Labour: Now the two unity candidates are fighting each other

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From tomorrow's Observer:

The Labour party has been engulfed by fresh infighting as the camps of the two potential “unity candidates” set to fight Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership embarked on their own war of words. 

On the eve of a pivotal week for the party, one MP supporting Angela Eagle accused rival Owen Smith of using “sneaky tactics” to manoeuvre himself into being the sole challenger. 

Meanwhile a senior MP supporting Smith claimed there was an overwhelming consensus that only one candidate should emerge, and warned that currently supportive MPs would not give Eagle their nomination if she did not swiftly recognise the situation. 

"Angela needs to be very careful," said the source. "I can understand her position having come out first, but it is not a question of who deserves to be leader; it is about the best possible candidate to beat Jeremy."

On the surface it is funny: deep down it is tragic.

But I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that it will take at least one defeat under a hard left leader to bring the Labour membership to its senses.

And I remember the crap that good Liberal Democrats took from Labour for five years.

So I shall take Lord Bonkers' advice and point at Labour and roar with laughter.

Angela Eagle's chess career

I am not convinced Angela Eagle is the answer to Labour's problems, but I do remember her and her sister as junior chess champions in the 1970s.

In last Saturday's Guardian Leonard Barden recalled those days:

Angela Eagle, who is set to challenge Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership, was the 1976 British girls under-18 co-champion and an England junior international. She also represented Oxford in the annual varsity match. 

The Wallasey MP still takes a keen interest in the game and in 2011 was photographed with Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short at a Chess in Schools meeting hosted in Westminster. 

Eagle would be easily the strongest chess player ever to lead Labour, and if one day she becomes prime minister she would rival Andrew Bonar Law as the best player to hold that office.

The Mystery of Jon Ashworth's failure to resign

Shouting match going on between Jeremy Corbyn's spokesman and Jon Ashworth outside PLP. Accuses Corbyn's team of "spreading lies" about MPs.

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) June 27, 2016

With so many shadow cabinet ministers having resigned over the last two days, it is worth taking a look at those who have not resigned.

And among them you will find the name of the Leicester South MP Jon Ashworth, who retained his position as shadow minister without portfolio in the rump cabinet of loyalists announced by Jeremy Corbyn this afternoon.

Why hasn't Ashworth resigned like so many of his colleagues?

He is not of the far left: he was an Ed Miliband loyalist parachuted into Leicester South for the 2011 by-election,

One theory is that the anti-Corbyn forces want him to stay in the shadow cabinet so he keeps his seat on the party's national executive. But then Angela Eagle was also on the executive and that didn't stop her resigning.

Demonstrators in Leicester today were demanding that Ashworth support Corbyn. The Leicester Mercury just wants to talk to him.

The tweet above suggests that Ashworth is far from being a Corbyn supporter, but until he explains himself the mystery will remain.

Later. The mystery deepens. That tweet has now been deleted.

Jeremy Corbyn forms his first Shadow Cabinet

"What is the correct Liberal Democrat reaction to Jeremy Corbyn?" I asked Lord Bonkers.

He thought for a moment. "I think we should point at him and roar with laughter."

Of course, things aren't so funny if you are someone being hit by Conservative policies and hoping for change at the next election.

But in the mean time, watch this...

Angela Eagle flies too low

How do we increase turnout in British elections?

Perhaps the parties could abandon their increasingly technocratic pursuit of swing voters in a select group of seats? As Mrs Thatcher's funeral games reminded us, it is not so long since British politics involved big ideas and was merely a career for a narrow elite. And in those days the turnout was significantly higher.

That is not the solution that Angela Eagle, Labour's shadow leader of the house, favours. In a speech to the Hansard Society this week she said:

"We should consider incentives for voting. How about entering everyone who voted into a lottery?"

That was not the only part of her speech that smelt of contempt for the voters. She also suggested "simplifying the legislative process so that the interested citizen can more easily understand and engage with it".

That's right. We can't have proper checks on the government because the voters just won't understand them.

The irony is that Labour began by arguing that the workers ought to run their own industries. After a century of their policies being put into practice they now believe the workers cannot possibly understand the parliamentary process and have to be bribed with the prospect of a lottery win to get them to vote.

A footnote on chess

Parliament is or was full of people who were chess champions in childhood. The careers of Rachel Reeves and Evan Harris passed me by, but I do recall the days when the Eagle sisters were a force in the junior game.

House Points: Strengths and weaknesses of Lib Dem economics

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

InVincible

Last time the Liberal Democrats called a Commons debate on the economy, the treasury minister Angela Eagle was scathing. Our motion read "like the storyboard for Apocalypse Now or perhaps even Bleak House." Why, it even said Britain faced the risk of recession! "Fortunately for all of us," Eagle reassured the House, "that colourful and lurid fiction has no real bearing on the macro-economic reality."

For good measure, she added: "Hysterical overreaction … might attract a few cheap headlines … but it is not mature or responsible."

That was April. Eagle was in her place again on Monday, but in a very different world. As Philip Hammond, the Tory shadow treasury minister pointed out, her reply to Vince Cable’s opening speech used the words "global" or "globally" 21 times. There was no mention of any of the policy or regulatory failures made in the UK.

But then Vince is, well, invincible at present. One commentator describes him as the nation’s kindly uncle. Another writes: "Everyone likes him. He predicted this crisis but is not crowing about it. He is comprehensible, calm and human. Can’t we just get him to sort it all out?" One even claims he is descended from Sir Thomas More.

All of which means it is safe to ask a few questions about Lib Dem economic policy. Our first package - the 4p cut in income tax funded by green taxes and closing loopholes for high earners - is well understood. But is our second package - the £20bn of spending cuts - so clear?

There was some wobbling during the Bournemouth Conference, but eventually it was widely agreed that the £20bn would be used to fund our different spending priorities. There would only be tax cuts if there were something left over after that.

Today that money is earmarked for tax cuts, with a danger of confusion or double counting. The other day Nick Clegg said we would use the money saved by scrapping identity cards to cut income tax, but Chris Huhne still proposes to spend it on more police officers.

While Super Vince bestrides the globe, none of this matters much. But we do need to agree a clear policy in time for the next election.