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Originally Posted by Osem
Mark Steel is but one of hundreds of people who've been told the same thing. Exactly who is allowed to vote in this election and who's deciding that under what process? I hope Corbyn does win because it seems only that outcome will lead to Labour being a credible opposition, albeit after his outdated politics have caused the party to implode and become unelectable.
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I don't think Corbyn will make Labour into a credible opposition. I think by definition a credible opposition needs to stand a chance of costing the Government their majority and frighten their MPs sitting in marginal seats. That causes the Government to take notice, makes their backbenchers nervous and more likely to rebel to save their own skins and ultimately forces concessions from them or even scuppers bills altogether.
An opposition without a snowballs chance of getting elected are confined to whining from the dispatch box and in TV studios without ever causing trouble to the Government.
As for the process of who is and who isn't allowed to vote there is an article here about what Labour are actually doing:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics...-jeremy-corbyn. In short they've screwed it up and they should really just let it be and accept the consequences but their intentions don't seem to be conspiracy but rather a belated attempt to fix a fatal flaw in their process. After all Labour had long, large fights to stop the militants from taking over the party during the 1980s and now, in one swoop, they've let them all in via the back door!
The supporter system seems to have been designed to dramatically increase the party's electorate to dilute the influence of the Unions but the problem is we don't have a tradition of open primaries in this country. Few people would be bothered about voting for the leader of a political party 5 years before the next election. So instead a highly political motivated minority have signed up with the intention of skewing the party towards their ideology. Let's face it the kind of people who obsess over the internal politics of a party aren't reflective of the wider population, they are campaigners and partisans.
So rather than marginalising the fringe element they've empowered them and instead marginalised the moderates. A very small part of the electorate are forcing one of the two potential parties of Governments into electorate wilderness and the moderates seem powerless to stop it. This is catastrophic for Labour and pretty bad for everyone else too.
In that context it's not unreasonable to think that Labour should vet the lists for the most obvious of entryists.