Angela Eagle pulls out of Labour race....

[BooScout]

So it's Owen Smith vs Jeremy Corbyn.

[LeftishBrit]

1. Party leadership contests these days seem to be a cross between 'Survivor' and 'Ten Green Bottles'

Whoever is left standing sort-of wins.

[T_i_B]

2. It was inevitable that one or the other would drop out

Although I think most people would have struggled to guess which one would pull out to unite the non-Corbynite wing of Labour in this contest.

[Denzil_DC]

3. At least it looks like Smith wants to debate policies, which may be a step in the right direction.

Pitching himself to the membership as "as radical as Jeremy" given his track record will be a neat trick if he manages to pull it off. If he does, I can't imagine he'll fare that much better over time with the current PLP than Corbyn, if he does win (which would take a massive swing, from what polling I've seen).

And where the hell is the glorious Hilary Benn in all this? He was happy enough to snipe from the front benches, let alone the back, and his early-morning move triggered the latest challenges. Is he feart, or just biding his time?

[T_i_B]

4. What's been noticable since the referendum....

Is that the ultra Blairites, the likes of Tristram Hunt and Liz Kendall who never worked with Corbyn have been remarkably quiet. I suspect that they have realised that they are not going to be of much use in a Labour leadership contest.

[RogueTrooper]

7. They are too busy welcoming all these new Blairites

who have been coming out of the PLP woodwork these days.

[Ken Burch]

5. If Smith really wants to have a chance, he should make it clear

1)That he rejects the Blairite canard that Corbyn's leadership victory was caused by "Trot entryists&quot Corbyn got 250,000 votes-even in the Eighties, there were never more that 20,000 Trotskyists in the entire country and most of the Labour Left hated them; today, at most, there might possibly be 8,000).

2)That he rejects the idea that no one but the leader and the PLP should have a say in how the party is run, who is selected as candidates and what it stands for. All the PLP are are a group of people who managed to win seats in places where ANYONE could count on winning as a Labour candidate-they are not above everyone else in the party and they have no greater intrinsic wisdom than people who don't happen to have seats in the commons.

And none of Labour's current problems are down to the rank-and-file having too much say. The rank and file had no say at all in the failed campaigns of 2010 or 2015, have so far played no role in the drafting of Labour policies(the last party conference was still run under Blairite rules and its policies were essentially dictated by Blair-Brown-Miliband loyalists in the party bureauracy).

3)That he accepts that Momentum is an honorable legitimate organization that has just as much right to be part of Labour as does Tribune or Progress or any other group within the party.

[Ken Burch]

6. Eagle still needs to apologize for accusing Corbyn supporters of shouting homophobic slurs at her

at a constituency meeting she didn't even attend.

And for implying that Momentum is a bigoted organization.

And for implying that leftists through a brick through her office window when actually

1)No one knows who threw the brick or why;

2)The window that was broken wasn't in her office...it was just in the building her office is in(a building shared with several other tenants);

3)The broken glass from the window was OUTSIDE the building...suggesting the window was broken from inside, not from a brick thrown from outside.

She should have left it at calling Corbyn a less effective leader than he might have been. She never needed to the war against Momentum or to abet the slur that Momentum was Trotskyists conspiring to destroy the Labour Party. There are, at most, 10,000 Trots in the entire UK and the overwhelming majority of them despise each other. There's no way a group that small could have organized 250,000 people to do anything.

[Nihil]

8. Good riddance.

We don't need any more blatant liers in charge.