If you ever wondered what Hilary Benn's father would have said about the Labour coup...

So today we learned that, in a display of utter contempt towards both their own party and the democratic process in general, the Labour plotters will attempt to overthrow their elected leader without even giving party members any say at all on whether he should stay or go.  The ultimate 'fix', you might say.  I find it particularly sad that intelligent people like Keiran Pedley are so blinded by their (incorrect) analysis of where Labour's best interests lie that they are acting as enthusiastic cheerleaders for the death of democracy within the party.  Pedley has gone so far as to perversely claim that Labour's system is "broken" because it doesn't allow MP plotters enough of an opportunity to overrule the members!

A couple of nights ago, I happened to stumble across some clips from the mid-90s BBC series Labour : The Wilderness Years, which contains wonderful archive footage of Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Denis Healey, and a number of others.  At one point, Benn recalls the bizarre method used by a trade union baron to try to dissuade him from triggering a democratic election for the deputy leadership in 1981.  (Healey was the incumbent, but had been elected by no-one.)  When he asked for a cup of tea, it was brought to him in a custom-designed mug featuring the words : "Don't Do It, Tony.  Elections Can Be A Poisoned Chalice, Tony."  He kept the mug, but still stood for election.

Benn's reflections on that incident seem eerily appropriate, today of all days...

"It did indicate the very strong tradition of 'fixing'.  Everything's always 'fixed' in the Labour party.  Don't discuss it, 'fix' it.  And I think that's one of the things that's wrong.  The denial of people's right to participate is something that really characterised the Right of the Labour party."

Kinnock's rage against democracy : the abridged version

I met this guy in Wales who said Jeremy was weird. And let me tell you, comrades, a landslide 60% majority in a one member, one vote election is AS NOTHING compared to one random bloke in Wales who thinks our leader is weird.

It's been said that Jeremy won last year with the "biggest majority ever", but in fact I defeated Tony Benn in 1988 by 89% to 11%. OK, you and I know that's not directly comparable, because that was a challenge to an incumbent leader rather than an open contest like the one Jeremy won, but let's pretend it's directly comparable because I'm on a roll here. One thing about winning by a larger majority than Jeremy managed is that I outrank him for the rest of time, and he doesn't get to demand loyalty and unity ten months after his victory in the way that I did.

You know what? There were constituency parties which voted for Tony Benn in the deputy leadership election in 1981 but which then voted for me by 82% to 18% in 1988. They changed their minds, and they were right to do so. They then changed their minds back again and voted for Jeremy in 2015. They were wrong to do that. Let me explain to you how this works - when the members get it right, we applaud their decision, and when they get it wrong, we overrule them. This is a democratic party.

Actually, the leader used to be chosen by the parliamentary party alone. We changed that system to give members and trade unionists a say. We were incredibly generous. But unfortunately the members and trade unionists abused our generosity by voting the wrong way.  So I'm afraid Jeremy can't continue without the support of the parliamentary party, because he wouldn't have been able to do that before we changed the rules. What the rules were in 1976 is obviously far more important than what the rules are now. This is a democratic party.

One hundred years ago, our party's founding fathers used the word "parliamentary" in a pamphlet. What they really meant by that was "MPs should set aside the party rules and depose their democratically elected leader if they ever encounter a random bloke in Wales who thinks he's a bit weird".

We're not leaving this party - this party belongs to US, not the bloody members.

We're alright! We're alright! We're alright!

Hey, we'd better get some plotting done here...

Labour coup attempt : have we just seen the most ludicrous misrepresentation of an opinion poll in history?

There's a new YouGov poll of Labour members which contains relatively good news for Jeremy Corbyn, even if it suggests he's no longer as wildly popular as he was last summer.  It shows that he has a healthy lead in any head-to-head leadership contest against Angela Eagle, Tom Watson or Dan Jarvis.  Perhaps surprisingly, Eagle does best of the three, but still loses by 50% to 40% - and remember that's only among full party members.  Registered supporters also have an equal say in the election, and they're probably even more likely to vote for Corbyn.

By a narrow majority (51% to 44%), members say that Corbyn should not resign.  That's only a qualified endorsement, because roughly one-fifth of the people who say he should stay also think he should step down at some point before the next general election.  But words have meanings, and the simple fact is that a majority of members don't want him to resign now - which is exactly what the coup plotters are demanding he must do.

So you might think it would take a special kind of talent to present this poll as somehow being a disaster for Corbyn, but our old friend Mike "can't be arsed" Smithson is up to the task.  Just as Lucy Powell did on Twitter last night, Smithson cynically ignores the 10% of the sample who want Corbyn to remain in post on a time-limited basis, and claims that there is a 44% to 41% plurality who want him to resign now.  There isn't.  There just isn't.  To repeat : members oppose his resignation by 51% to 44%.  

If Corbyn turns out to be "doomed" as Smithson risibly claims, it'll only be because he's fallen for a gigantic con-trick which Smithson has now made himself an active part of.  As this poll unambiguously shows, it's unlikely the Westminster/Bedford elite will be able to displace Corbyn by democratic means, so their only hope is to use psychological techniques to convince him that his very healthy position somehow looks "increasingly untenable" (never forget the "increasingly", folks).  If his inner circle can help him keep a proper sense of perspective and he successfully stands for re-election, where do the conspirators go from there?  They can't pull this stunt every year, so they'd either have to unite behind him or leave the party.  Either way, Corbyn would have established complete authority over whatever remains of official Labour.  It really all depends on whether he can hold his nerve - and I don't know the answer to that.

How might an SNP-Labour pact work in advance of the next UK general election?

The furious reaction of Dunc "don't call me Dunc" Hothersall is probably sufficient to tell you that Keiran Pedley may be on to something in suggesting that, because Labour's only hope of regaining power at UK level depends on a deal with the SNP, it would be better to conclude that deal in advance of a general election and then sell it to the English people.  Nothing's inevitable, of course, as the bogus claims of "absolute certainty" about the result of this month's Holyrood election proves.  I can just about imagine a scenario in which Labour might return to being competitive in Scotland by 2020 - it would depend on the constitutional issue fading from people's minds, and on Jeremy Corbyn being replaced by a charismatic leader who looks set to sweep the hated Tories from office.  In those circumstances, the Scottish electorate's priorities might change.  But the overwhelming likelihood is that one of three things will happen -

1) Corbyn will remain leader.

2) Corbyn will be replaced by someone of like mind, such as John McDonnell (who admittedly is more charismatic, but is still regarded as unelectable in England).

3) Corbyn will be replaced by a bland, uninspiring identikit centrist politician in the mould of Ed Miliband or Andy Burnham.

If that's the case, Pedley is surely right in saying that the game's a bogey for Labour in Scotland.  But what intrigues me - and what Pedley doesn't address - is the electoral consequences of any deal.  If we're talking about a formal pre-election Labour-SNP pact to keep the Tories out, how could the two parties justify putting up candidates against each other?  Labour in particular would find it very difficult to pitch for votes in seats that are already held by the SNP - which is virtually every seat in Scotland.  Logic would therefore seem to dictate that they should practically sit out the election north of the border.

Ironically, that would probably benefit only the Tories.  The former Labour heartlands are highly likely to vote SNP anyway, and the absence of Labour candidates would simply lead to bigger majorities in seats that were never in doubt.  But in heavily No-voting areas like the Borders and the rural north-east, the SNP could arguably do with Labour opposition to help split the unionist vote and keep the Tories out.

If an anti-Tory pact isn't going to prove counterproductive, the details are going to need some careful thought.

Genuine question for Dan Hodges : if Jeremy Corbyn has already killed the Labour party four times, how can it possibly die again?

Merciful Dan Hodges has at last given Jeremy Corbyn some respite.  Just for once, it's Hodges' own fellow travellers in the PLP who are responsible for "killing" the Labour party, because (you've guessed it) they're not doing enough to get rid of Corbyn.  However, regular readers of Hodges' column may be a tad puzzled as to exactly how, in practical terms, it's even possible for these "spineless" parliamentarians to be killing the Labour party - an organisation which has apparently already been put to death by Corbyn on no fewer than four separate occasions since August.

Dan Hodges, 31st August : "Labour has ceased to be a real political party...we’ve now reached the point where it isn’t really possible to call Labour a political party at all."

Dan Hodges, 12th September : "The day the Labour party died. The Labour Party as we know it – and as some people once loved it – died today. Each and every one of us will be touched by its passing."

Dan Hodges, 5th October : "The Labour movement is dead."

Dan Hodges, 25th November : "The Labour party has ceased to exist."

Hmmm. I think we can only conclude that a key part of the cruel Corbyn/McDonnell masterplan is to keep bringing the Labour party back to life every few weeks, just so they can kill it all over again. Will this non-singing, non-bowing, Albanian-quoting, party-going, peace-loving Marxist madness never stop?

* * *

Meanwhile, Hodges' even more unhinged Blairite brother John "the Gardener" McTernan has excelled himself with possibly the most hypocritical paragraph that has ever been written in the history of the English language. Indeed, if McTernan's name hadn't been at the top of the article, I might have assumed it could only have been written by the Professor of Hypocrisy at Hypocrite University.

"This strategy of ridiculousness – so ridiculous, to adopt the immortal words of Blackadder, it could only be thought up by the Professor of Ridiculousness at Ridiculous University – has as its current emblem the proposal to make Ken Livingstone a peer of the realm. Pause for a minute to savour the delicious irony – and total stupidity – of that concept. The "new politics" is about making appointments, rather than electing parliamentarians and then making them Shadow Cabinet members? New precisely when? The mid-eighteenth century?"

Tell me, John - in which parallel universe did the Labour Prime Ministers you worked for appoint only elected politicians to the government? Is it a figment of my imagination that, for example, Gordon Brown appointed the ultra-right-wing Digby Jones of the CBI (who wasn't even a member of the Labour party, let alone the House of Commons) as Trade Minister, and then immediately made him a Baron so he could continue in the job?

Corbyn's top priority for internal reform should be changing the nominations system for Labour leadership elections

Some of Stephen Bush's political predictions this year have proved uncannily accurate (admittedly he didn't call the general election correctly but was much closer than most), so we should probably take heed of his claim that Corbynistas are increasingly confident of being able to remain in control of the Labour party for the next decade, and that anti-Corbynistas are increasingly despondent about their chances of averting that fate.  If that's true, the first thought that occurs to me is that it makes an SDP-style split highly likely at some point between now and 2020.  The only reason that Blairites are still rubbishing the idea of a breakaway party is that they're still trying desperately to convince themselves that Corbyn is just a passing nightmare.  To use a Daisley-esque analogy, it's a bit like the Arab reaction immediately after the Six Day War - it's initially hard to believe that something that happened so quickly can possibly have such lasting consequences.  But it only took Mrs Thatcher a couple of weeks to seize control of the Conservative party from Edward Heath, and nothing was ever the same again.  The Tory "wets" eventually accepted that harsh reality, and if the Labour right start to do the same now, it's hard to see how they will reach any other logical conclusion than that their future lies in a different party.  It might take a few years to emotionally reconcile themselves to that logic, however.

The second thought that occurs to me is that Bush's belief that Corbynism is safe depends entirely on Corbyn himself not voluntarily standing down.  He'll be almost 71 by the time of the next general election, so it's hardly inconceivable that a health or stamina issue might crop up.  If he does decide to step aside for any reason, it's far from certain that whoever he anoints as his preferred successor will even get onto the ballot paper in the subsequent leadership election, because he or she would require nominations from 15% of Labour MPs, who won't feel under the same obligation to 'play fair' that they might do if it was a question of renominating Corbyn himself.  So I would have thought the left's most urgent internal reform priority should be to give themselves an insurance policy by changing the nomination system.  Perhaps the most elegant solution would be to allow nominations from constituency parties to be taken into account.

*  *  *

You might be interested in Alasdair Soussi's article about the Scotland Bill on the Al Jazeera website, which includes quotes from myself, James Mitchell, Paul Cairney, and (brace yourselves) Duncan Hothersall.  You can read it HERE.

To survive as leader, all Corbyn has to do is decide to survive

You know, it's on days like this that Mike "can't be arsed" Smithson utterly baffles me.  The title of his post on Stormfront Lite this morning was "You can get 11/8 on Corbyn being leader at general election. Why I’m not tempted."  For 11/8 to be a value bet, you merely have to think there is a better than 42% chance of Corbyn still being leader in May 2020.  So I was waiting with bated breath to hear why Smithson thinks the likelihood of that happening is in fact 42% or lower - but he didn't say anything at all. (Maybe he couldn't be arsed?)  The post simply consisted of four reposted tweets, two of which clearly support the idea that Corbyn is NOT likely to be deposed.  One is a link to a Stephen Bush article with the title "A new poll shows Jeremy Corbyn is going nowhere", and the other shows that Labour members questioned by YouGov think by a margin of 54% to 33% that it is more important for a party to put forward policies it really believes in than to make compromises that would allow it to win an election.

Bush is particularly worth listening to on this topic. He hasn't been right about absolutely everything this year, but he made a very confident call about the Labour leadership contest that proved to be spot-on, and he was much closer to being right about the general election than most people. There are two major question marks in my mind over whether Corbyn can cling on, and Bush deals with one of them very helpfully. He links to a post by a barrister offering a legal opinion on whether Corbyn would require to be nominated by 20% of the PLP to simply make the ballot paper if he is challenged for the leadership. Although it's conceded there is some ambiguity in the relevant part of the Labour rule-book, the answer is basically no. If that's correct, it removes any realistic chance of Corbyn being directly removed against his will, because any challenger would have to defeat him in a members' and supporters' ballot, and the latest polling evidence suggests that would be nigh-on impossible.

That still leaves the other question mark in my mind, though, which is to do with Corbyn's own commitment to the job. Would he, as Damian McBride implied recently, resign voluntarily at the first sign of a push against him? The fact that he never seemed to have any personal ambition to be leader or Prime Minister doesn't inspire huge confidence that he has the stomach to fight for his position. But the counter-argument is that he has shown plenty of ambition for his own wing of the party. He knows that what happened in September was a historic achievement for the left, and that it could be totally squandered if he walks away. For all the talk about him paving the way for a left-wing succession before the general election, he surely knows that it doesn't work like that. As soon as there is a vacancy, anything could happen. Even if the new leader was vaguely left-ish, who is to say it wouldn't be somebody from the soft left (such as Lisa Nandy) who would then "do a Kinnock"?

To survive as leader, all Corbyn really has to do is decide to survive. And if he's being rational (and receiving rational advice), that's the decision he'll take.

* * *

The SNP's motion calling for Trident not to be renewed was voted down in the House of Commons today by 330 votes to 64. There are 60 MPs from the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens, so assuming there was a high turnout among those three parties, the vast majority of Labour MPs -including Jeremy Corbyn himself - must have abstained on the question of whether Britain should retain its nuclear weapons. Surely Corbyn's position as the vice-president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is now untenable?

From a strategic point of view, who should we want to win the Oldham West and Royton by-election?

Hopefully my radar isn't faulty on too many occasions, but it's probably fair to say my headline one year ago today of 'Is Rochester and Strood the most important by-election since Darlington 1983?' looks a tad silly in retrospect. I thought that a UKIP victory might produce a bandwagon effect leading to more defections, and ultimately to a telling breakthrough for Farage at the general election, but...well, it didn't. The outcome wasn't unexpected, and thus didn't produce any kind of shock factor - in fact the media reaction was extraordinarily muted.

But now that Jeremy Corbyn is Labour leader, we've moved into territory where we might expect to encounter a genuine Darlington-style contest sooner or later. One of the reasons that famous by-election 32 years ago was so crucial is that if Labour had lost to the SDP, as they were initially expected to do, Michael Foot's position as leader might have looked untenable and he might have been replaced by Denis Healey in time for the general election a few weeks later - in much the same way that Bob Hawke had just replaced Bill Hayden as Australian Labor leader after defeat in the Flinders by-election. The 1983 general election was probably unwinnable for Labour under any leader, but it seems plausible that Healey might have saved a good few dozen seats, perhaps paving the way for a return to power several years earlier than 1997, and under a much less divisive leader than Tony Blair. So Darlington may be a classic example of 'a good election to lose' - and unfortunately for Labour, that was the election they actually won in 1983.

For anyone who thinks Labour's decline into irrelevance across the UK serves the best interests of the pro-independence movement, it's therefore hard to judge what would be a good result in Oldham West and Royton, where UKIP are rumoured to be running Labour close. I'll say straight away that this isn't Corbyn's Darlington - he would survive a defeat, but such an early electoral wounding would clearly be a landmark moment that would further darken the mood within the PLP. From a strategic point of view, what we don't want to see is Corbyn eventually being replaced with a charismatic leader who can transcend the divisions within the party (I'm not really sure if such a person exists, but one or two names have been mentioned as possibilities). So if you think a UKIP win on 3rd December has the potential to help set in train a sequence of events leading to that outcome, it might just be better if Labour cling on.

There's also a more immediate arithmetical reason why the SNP might prefer a Labour victory. We've already seen one crucial vote in this parliament where the SNP, the DUP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens lined up together in an attempt to defeat the government - but Douglas Carswell of UKIP went into the Tory lobby. So one more UKIP seat could make it harder for the SNP to hold the balance of power when there is a modest Tory rebellion. (Having said that, if Labour carry on abstaining as often as they have, that'll largely be an academic point.)

Why does the new Labour leader think Scotland is a lesser nation than Ireland?

A second quick note of the day, this time to let you know I have a new article at the International Business Times, about Jeremy Corbyn's double-standard on the national questions in Scotland and Ireland.  You can read it HERE.