Word from The Dark Side; Jeremy Corbyn is on the ballot.

The drama at 'The Dark Side', or The Labour Party headquarters as it is known by Jeremy Corbyn's supporters, carried on long into the evening last night.

The meeting of The National Executive ended up being called at 24 hours notice; which is fine if you are an M.P. or if you work for the Labour Party. Not so good if you are a Trades Union member or a lay member who works for a living - it's not so easy to get time off at short notice.

Of course, that was the intention of the Labour bureaucracy appointed by Blair and Mandelson; to prevent Corbyn getting on the ballot for leadership by fixing the vote.

Two trades union reps were on holiday - at least one made it back to London in time.

What fine democrats these people are.

After a six and a half hour meeting the result was a draw.

It started with Corbyn being prevented from voting even though he is a member of the NEC himself.

That didn't work - he's got on the ballot paper.

On the other hand, the Labour right then tried to fix the vote; only those who registered before January get to vote although there is a complicated 2 day window where people can pay an extra £25 to get their supporter membership bumped up to voting status.

There will be a lot of pencil chewing and head scratching over who that helps but, broadly, as Corbyn won 60% of the vote last time and most of those voters are likely to stick with him the odds are in his favour.

Meanwhile, Owen Smith is likely to announce that he is standing for the leadership today.

No, I haven't heard of him either and he should neatly split the anti Corbyn vote.

Thanks Owen.

Meanwhile Angela Eagle who spent the last fortnight demanding that Jeremy Corbyn get the 51 M.P.'s nominations has had to welcome the NEC vote, through tightly gritted teeth.

There's going to be a furious debate over the next three months with a very stark choice between the old politics of the undemocratic, unpopular Labour right against the possibility of a genuinely popular anti austerity party of the left.

Interesting times - I'll have to try and stick around a bit longer.

Neil Harris
Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com

Angela Eagle; a plotter exposed.

We are still waiting with 'bated breath' to find out if Angela Eagle is going to stand against Jeremy Corbyn for leadership of the parliamentary Labour party. She's been threatening to do so on a daily basis for the last 10 days.

I think she.....may do.

If she does, her role in the attempted coup against Corbyn has been well and truly exposed by the Blogosphere.

If you remember Hilary Benn (son of Tony Benn, longstanding friend and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn) phoned him in the early hours of 26th June to tell him he could no longer support him. He was fired and then, on an hourly basis, other members of the shadow cabinet resigned - one by one.

This was an attempt to make it look as though support was slowly and steadily growing; it wasn't.

It was a crude attempt to disguise a coup that had been planned in advance.

One of the first group to resign was Angela Eagle.

Now, thanks to 'Evolve Politics', we know that a friend of Eagle's, Joe McCrea, bought a series of Website domain names like; 'angela4leader.org', 'Angela4leader.com', and 'angela4leader.co.uk' at 6pm on 25th June.

You can check out the story here;

http://evolvepolitics.com/angela-eagles-leadership-website-registered-blairs-pr-man-2-days-ago/

This is the record of when the domain names were purchased;

That was about 8 hours before Benn phoned Corbyn and about a day before Eagle resigned from the shadow cabinet.

McCrea is a PR man for an  NHS Clinical Commissioning group and lives in Derbyshire.

I looked up his LinkedIn entry and found that he worked as a 'special parliamentary advisor' for New Labour, working for health secretary Frank Dobson and then worked at Downing Street for a year helping to prepare Tony Blair's answers for Prime Minister's questions.
Eagle has denied any knowledge of these transactions but has admitted that she knows McCrea.

That should come as no surprise; 'Buzzfeed' has unearthed these Twitter conversations, I'm afraid my copying is not very expert;


  @angelaeagle

Such an honour to chair Labour's NEC & conference Thanks for the flowers now my year is over #Lab14

Joe McCrea‏@jbmccrea 24 Sep 2014

@angelaeagle And a better Chair there could not possibly be, comrade!

3:18 pm - 24 Sep 2014 

McCrea has been busy trying to recruit new recruits to Labour to vote against Jeremy Corbyn. 

I checked out Angela Eagle's voting record and found (unsurprisingly) that she was an enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, while Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were vocal opponents of the war. 

It looks as though the attempted 'Coup' against Jeremy Corbyn used the all planning skills they learned during the Iraq War fiasco.

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)
Home: helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com
Contact me: neilwithpromisestokeep@gmail.com