Thought I'd test out opinions on who people think would make the best leader of the Labour party.
My thinking is this:
Corbyn falls at the first hurdle because he wants the UK to leave NATO.
Cooper falls at the second hurdle because she thinks a low carbon economy is feasible at the moment, and should be worked towards.
That leaves Burnham and Kendall.
Of these Burnham is most popular with Labour voters and least popular with Conservative ones, making him the default choice.
In the Deputy leadership contest, Creasy doesn't like the Green party much, and wants to modernise Labour, making her the top choice for me at the moment.
What are your thoughts?

I find it quite easy to be apolitical on this matter.
Anybody who enthuses about a "low carbon economy" is a dimwit of the first order. A plank. A moron. An idiot.

As I'm not a member I won't be voting in this election. However I'm with michael hart on the "low carbon economy". Kendal is a History graduate. Burnham is an English graduate and both will therefore follow what DECC says without questioning anything. It doesn't look like there is a good choice, not even a least worst.

Whatever the result I think the entry of Corbyn, win or lose, means the in fighting will go on for quite a while.

Everyone's a bloody English grad. I asked my builder if he actually knew the difference between a joist and a girder. He said 'Yes. Joyce wrote Ulysses and Goethe wrote Faust'.

Clearly the Labour Party is going to ditch triangulation and offer a left wing alternative, although I don't think having a leader who's never missed a chance to proclaim people who kill British people as the real victims is going to help them in the polls. They can kiss goodbye to the British working class vote, and, despite what they assume immigrants aren't necessarily anti-capitalist many of them being entrepreneurs.

It goes around and around. High welfare and high spending on things like a bigger state leads to high debts and destruction of the economy. Then the other lot gets in and we have austerity. Then the people long for fantasy land so they vote for anti-austerity and the first lot get in. Yawn.

Corbyn. Politicians have become too similar. We need real debates so that reasons for doing things can be properly aired. Despite no Conservative making a good argument for Tory policies including austerity, the public voted for them anyway. Perhaps if the labour leader had been a more feisty opponent, the Tories might have risen to meet the challenge. As it was, the SNP won the election for them because people didn't want a weak Milliband being dangled on Sturgeon's strings.

I can see the appeal of the things Corbyn offers. At the moment we have a series of generations who, through their own experiences know that a little socialism goes a long way and that ultimately it has to be paid for. That situation is changing. There is a rise of a generation who think their lives are the worst evah! They know it's true because the BBC and Russel Brand tells them so. They want those lucky SOBs, the Baby Boomers to pay through the nose for the misery of Generation Y. Why not? Nobody speaks up for hard workers, savers and home owners, so it must mean they're guilty. (That might seem like bitterness but I'm not a Baby Boomer or one of Generation Whiney).

We need politicians who want to do their best for the British people, not follow a politically correct set of decsions that are currently fashionable. A good example was the Climate Change Act. Because politicians no longer have strong opinions on things they nearly all vaguely agreed with each other. At the very least they need their limp feelings on the issues zapped so that they can be enthusiastic one way or the other.

My enemy's enemy is my friend. Corbyn is that man.

I'm posting this here as a reply to a comment by tomo on unthreaded, and it seems relevant:

BoFA There seem to be a crowd of quite shouty Greens who are all for Corbin - mostly seen out + about on Twitter. I assume they are the of the watermelon tribe - some of the rhetoric is very reminiscent of undergraduate SWP Trot twits of the 80s....

Nationalise gas - phew!! - anybody here recall BNOC / BritOil ?

Aug 14, 2015 at 6:17 PM | Registered Commentertomo

Well, BP was a nationalised oil company that acquired them, and was later privatised, with great benefit to the treasury. Maybe the warm global watermelons are coming round to the idea that fossil-fuel energy companies are actually highly profitable (i.e. not subsidised in any real sense of the word) because they supply products that we need and thus want.

Whether Corbyn (the Labour leadership candidate) realises this, I don't know.
Or much care. The Conservatives are still talking the global-warming shite, but are beginning to get a (little) bit of credit with me for acting as if they don't really believe it. Still need to repeal the Climate Change Act, though.

But having a nationalised shale-gas/oil company is an interesting idea to kick around the park. Given the nature of government ownership of mineral rights in the UK, I am increasingly of the opinion that the private sector will largely walk away from developing UK fields without the genuine 'buy-in' of the UK government. The green lobby may lie, and cheat, and break the law to prevent private development, but history shows that they can succeed at that in this country.

We need some genuine initiatives from politicians. Corbyn may be a communist plonker, but I welcome him putting this matter on the table

Call me a cynic, but 400.000 extra Labour voters suddenly signing up since the party was soundly defeated in the last election sounds distinctly suspicious to me. Judges referring to voting systems that would disgrace a banana republic and places such as Tower Hamlets spring to mind.

If governments are going to demand all sorts of anti competative junk (like windmills) and then subsidising them until they're profitable, then in many ways there's no point not to take back certain businesses into public ownership. With fracking in mind, it's easier to ride roughshod over public opinion by setting up publicly owned gas drilling than to support a 'greedy' oil company to do the same thing.

As for 'infiltrators' into the Labour party, I think there are very few who wouldn't vote Labour in an election. The Tory intervention is probably mostly a media myth. I read the Telegraph article that sparked it and it just made me laugh, not consider handing over my money. Yes, there's probably a green intrusion but a great many greens vote red when election time comes round because they know their own party will never get anywhere.

The Labour boom years were with Tony Blair who, for all the things I think he genuinely did wrong, is pilloried for the Iraq war which I think was a forgiveable mistake. The issue gets clouded by fossil fuel paranoia but most people have forgotten the fundamental question that was asked at the time - do you turn a blind eye to what a leader does to his own people? 20, 20 hindsight says 'yes'. I remember being concerned at the time when Tony and George talked about winning hearts and minds. 'Why should the Iraq people be grateful to be liberated from Saddam?' I wondered 'We liberated the French from Hitler decades ago and they still hate us for it'. What nobody then or now will admit is that for some reason Those parts of the world can't live in peace. Remove the ugly head and hydra like, many uglier heads spring up. Now there's a bit of right wing paranoia - those nasty foreigners aren't capable of being civilised. Hmmm, but what if it's true, at least for the next few decades? Because the parties are now so similar, that sort of question can never be debated. Had it been possible before the Iraq war, Blair's name might not be mud.

We need there to be a gulf between Left and Right so that the plusses and minuses of issues are researched and aired. When the parties agree, they don't examine things deep enough.

"It wasn't the war, itself, that was the mistake. It was a consequence of an accumulation of errors" Robert Christopher

And I agree, those are the reasons to despise him but that's not why he's so hated. Corbyn's support of the Stop the War march is considered one of his good points but the march wasn't about our lack of preparation. There was no talk of how Saddam was the best of a bad lot. There were a lot more people in support of the Arab Spring but the same things happened as in Iraq. Evil dictators were pulled down and multiple insane despots were free to flourish. There was nobody brave enough to say that those cultures are not yet grown up enough to be peaceful.

Secretly the BBC love Corbyn. He embodies much of what the people there believe. They've been oozing far left view points for years as fake balance. With Corbyn actively voicing those views, they will no longer have the excuse of providing representation for the far left, so if nothing else it will clip their wings.