Veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn has won himself a place in the Labour leader contest after securing enough nominations to get on the ballot.
The MP managed to pick up the necessary backing just two minutes before the noon deadline, helped by MPs who wanted to widen the range of candidates.
Candidates vying for a place required support from 35 MPs – 15% of the total.
Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall already had enough backers to go through to the leadership vote.
Labour leadership: Jeremy Corbyn makes it on to ballot
There are 4 candidates going for the Leadership of the Labour party. Three were ready to run some time ago, but at the last minute a new entry slipped in.
The four candidates working from Right to Left (ha ha!) are Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham and Jeremy Corbyn.
Yvette Cooper was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, as was her much better known husband, none other than Ed Balls – Gordon Browns right hand man under Blair, and Chancellor of the Exchequer in his own right once Tony Blair gifted Gordon Brown the post of Prime Minister of the UK – but now kicked out of parliament by his former constituents.
Yvette, like so many Labour politicians, is originally from Scotland, born into a political family – and ended up graduating in PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford. She then spent the next seven years in further education and political jobs – with two years as an economics correspondent for The Independent Newspaper as her only ‘real job’ before becoming an MP in 1997 – from which point, of course, she’d never touch real life again.
As a minister she flitted though jobs changing job just about every year – her most notable contribution probably being the creation of the idiotic and soon abandoned HIPS – Home Information Pack Scheme.
Liz Kendall is the new girl – only entering parliament in 2010, so she is untainted by Blair, Brown, Balls and co. From a very well to do family Liz attended a selective girls school eventually graduating in History from Cambridge. As you would expect she went directly into politics and public sector with no real job before becoming an MP.
Her sole governmental experience is her current role as Shadow Minister for Care and Older People. However considering other contenders for the Labour Leadership it maybe genuine concern for the sick and elderly that prompted her to run.
Talking of protecting the sick and elderly of course brings us to their nemesis and the next candidate Andy ‘deathbeds’ Burnham.
Andy is from a more humble background then the girls in the competition and, unusually for a politician, is religious enough to identify as a Roman Catholic. Like the other candidate he has, of course, got no real life experience of work, but rides the coat tales of his father who was a telephone engineer and rarely misses the opportunity to cite deprived Liverpool roots.
Andy became an MP in 2001 entering government in 2007 under Gordon Brown as a reward for implementing the much hated and draconian ‘personal identity card scheme’ which has thankfully now been repealed and disbanded having wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers money, as was usual for the Blair/Brown Labour governments.
Andy flitted between departments when in June 2009 he landed his most notorious role – at least most notorious to date – when he became Secretary of State for Heath and oversaw the worst excesses of the NHS killing of patients – both deliberately as part of the Liverpool Pathway programme, and by base neglect in many hospitals, most notoriously at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. In this role he rejected dozens of requests for enquiries into very high mortality rates and has sought to distance himself from this – even going as far as to have his Wikipedia page constantly monitored to have references minimised. He is indeed a master of cover up after the event.
It is thought that it was his shame at his actions in relation to these patients that drove him to raise questions leading to the second Hillsborough (football disaster) enquiry – or more cynically this could be seen as a way of burying the former bad news.
Finally on the far left there is Jeremy Corbyn – a socialist firebrand who despite 34 years as an MP has never had a government (ruling or opposition) post. This leaves him untainted by the Blair/Brown years, but with the full set of loony left policies such as support for the IRA, unilateral nuclear disarmament as Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Anthropomorphic Global Warming, the Tamil Tiger terrorist organisation, the Argentinian Claim to the Falkland Islands and the people there, and a column in the Communist Newspaper the Daily Star. Despite, or maybe because, he is such an old school MP there is less information about him online than the other candidates who have effectively been tracked from day one – or perhaps this brevity of information reflects his never having had power, and with such marginal views, it being seen as very unlikely he ever would have.
As a final note – I see that while the first three candidate are concerned about how labour should run their ‘stay in the EU’ campaign for the upcoming referendum, Jeremy Corbyn has called for the party to consult widely with its members before deciding whether to campaign for in or out at all…
