Red Ed wins

Wow. 50.65% to 49.35%. And almost all on the union votes. Is that a mandate to lead? I guess it couldn't be much more different than Brown's coronation! They'll hope it'l end differently as well...

BBC Labour Election Video

Compelling...

Rap of the year?

This is great.

Hat-tip Political Scrapbook.

Labour's Legacy

The BBC's main headline today is that the coalition's spending cuts will 'hit the north harder'. I'm sure that comes as a big shock to all of us, especially if taken in conjunction with the Daily Mail's story from yesterday discussing figures that suggest 24 per cent of north eastern households have no inhabitants in work.

The overall UK figure is that there are 3.9 million households where no adult works. In these households there are 5.4 million adults and 1.9 million children. This has led to fears that there are children being brought up knowing nothing other than benefits.

Their reliance on the state will obviously mean that northern areas will suffer the initial brunt of cuts. The problem for the coalition is that while it is rightly seeking to review benefits and to force those wrongly on incapacity benefit back to work there are not enough jobs in these areas to accommodate the current unemployed, let alone the newly unemployed.

Predictably, the Labour party and the unions are condemning the cuts as unfair and ideologically driven. They say that the government is risking the recovery and hitting the poorest hardest. Each attack of this nature is frankly an admission that Labour failed to help the poorest in society, and that it failed to build an economy that would protect the most vulnerable people in the most at risk areas of the country.

It's not that I dislike Labour - indeed it has much to commend it - it's just that they had 13 years of government to make an impact on this. 13 years to make the north and other areas less reliant on the state for jobs and to make people less reliant on the state for welfare. They failed to do that. It was a mistake that was compounded by their economic policies, which were based on faulty underlying assumptions about the cyclical nature of growth and led them to borrow and spend too much money. For them to now sit in opposition and bleat about cuts is not credible. It's too easy in opposition just to be opportunistic, and their party is becoming ever more so as it seeks to redefine itself. I just hope they stop when they eventually elect a new leader.

Rawnsley dissects Labour

This piece by Andrew Rawnsley is the best article I have read on the current course of the Labour Party and its leadership election. Read it!

Oh, and if you have the time, read his book The End of the Party, it is superb.

One person, one vote?

I guess it's up to the Labour Party to decide exactly how it runs its leadership election, but its strange voting system is getting a bit of flack in the papers today.

It seems as though many individuals have more than one vote for leader. This is possible because the vote is split between unions and socialist societies, who have 1/3 of the vote, MPs and MEPs, who have another 1/3, and party members, who have the final 1/3.

So if you are a party member, who's in a union and also a socialist society, then you've got 3 votes. According to the BBC, some people have as many as seven votes.

When Mandelson and the other modernisers got rid of the union block vote back in 1993 they did it under the banner of 'one member one vote', or its catchy acronym, OMOV. I'm not sure that this was what they intended.

I understand the system, but I worry that it looks corrupt. Perception is everything in politics. That people can vote more than once in the same election will give the public the impression that the result isn't even a fair reflection of the views of the Labour Party. It would be much better if they simply divided the vote up between MPs and MEPs on the one hand and party members on the other. If they are desperate to keep the unions, then give the leaders of the major ones votes equivalent to those of MPs and MEPs.

Labour 'leadership' contest

Viewers were offered the choice last night between the future and the past. Not by any of the 'leadership' candidates, but by BBC and Channel 4, who respectively ran Marr's interview of Blair and a 5-way debate, at 7pm. It was a bit of a false choice to be honest, as you can happily watch and re-watch them both on the internet.

I did a poll (which you can find here) and the results are opposite. I am shocked that it thinks I agree with Balls so much. Going to go upstairs now and take a long hard look at myself in the mirror. Hopefully it won't break...

More seriously (not that the campaign is particularly serious) I thought that David Miliband was the star performer last night. His body language was better, and he has a natural authority when he talks. His policies are also much saner. He also didn't bicker as much as the others, which was a pretty lame sight - I know they have to get their points across but if they all talk at once they all look petty.

I felt sorry for Andy Burnham though, because he was side on to the camera, which did him a great disservice. I don't know how the seating arrangement was decided, but it favoured Balls and the Milibands, as they were face on to the camera.