In spite of many Labour members calling for a fresh election for the party’s Deputy Leader position, Tom Watson apparently feels entitled to continue his poor performance in the role.
An ‘old hand’ like Watson will definitely have his team conducting some kind of opinion polling among Labour members, so it may be that his failure to ‘refresh his mandate’ for his continued behaviour is because he’s aware of the extent to which any support among Labour members has fallen away.
Last year, many members – including this writer – voted for Watson as Deputy because of his apparently principled stand against the media owned by Rupert Murdoch and others over such issues as phone hacking. But a new online poll provides an indication of just how profoundly eroded that support now is.
After its first 24 hours, here are the current standings in response to the question, “For those who voted for Tom Watson in 2015, if there was a new deputy leader race, would you support him again?”
Based on vote counts in 2015, this would reduce Watson’s first-round 160,852 votes to 11,259 – putting him by far at the bottom of a poor list of candidates, way below even the 39,080 polled by the awful Ben Bradshaw and eliminating Watson in the first round.
This is a very basic poll and not scientific, but the results are so stark that there can be almost no doubt that Watson’s mandate for any action as deputy leader has evaporated – and that Jeremy Corbyn should have no qualms or hesitation about removing the whip from Watson – which he is perfectly entitled to do – in order to force a new election and allow the membership to elect a more constructive and supportive deputy.
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tom who
Tom Pepper
Reblogged this on sdbast.
Despite their best efforts The right wing are realising the game is up and they are on the losing side. Jeremy is growing into the leader’s role so quickly they are at a loss. It is his time to bring the party back to it’s roots and rebuild from there. In doing so he needs to remove the whip from the enemy within. Members need to sort out the NEC and get rid of and if possible prosecute McNicholl for all the misuse of members private data. The party has been infested with parasites who wish to simply line their own pockets. They haven’t got a principle between them. Reopen the places like Ruskin College along with political education in schools. People like Tom Watson need to have their cards taken off them and humiliated in public like they tried to do to Jeremy.
He has shown himself to be unprincipled and two-faced. This is not what I expect or tolerate a principled politician to behave like!
Except that neither Corbyn nor any party leader has the power to remove the whip from an MP.
Party leaders have no authority to discipline MPs.
You’re wrong. Search ‘withdraw’ on the blog and you’ll see that the party leader absolutely has the right to withdraw the whip, from an official parliamentary site.
I agree with skawkbox that the leader has the absolute right to withdraw the whip from any member of the PLP. I just hope he grows a pair and withdraws the whip from several MPs and we can get rid of the NEC vote riggers.
The amount of citizens and members he has blocked from his twitter account says it all
As one of the old trots who voted for him in the deputy leadership election last year I now realise the error of my way and offer my sincere apologies for helping to put this an excuse for a democratic MP into his current position. Tom when are you going to publish the accounts for the money you received from Mr. Moseley and your justification for accepting this money?