Willow904 wrote:The rules in the past have had the incumbent needing nominations, as we saw with Kinnock. This hasn't been explicitly changed in any of the later rules so it is open to doubt as to whether those who drew up the rules intended a new situation to apply.
It's non unusual or controversial within political parties for a leader to need the confidence of the MPs they lead in order to retain their position. Although the membership mandate may seem to obviously trump that in your view, and all the arguments for thinking so is very compelling, it would constitute a break from rather than an adherence to the conventional rules of how parliamentary parties operate as far as I can tell. There would be negatives as well as positives to such a significant change in relationship between the movement and the party that as yet have not been fully considered.
My (well, actually our, Mrs TRG and I being in agreement) reading of the rules is that they very specifically state that if there is a sitting leader and someone wishes to challenge the leader then that someone needs the support of 20% of Labour MPs. The leader requires no nominations. If they did the rules would say so and they do not.
The only persuasive relevance the old rules might have is that they
did say the leader would need nominations. The exclusion of that requirement in the current rules should therefore be regarded as deliberate, not some error of drafting that nobody noticed or in some unspecified way meant to be read by inserting clauses from previous rules that the current rules replaced. Which, if anything, reinforces the argument that the leader does not need to be nominated to go forward into the ballot.
It would be like arguing that because the current legislation and sentencing guidelines for murder don't mention capital punishment at all, but previous legislation included it and it was the conventional, in fact sole, sentence for murder for 1,000 years then the current law and guidelines should be read as including capital punishment in the sentences available.
I respectfully submit the rules are not vague but absolutely and unambiguously clear. I suppose it might be arguable that if there's a challenger with sufficient nominations the existing leader is simply excluded entirely from the ballot, but if I were a lawyer I'd be advising my client that while making that argument would be good for my bank balance I find it hard to see how a judge or panel of appellate judges would find it remotely persuasive. I can't easily imagine the courts throwing out a big chunk of the Labour party rulebook because in their opinion that's not how a political party is "conventionally" run. And if they did it would be a very alarming precedent.
Though if they did, all that would achieve is the Labour party having no mechanism by which the leader can be challenged or removed unless they become "permanently unavailable". New rules would need to be drafted, internally legally scrutinised, accepted by the party and in all probability have at least one more round trip through the courts. An acrimonious, damaging and drawn-out process at the very least.
And politically, how desperate does it look to be so sure your candidate will be defeated in a straight fight that you run off to court to fly legal kites in an attempt to ensure there's no election and your candidate becomes leader by default? What does it say about the putative "trusted unity leader candidate" that their supporters are so certain of the candidate's unifying effect and outstanding appeal they're frantic to avoid an election?
I forget which order I put them in but Watson and Eagle were my first two choices for deputy leader. I don't think I'll be making the mistake of voting for either of them again.
I'm getting tired of calming down....
