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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » In the 40 year since the Tories selected a woman LAB has ha
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » In the 40 year since the Tories selected a woman LAB has had 8 male leaders and looks set to choose a 9th
It was in February 1975 that Tory MPs (there was no party member involvement in those days) made the momentous decision to choose a woman, Mrs Thatcher, as their leader to succeed Edward Heath.
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Now, if Corbyn wins, he will be haunted by these allegations that he was elected by non-Labour supporters.
If ABC win, the mysterious process by which voters were vetted and Harman's attempt will enrage the Corbyn camp;
If the process is null and voided, the Corbyn camp will see it (perhaps rightly) as a shabby attempt to stop the 'wrong' person from winning.
She'd have been better off just letting the process continue. The chances of the party pulling together behind whoever wins is very low now.
The Labour Party is also the party of Phil Woolas, so if you're not a white male it is a horrific place to be a member.
Given an historic opportunity to pick its first woman leader, what does the party of fairness and equality do? It goes pine nuts over a 66-year-old bearded Trotskyist vegetarian whose first wife, Jane, left him because he spent every evening photocopying documents for the Labour Party, never took her out to dinner once in five years, and ate baked beans out of a can.
Corbyn divorced his second wife, Claudia, because she refused to send their son to a failing London comprehensive, weirdly preferring a fantastic grammar school of exactly the sort that educated – guess who? – Jeremy Corbyn.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11809421/Liz-Kendall-is-the-only-candidate-who-could-tempt-me-to-vote-Labour-again.html
Backing someone because they have ovaries is ridiculous. Whoever's best (or least worst, in this case) should get the gig.
I don't have a vote, but initially I would've probably gone Cooper-Kendall. Now, I'd probably just support Kendall. Cooper's idiotic "I have children and ovaries, you know. Boo hiss to white men" doesn't impress me.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11808140/How-European-are-you-Take-this-quiz-to-find-out.html
I got 47.6%
Is it because that Labour is quite dominated (at least financially) by male Trades Union leaders - there have been/are lady union leaders but they tend not to be so dominant.
@Plato, thank you for those wonderful quotes by Jinnah. I shall cling on to them for GCSE results tomorrow (my first as Head of Department after a very difficult year). Jinnah was, from what little I know of him, a remarkable man. It's a real tragedy all around that he and the equally remarkable Nehru couldn't agree on some way to keep India together on independence.
Theresa May for next Tory leader, purely to spite the Feminists?
You are 47.0% European, and you scored closest to United Kingdom, with a similarity of 64.9%!
Mr. Sandpit, Priti Patel.
The Mary Creagh thing really does stand out, for example.
1) Labour pride themselves on being the party of equality. Being, in effect, fifty years behind the rivals they castigate for every crime under the sun including misogyny looks bad and hurts their image of themselves;
2) As there are a large number of women in the Labour party, and have been now for two decades, it looks a bit odd that apparently not one of them is fit to be placed in the top two in the leader and possibly deputy leader contest. Is it because they are not very capable or is there something holding them back (the infamous 'glass ceiling')? Even if other people are like you and don't care, Labour will and it will cause prolonged naval gazing while they try and work out the answer.
Of course, the most senior women in the Labour party have been Beckett (temporary leader and Foreign Secretary) Jacqui Smith (Home Secretary) Harriet Harman (twice temporary leader) and Yvette Cooper (Shadow Foreign Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary). None are exactly walking adverts for feminism.
The fact that this contest from Cooper's point of view has largely revolved around her genitalia, her children and her husband is possibly the most damning indictment imaginable of how little she has actually achieved, but it also suggests, since nobody has been asking those questions of Burnham - not even about his expenses and his wife's threat to divorce him over them - suggests Labour (and the country perhaps?) have some way to go on the subject of sexual equality.
But I'm not wedded to her alone. Justine Greening's triumph would suit just as well.
Hmm
Comes of being an OAP I guess.
The Tories have had a Jewish PM, a gay PM and a woman PM. Labour have had only men...
The Tories elect Muslims as leader, Labour uses Muslims to make white folk angry to win elections.
Another contrast to the progressive Tories and nasty Labour
I stick by my prediction that the first openly gay leader of a UK party will lead the Tories, as will the first non-white (assuming you don't count Disraeli, whose Jewishness would have counted as non-white at the time).
"Bulgaria, Cyprus, Lithuania, Malta, Romania and Slovakia were excluded due to lack of sufficient data."
The difficulty about that is the role model thing - if we never choose women leaders, women candidates for leader will always look to some as a bit of a risk. We've got over that for MPs, arguably thanks to AWS - only very eccentric voters would say, "I'm not voting for X as I think MPs should be men." So I'd like to see a woman leader (and it was a minor factor in choosing Jowell) - but the question of what they're like is more important.
The Tories meanwhile have Heath, who was unmarried and who is of course embroiled in a current scandal (although we could argue all day about the merits of the case put forward so far) and Balfour never married (although I think was probably for other reasons, questions were also asked of him).
Were Ben Bradshaw to become Deputy Leader then he might qualify
Considering an e/w on Gatsby but if Glenegles is a NR it becomes a 7 runner.
Of the gang of four, I have met only Liz Kendal - she too is a thinker - but perhaps needs that few more years of experience to fulfill her potential.
There may have been other factors at play in both, but it is inconceivable that Law would have stood as an independent had the seat not been effectively swindled from him by an AWS. Moreover, he was so ill he might not have been selected anyway in a fair fight - even more of an own goal!
Plus the nation of Belgium was created to annoy the French.
I can't of anything better than annoying the French
EDIT: Pah, it says I'm French. This is despite being a monogamous, property-owning, long work hours, gym-going tea drinker. What's it basing it on, my water-drinking? Stupid quiz.
I don't think this occured because of Creasy's gender tbh - Corbyn offered a radical left wing vision the others didn't, Creagh was somewhere between Burnham and Kendall iirc.
There are two women in this contest, one is just too far to the right of the membership to win and the other is dull. Cooper is better than Burnham, mind.
In my experience they all are extremely bright, sharp, driven individuals.
Do they all have the spark of greatness, or genius, for that matter? Of course not, but they are uniformly a pretty above-average bunch.
BTW, do you have multiple sets of accounts with a special one for the tax-man?
Up until this point, I thought it was part of her Hatemen feminism that's been her main agenda for 30yrs.
Now, perhaps she had a point - compelling Labour to have ovaries as a default seems to be the only way it's going to happen. I suspect she knows the Party better than the rest of us on this one.
Add me to that collection. Two weeks ago I said I was hoping for a Corbyn win. Unfortunately that was the romantic in me. Siince then I've done some due diligence and can't believe I was such a simpleton.
Rooting through moth eaten Che Guevara T-shirts.....what was I thinking! Corbyn's closest political soulmates are IDS and Nigel Farage..and he's as rabidly anti EU as both put together.
There's every chance that if he wins the Labour leadership he will forge an alliance with the Tory right and form a powerful anti EU force going into the referendum. Add in a PM who's blowing in the wind and OUT suddenly becomes possible
IDS's to the right of them
Farage's to the left of them
Corbyn infront of them.....
Someone has blundered
Into the valley of death.......
One UK party has once elected a woman as leader. That's it. All have frequently had women in senior positions. Clearly we are still a long way from equality, but to single out any party as having a problem is odd.
Typically, activist - Teacher/lecturer/LG employee - shop steward - councillor - candidate - MP.
Otherwise it takes time and dedication to trawl the country putting yourself about and your name forward.
That said, the Dutch attitude to animal welfare, especially pig rearing, leaves much to be desired, indeed it is a blot on their civilisation and why, if a push came to a shove, I could never actually live there.
No Lib Dem female MPs, no prospective leader candidates (UKIP has Suzanne Evans; Labour Yvette/Liz). No former leaders. No former deputy leaders. A record consisting almost exclusively of middle aged, middle class white men reaching the top
Personally I'm praying that Flint is elected deputy leader. Serve labour right even if it will give me apoplexy.
I think, personally, that he was a very dry intellectual who wasn't very interested in people. He was good at cutting remarks - that may be what you are thinking of - and for that reason he was good at making enemies. But so far as I know, none of them thought it even worth while making stuff up about his sex life.
I always assumed it's only people like us that notice the inconsistency between what Labour says and what the reality is. But now I think much of electorate was fairly unimpressed by Ed's attempt to describe the country as being in a bad way (cost of living crisis etc) as it so obviously didn't match their own experience.
Admittedly she was (A) only in de facto charge and (b) in the Lords at the time, but surely it counts for something?
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6356/pastor-james-mcconnell-islam
But he sealed it when two breaths later, he couldn't remember the price of bread. As Norman Tebbitt is supposed to have said, 'In politics, far better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.'