercut all that -- above all in Britain where the unions disastrously overplayed their hand in the winter of '78-9.


The CIA coup in Chile was just American power politics of the time. Same old nonsense was still going strong in the Eighties when the US backed the ousted Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, simply to annoy the Vietnamese-sponsored government of Cambodia, and once Reagan got found out on the Iran-Contra thing and Congress made life difficult for him he just got Thatcher to send the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge instead.

Even so, Britain is Britain, and once Simon O'Dwyer-Russell exposed this unbelievable support for Pol Pot in Jane's Defence Weekly and the Sunday Telegraph, and John Pilger took it up, the SAS were abruptly withdrawn.

Alastair Campbell seriously dislikes grammars, yes. They're good schools, of course, they always are, because of the creaming-off factor, but that factor damages every other school in the area, so... Anyway, Mrs May is playing a Back To The Future game which is a bit silly (and which even Thatcher would have recognised as a bit silly -- probably).

There is of course unevenness in the way Globalisation/neo-liberalism is spread. To illustrate, the experience of a European worker having their take home pay reduced while working more hours is not going to the same as an unemployed African struggling to obtain water for his dying child thanks to IMF enforced privatisation of water supplies...

Yes there is a contradiction when Germany expects Greece to force austerity on its citizens and de-regulate its economy for German firms to exploit while insisting on protectionism for the German economy and failing to crush its own unions. But this doesn't mean the EU isn't neo-liberal. Evidence shows the opposite to be true eg. EU actions against countries like Spain and Greece.

Yes, I agree that the miners were the example for others to follow, that's why socialists support strikes, not only for the betterment of one group of workers but to showcase the general idea for others to follow suit. But generally I think you downplay too much the impact of the economic downturn in the mid 70s and the impact on industrial relations.

Didn't know the SAS were involved with training the Kmher Rouge, that is something worth reading into.

Corbyn's ex wife has admitted on radio today that despite voting for him in the last leadership election she's voting for Smith this time. The main issue seems to be that he doesn't have the qualities required for leadership. She admitted he's had no experience of it, either in unions, industry or the 3rd sector and doesn't have the skills. Also cites his lack of flexibility and his lack of a long term vision.

Yeah cos the the thing that stands out about Smith is his leadership experience.

I'd say anything would be an improvement on Corbyn's shambolic 'leadership'. I don't even think I've heard any of his supporters talk in positive terms about it when it comes up for discussion. They might rave about his political views but no one raves about his leadership qualities and it's not really surprising why that's the case. Some of the things you read from Labour MP's about their experiences under him are pretty incredible.

All leaders learn on the job. It's a very strange job that you can't prepare for. Those who generally agree with his direction are far better served by supporting him rather than trying to make his job impossible.

Smith saying he agrees with just about everything but refusing to serve in the cabinet is pretty poor stuff. they throw in JC's face that he rebelled a lot but he rebelled over things he profoundly disagreed about.

Some learn quicker than others. I think that was part of the point his ex was making, he doesn't seem to be learning. And the issue is that some who have tried to support him have seen his shambolic leadership up close and haven't had any support from him. It's a two way street.

It's not a two way street. He (assuming he wins) is in fact the leader with a clear mandate. They have no good reason not to support him except where they disagree with the policies.

I'm sure we disagree about his leadership style as I'm not a fan of the 'good' leadership many seem to want but I also think he hasn't had anywhere near enough time to tell how he will develop in the job.

The problem is far more fundemental than who is leader - the MPs are totally out of step with the party membership. One way or another that is going to have to be resolved.

It's surprisingly little known, as one of the most inexcusable actions by any post-war British government, but Pilger has written about it here and there, for instance:-

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...ussell&f=false

Simon O'Dwyer-Russell sadly died of a heart attack, at the age of just 29, not long after his scoop. There doesn't seem to be anything sinister about that, as he was suffering from congenital heart disease and had just had a bypass operation. But Pilger did find that Telegraph executives were inclined to claim that their own defence correspondent was unreliable (as if they'd been spoken to on the matter).

One of the SAS personnel at the time of the abrupt withdrawal in 1989 was Colin Armstrong, later a survivor of Patrol B20 in Iraq in 1991 (that is, 'Bravo Two Zero'), now known as the novelist 'Chris Ryan', who has been rather startlingly open about the subject -- oddly enough in an interview for the Daily Mail's money page, where he mentioned that, once the SAS were withdrawn, he had to take out a loan to repay the £10,000 the army had paid him for food and accommodation on the Thai-Cambodia border because he'd spent it on doing up his house. Being former SAS, he knows what's secret and what's not, and once something has been mentioned in the press it's not secret. Most people still don't know it was ever mentioned in the press, but it was.

It's not a two way street? Seriously? A leader should be supporting those below him, to say otherwise is ridiculous. We keep hearing the same story from shadow cabinet members about being undermined by Corbyn and the fact he just goes off and does things without any sort of communication or discussion with them. As an example, here's an extract of Lillian Greenwood's speach to party members after she resigned as Shadow Transport Secretary:

'...So I'd like you to imagine how I felt when, even though I was trying my hardest, it became impossible for me to do my job in the Shadow Cabinet.

Some people have asked me for examples of why that was the case, and I wanted to explain tonight what’s happened over the last nine months as fully as I can.

Rail fares go up once a year on 2 January.It's the perfect opportunity to show that this Tory Government aren't on the side of working people.
Commuters who've seen their season tickets go up by more than 26% since 2010. Some of whom are paying more for their rail fares than their mortgage. Four, five even six thousand pounds a year. People who live in Essex and on the Kent coast, in suburbs and small towns, in marginal seats. Many of them are not Labour voters, but they are the people we need to win over. It is a huge date in the political calendar every year.

We had the opportunity not just to criticise the Government, but to show we had a real Labour alternative. Our flagship policy. One that unites our party.
My staff spent weeks preparing briefing materials for MPs and constituency parties across the country. Trawling through mountains of rail fare information to provide examples of the season tickets that had risen the most and that cost the most. Examples for every MP and CLP.
Like Nottingham to Derby – where the cost of an annual season ticket has risen by almost 30% since 2010.
And over the Christmas period we were listening in to Network Rail conference calls, monitoring the engineering works. Several calls every day including Christmas Day and Boxing Day, even New Years Eve.



On 4 January – a cold dark Monday morning – I was at Kings Cross at 7am doing Radio 5 and BBC TV. Standing with Jeremy and the Rail Union General Secretaries for the media photocall. It was a crucial day in the Party’s media grid. And all across the country local party activists were outside railway stations in the cold and the dark, leafleting commuters with the materials we’d prepared. Armed with the briefings and statistics.

Incredibly, Jeremy launched a Shadow Cabinet reshuffle on the same day.
This was the reshuffle that had been talked about since the Syria vote a month earlier. A vote where I supported Jeremy’s position. The reshuffle that meant all our staff spent Christmas not knowing whether they'd have a job by the New Year.

By mid-afternoon the press were camped outside the Leader's office. They were there for the next 3 days. It knocked all the coverage of the rail fare rise and our public ownership policy off every news channel and every front page. I respect completely Jeremy’s right to reshuffle his top team. But why then? It was unnecessary and it was incompetent. It let me down, it let my staff down but most of all it let down the Labour campaigners and trade union members, people like you, who had given up their time to go out campaigning for us that morning.

Now I’d ask you to imagine how you would you feel if you agreed something with your boss but he then did something completely different. Something that undermined you. Something they hadn't even had the courtesy to tell you about.

HS2 has always been controversial, including in our Party, but it is something that I believe is vital for the future of our country. It has the support of all the rail unions. It has the support of Labour leaders in the great cities like Birmingham and Manchester and Leeds and Nottingham. It is important for jobs and skills in Derby and Doncaster and across the country and it is our official policy to support it, as agreed by the Shadow Cabinet and our National Policy Forum. I’ve been one of HS2’s strongest supporters so I when I took up the job in Jeremy’s Shadow Cabinet I wanted to be absolutely sure we were on the same page. I met his Director of Policy to talk it through. We talked about the most difficult parts of the project, the impact at Euston in London. I'd been working with Councillor Sarah Hayward and her colleagues at Camden for more than 2 years to try and help them get what they wanted for their local residents. It had been very difficult. I'd been to visit several times, meeting residents and businesses and dealing with some hostile media. But we secured real concessions – changes that will make a difference to local residents. It didn’t matter that it was in a nominally safe seat. It was the right thing to do.

Despite our agreed policy, despite Jeremy's Director of Policy and I agreeing our position, without saying anything to me, Jeremy gave a press interview in which he suggested he could drop Labour’s support for HS2 altogether. He told a journalist on a local Camden newspaper that perhaps the HS2 line shouldn’t go to Euston at all but stop at Old Oak Common in West London – but he never discussed any of this with the Shadow Cabinet, or me, beforehand.

I felt totally undermined on a really difficult issue. And when 2 frontbenchers voted against the 3 line whip at 3rd Reading in March he did nothing. Telling one of them “well I've done it enough times myself”. Breaking the principles of collective responsibility and discipline without which effective Parliamentary opposition is not possible.

When I raised my concerns it was simply shrugged off. It undermined me in front of colleagues and made me look weak. It made me feel like I was wasting my time. That my opinion didn't matter. And it made me miserable.

I'd discuss it with my political adviser, a Labour Party member of staff and activist from Nottingham who has also lost his job in all this, and we'd agree to go on because the policy mattered. Because we wanted to keep holding the Government to account. Because we love the Labour Party. This didn't happen once or twice. It happened time and time again.

The EU 4th Rail Package is a bit complex to explain here and now, but it had the potential to make it difficult to implement our new rail policy. I'd been working with MEPs to ensure it was amended or blocked for the last 3 years. We felt we could live with the final draft issued in April but it was a very sensitive issue. ASLEF and the RMT were on the Leave side in the referendum because of their concerns.
So when Jeremy talked about it in a speech, in very Euro-sceptic terms, without giving me any warning let alone discussing it with me, I was concerned and asked to meet him. Our frontbenchers were being challenged on the issue in the media, but there was no common position. I asked and asked. After my staff chasing virtually every day for a month, we got a meeting.

We put together a briefing paper in advance. We drafted some lines to take in any press interviews for us to give to all Labour MPs. We discussed the lines with his Policy staff and made some changes in response to comments. We agreed a final version. We sat down together and discussed what was in the 4th Rail Package, how we were ensuring it didn't stop our policy, how we'd been working with our MEPs and the Socialist Group and we agreed the lines to take. The lines were circulated to all frontbenchers, to all MPs, to ensure they knew what our policy was and how to deal with difficult questions.

But Jeremy went on SkyNews and took a completely different, eurosceptic line. Not what we'd agreed. With the potential to make us look divided. It undermined me, my staff and his staff. I wondered why I was bothering to put in the hard work.

You’ve all heard stories about pro-European speeches being downgraded, events, being cancelled, and Jeremy and his staff privately subscribing to Eurosceptic views. And I felt that I was watching my leader deliberately sabotage the campaign on an issue on which he and I had a personal agreement. How would you feel if your boss undermined your work and when you complained he listened and then did nothing different? How would you feel if you were part of a team and you knew that not only was your boss undermining you but that this was happening to other colleagues?

You can agree or disagree about whether Jeremy was half hearted about the Labour In campaign. You can agree or disagree about whether it's Ok to take 5 days holiday 3 weeks before the most important vote in my lifetime. But I sat at the Regional Count with Glenis Willmott the Leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, my friend, a fellow trade unionist from the East Midlands doing media duty for our Party. And as we left at 5am, defeated and in despair, we finally got sent lines to take from the Leader's office. Acknowledging Kate Hoey and Gisela Stuart for their work in the Leave campaign. Their work in direct opposition to Labour Party policy.
And shortly after we heard Jeremy calling for the immediate triggering of Article 50. Without any discussion with the Shadow Cabinet or the Leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party.

Think about that. The country had just voted to leave the EU after more than 40 years and Jeremy made a major announcement on the Party’s position without waiting to discuss it with the Shadow Cabinet, without even consulting the leader of our MEPs in Europe.

At 6.30am I was interviewed by Radio Nottingham. I was tired and I was gutted and I tried to use the lines I'd been sent, even though they were so inadequate, but when I was asked the question "Is Jeremy the man to lead the Labour Party in these challenging times?" I found it hard to say an enthusiastic yes. Because I didn't believe it. Because I'd worked with him and I'd tried hard but in my mind, it simply wasn't true.
And when I saw that Cameron had resigned, I felt like I was looking into the abyss. Towards a General Election in which dozens of my colleagues would lose their seats. And I already know what that is like and I was in despair. But at that moment I knew that I didn't have to put up with it.
I could leave the Shadow Cabinet and return to the backbenches and focus on Nottingham South.

But I was tired and emotional, so I wasn’t going to do anything hasty.So I talked to some of my closest colleagues. And decided to raise my concerns at Shadow Cabinet on the Monday. I arranged to meet my agent and several CLP officers on the Sunday afternoon to explain what I had decided to do.

But it didn't go as planned.On Sunday morning Ravi woke me and passed me my phone. Hilary Benn, who I'd been with on the campaign bus with in Derby and Peterborough only 3 days earlier, had been sacked. And Heidi Alexander, one of my closest friends in the Shadow Cabinet, one of the best and most talented and loyal colleagues I know, had resigned.

So I rang Brian, my agent, and my adviser, Laurence, to tell them. I wrote my resignation letter and I rang Jeremy to explain. And I texted asking him to call me. And I rang Katy Clark in his office and asked her to ask him to ring me. After an hour or so he did ring me. And we had an amicable discussion and I explained that I has lost confidence in him.

He didn't even ask me why. Or what was wrong , or how he could fix it. Things were, and are, falling apart. Jeremy has always treated me politely, and with kindness. I know that he has strong principles.

I remain proud of our policies on transport, especially rail. And Jeremy is right to set out an alternative to the economics of austerity, to focus on affordable housing, to defending a public NHS and to tackling poverty and inequality. But through my own personal direct experience I know that Jeremy operates in a way that means progress towards these goals is impossible. He is not a team player let alone a team leader.

Jeremy has a new Shadow Cabinet but it’s clear to me that he doesn’t understand collective responsibility and that he can't lead a team, so I'm afraid the same problems will eventually emerge in the new front bench. This is not about policy or ideology, it is about competence'

You have an elected leader with a clear mandate. If you agree with him then try to help as best you can. If you dont then oppose him. Bleating about competence is of no value and at this stage really just means they dont like his style.

Personally I hate the cult of leadership that some want so much. MPs dont need to be told what to say or led like sheep - or maybe they do in which case they need replacing with higher calibre people. Make a name for themselves by campaigning hard for HS2 if that's what they passionately believe in.

With respect though, parroting the mandate line used by Corbyn supporters is just a way of avoiding addressing the issues at hand. I also have an issue with the mandate given the huge influx of new members who would appear to be pro-Corbyn before pro-Labour.

Anyway, here's another one...

When Jeremy Corbyn called me last September and asked me to be his shadow health secretary, my world felt like it had turned upside down.

I had never harboured ambitions to be in the shadow cabinet. I spent my first five years as an MP avoiding the national media because it just added another layer of complexity to an already difficult job. I had never spoken from the dispatch box. And despite having helped run a campaign to protect services at my local hospital, I knew little about the NHS. But when Jeremy phoned and asked me to serve, I said yes.
Jeremy Corbyn's leadership unprofessional and shoddy, says Heidi Alexander

I remember leaving the TV studios in Millbank the following morning after three hours of interviews feeling like I had survived a round with a heavyweight boxer. I was anxious: to do the job right, not to let my party down, not to let myself down. But I also felt excited and liberated. This was a chance for my party to have a proper rethink, a chance to bring together the best ideas from the left with those from the centre.

I hadn’t voted for Jeremy, and weeks before I’d sent an email to my local party members saying why I was voting for Andy Burnham. Yet my instinct told me that accepting the brief was the right thing to do. Make it work. Play a part in providing an effective opposition. Ensure that those in Lewisham who had voted for a Labour government knew their MP was doing her bit, prepared to put the differences of a leadership contest behind her.

I loved the job. Learning about a whole new area of policy; understanding how things in the NHS worked, and thinking about how they could work better; meeting principled, intelligent people – from the NHS, charities, local authorities and thinktanks – from whom I could learn so much; working with the fiercely bright, committed individuals who joined my already brilliant team; standing up in parliament and giving Jeremy Hunt a run for his money.

So when friends and colleagues asked “Are you enjoying it?” why did every response start with: “Well, enjoy is an interesting word...”? I loved being the shadow health secretary. But I hated being part of the shadow cabinet.
Heidi Alexander at the medical centre in Lewisham, where she is MP. ‘I loved learning about a whole new area of policy.’
Heidi Alexander at the medical centre in Lewisham, where she is MP. ‘I loved learning about a whole new area of policy.’

Some of it was the rough and tumble of politics at that level. The leaks that happen after you said something at shadow cabinet. The frustrations of collective responsibility. Not being totally free to say what you think on a sugar tax or on levels of funding for health and social care.

But it was more than that. I hated being a member of Jeremy’s shadow cabinet – because it was entirely dysfunctional.

I tried to not let it affect me. I had enough on my plate trying to hold the Tories to account. I had a great team of shadow ministers, and we worked hard in parliament to ensure that the public knew that when it came to the NHS and social care Labour was on their side. But as time went on, I came to realise that it simply wasn’t good enough.

It wasn’t good enough for the leader to routinely defer to his shadow chancellor when confronted with a difficult decision – a shadow chancellor who on three separate occasions undermined my efforts to agree collective positions on health matters. It wasn’t good enough for the leader to say one thing to me, only for his political secretary to phone a day later and say: “He may have said that, but I know what he really thinks.” It wasn’t good enough for the leader to read his position from a typed up script at shadow cabinet meetings discussing the prospect of military action against Isis in Syria or the EU referendum. And it wasn’t good enough that whenever he appeared on TV, his description of a process, or his analysis of a problem, ended in confusion or despair on the party’s position – article 50, counterterrorism, “7.5 out of 10” on Brexit.

I hated being part of something so inept, so unprofessional, so shoddy. There was no effort to build a team. Good people recruited to his office soon left.

This wasn’t what I had gone into politics to do. It was a joke. My friends and family knew what I really thought, and I couldn’t bear the prospect of saying something different on TV.

The morning I resigned was difficult. I woke to the news that Hilary Benn had been sacked in the middle of the night. There was no way I could stay. I tried calling Jeremy at 7am from my bedroom. I went downstairs to type a letter of resignation on my computer. I tried again to call him and his political secretary but got no answer. So I texted him and told him I had emailed a letter of resignation. I posted it on Twitter at 8.20am.

I wanted to hide but I knew I couldn’t. So, it ended where it had started 10 months earlier: a TV interview and my world turning upside down.
Owen Smith accuses Jeremy Corbyn of having never believed in the EU
Read more

I wasn’t part of a plot. I wasn’t part of a coup. I had tried hard to make it work. A leader who had been willing to engage, support and take difficult decisions, and had been able to build a team, might have

There's no shortage of them. I think Owen Smith is being somewhat disingenuous about how willing he was to give JC a chance. Still there's no point in not fully supporting whoever wins when they largely agree on policy.

It's true JC is not a huge fan of the EU. Much of the left has never been. In hindsight it's bizarre that it wasn't much of an issue in the first leadership race.

Actually I should address this a bit further in addtion to the post I made above. It is VERY clear that the examples given don't 'just mean they don't like his sytle' but that he is incompetent. And re MP's nor needing to be told what to say or led like sheep, of course they don't but they do need to ensure that the party is on message and actually has a position on important matters. You can't have shadow cabinet members saying one thing and then the leader going off and contradicting them, without any consultation whatsoever.

I'm pretty sure they mostly mean that they dont think his style of leadership is correct if they want to win the election and that he doesn't do the message/spin control stuff they are now so used to. We disagree about that on-message thing. It's been very bad for UK politics imo.

But it remains all for the future. If he wins again then nothign they are sayign about him suggests it's better not to support him and see how it developes into the next election. Unless they feel so strongly that they decide to split - if Smith feels so strongly about the EU that he tries to lead or participate in a new pro-EU party then fair enough and I might even support him.

No that's not what they mean. They are pointing out, with very clear examples, why his leadership is shambolic. It's nothing to do with their personal preferences about leadership styles it's the fact he's incompetent and incapable of leadership. I can post more examples if you like...



Many people have asked me for specific examples of my problems are with Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. Here is my experience.

On 14 January 2016, Jeremy announced that he had appointed me as a Shadow Minister for Arts and Culture without my knowledge or consent while I was in the middle of cancer treatment. He then sacked me the next day when he realised he had given away part of someone else's role.

But didn't bother to tell me that either.
"I kept hearing from other colleagues on the front bench just how difficult or impossible it was to get a decision out of him on important policy issues – the very thing Jeremy is supposed to be good on"

By the time I had sought and received confirmation from the Labour Whips office that I was indeed Shadow Arts and Culture Minister, to serve under Shadow Arts and Culture Secretary Maria Eagle MP, my office had been besieged by press and the story was out. I decided to make the best of it and to serve. I worked on his arts policy while I was still having treatment but in Bristol. Bristol West constituents said they were delighted – a good fit for the constituency, and a good decision to ask someone who has an arts background, which I have.

Six weeks later, after being asked every week to do so by Maria Eagle when she met him at Shadow Cabinet (I wasn't a member of the Shadow Cabinet, only the Shadow Secretaries of State sit in that meeting) Jeremy finally phoned me.

I discovered then that he had made a mistake back at the start and having given me part of someone else's role, gave it back the next day. I said that I was not happy about this, as I had spent six weeks working on his arts policy, getting in touch with arts organisations and so on. He invited me to come and have a chat with him the following week.

Contrary to what he frequently says, Jeremy is not easy to "have a chat with". My parliamentary assistant could not get an appointment with him until she went to his office and explained over and over again that I had been promised one.

When my assistant and I met him, I asked how I was supposed to explain the confusion to Bristol West members or constituents. I was faced with the choice of telling the truth that he had made a series of errors, or say I had changed my mind about accepting the role. Either way I would inevitably face a pile of criticism from his supporters. Corbyn supporters had already piled into me for disloyalty when I had had to miss votes for cancer treatment. I had no confidence that he would explain the situation to his supporters, or ask them to trust him that it wasn't my fault. I knew he wouldn't do anything to stop the criticism – I had seen from my own experience that he didn't directly call on his own supporters to follow his slogan of "kinder, gentler, politics".

At this meeting, despite the fact he had had six weeks to come up with some idea for how to deal with this, he had nothing to say. No idea what to do. It took my boss Maria Eagle to explain to him that as he was leader he could reappoint me if that was what he wanted.

I then worked hard for him on his arts policy, loyally didn't go to the press about the above, got stuck in and worked. And yes, I enjoyed the role; it is one of my dream jobs in parliament and I worked hard for Jeremy and the Labour Party. Millions of people work in the arts and culture sectors and they valued being involved in policy-making. So it was never my intention to resign.

However, I kept hearing from other colleagues on the front bench just how difficult or impossible it was to get a decision out of him on important policy issues – the very thing Jeremy is supposed to be good on. I also noticed that the policy making process through the National Policy Forum was being slowed down by lack of decisions from the Corbyn office.

But then he was missing in action during the EU referendum, including going on a week's holiday three weeks before the day. I found that unforgivable. I was doing all I could for the campaign, phone-canvassing to conserve my energy, and kept hearing Labour voters saying "but your leader wants out, doesn't he?" His team didn't send anyone to the EU Campaign meetings in Westminster and his lack of enthusiasm showed.

On the day after the referendum he asked for an early Brexit. My constituents want exactly the opposite and were telling me so in their hundreds, and voted strongly to remain.

That was the tipping point for me. You cannot remain on the front bench while taking an opposing view to the leader on something so important. I therefore had to resign.

The reason I then voted "no confidence" in him as leader is because I have no confidence in him as leader. See above. Plus, I had found out from other front bench women how unwilling and unable Jeremy is to communicate with, listen to or work with anyone outside his narrow group.

We're just going to have to agree to disagree. it all looks to me like them looking for anything possible to attack JC with and it amounts to very little given how many never really supported him. Maybe you think they did really support him but found to their shock he wasn't up to it - if so we're going to have to disagree about that as well.

Decisions on policy issues is a strange point that seems close to a dead giveaway. Opposition parties rarely commit too much this this early in a parliament. The manifesto will get written but by any standards we have a good idea where JC stands on the big stuff.

The EU is the only genuine issue. That's going to overwhelm normal politics for a long time and many heads are likely to roll along the way.

Husker you are either blind or your mouth is full of Alastair Campbell's sac. Peter Mandelson, Campbell, Tony Blair, their corporate think tanks and Progress are behind all of this. Yes some MPs are dumb enough to fall for this game but many are willing conscripts in this war on genuine, ordinary people who have swelled the Labour membership simply because they are sick of being shat on by Governments Labour or Tory.

Owen Smith is a LIAR - he has been exposed supporting welfare cuts while claiming to be more left than JC. 'Mr Normal' white middle class man with wife and 2 kids, beware this man if you are gay, a woman, black or muslim.

Which side are you on?

And the day after Corbyn smashed Theresa May over education policy, Campbell was teaming up with a Tory on Question Time to bash McDonnell - except that was apparently because McDonnell orchestrated abuse of women colleagues. With Corbyn it's because he is a nice guy but can't lead. Labour members don't buy this, on the whole, which is why Corbyn will wipe the floor with Smith.

What happens next is that the majority of MPs crawl back to Corbyn, while a significant minority split with the Lib Dems like they did in the 80s. How this realignment shapes up and who gets power in 2020, or earlier, will depend on the outcome of these battles.

And someone made the fine point - why won't May try to force an early election ASAP while Labour is so low in the polls? Maybe she will, but I suspect they aren't all that sure of their position - ie. they believe Labour can win, hence this smear campaign.

May can't really go for an election until she has some clear line on brexit.

Otherwise she risks get caught between ukip pushing hard for the 'must force brexit' vote and some labour/libdem/etc group pushing for brexit lite (or even a rerun).

Once she has some firm brexit position then all bets are off. An early election (if it's still early) must look very attractive to her.

I didn't think she could push for an early election without the backing of a 2/3 majority of the commons or lost a confidence vote.

Not sure how attractive a proposition that would be to the Labour Party(s?) if they think they'll get trounced and she'd definitely need quite a few of them to get the 2/3.

I suppose they might reckon it would be a chance for Corbyn to get destroyed and so provide a lever to regain control of the party but they'd be in danger of losing a fair few seats as things stand. Self interest would suggest they wouldn't do it.

Labour should snap accept an early election vote

Labour would get destroyed in an early vote. It would probably be best to accept that pain now though.