The Wardman Wire

From the BBC:

The Labour Party has moved to see off an attempt by 12 rebel MPs to force a challenge to Gordon Brown’s leadership.

Its ruling National Executive Committee has rejected calls to get nomination forms sent out to all Labour MPs before next week’s party conference.

Whoever is trying to prevent any prospect of a Labour Leadership Challenge has decided that they are not even willing to give a show of allowing MPs to raise the question.

I have read Alan Watkins since the 1970s - first in the Observer, and then the Independent, and he has commented at length over many years on the rules for replacing the Labour leader. The current set make it - to put it mildly - incredibly difficult. These rules were put in place in the mid-1990s as part of a gradual centralisation of power within Labour carried out by the Blair-Brown-Mandelson axis to make it difficult for anybody but “Us” to assert themselves against “The Project”.

If Mr Brown and his friends are seriously looking for a renewed Labour Party, then relying on this rulebook from the past to shush the dissenters is not the way to do it.

My take is that there would be very little point anyway, as I can’t see anywhere for them to go, even if they do embrace change. I see two options:

• A complete abandonment of the current authoritarian, centralised, controlling approach to government, which no one would believe was genuine without a complete replacement of personnel.
• Something entirely different, which could only be a leftward lurch into a disfunctional political utopia.

I don’t see that a middle way exists in the current Labour Party.

My own opinion is that - whatever happens - an implosion is likely at some stage, and it will take a number of years for a renewal to come to fruition after that, if ever. So this whole current experience is more like watching a dying fish flopping about in the bottom of a boat.

That is my take; some writers here may not agree!