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[Ken Burch]

23. There's nothing illegitimate or unfair about the concept of deselection.

Without it, a constituency party has no way at all of holding the MP that clp worked to elect and re-elect to any level of accountability at all. If the MP has no accountability to the constituency party, there's no real reason for the constituency party to exist-for that matter, there's no reason for party membership to exist if people within a party have fewer means to hold their party's parliamentarians and candidates to any set of expectations at all. At that point, you've reduced the notion of a party to a leader who imposes policy solely from above, an arrogant, self-entitled parliamentary elite who feel no respect either for the party's values or those who will do most of the work of electing them(it's fairly unlikely that anyone has ever been elected by treating their party's principles dismissively), and a core of party workers which is slowly dwindling towards extinction.

No party with that sort of internal political culture is going to be sustainable and electable.

I can make that assertion because what I've described there is the political culture of the Labour party since at least the accession of Gordon Brown-a party that had failed to win even 31% of the vote in the last two elections on the type of manifesto you prefer, the type of it's-enough-that-it's-US-making-the-cuts policies that had no chance of ever leading to an increased vote for Labour at any possible future election or of providing effective governance if it did.

It's a culture whose defenders within the party are currently working with all their might to sabotage their own party's leader DURING the current general election campaign, and who, on a milder level essentially did the same thing to Ed Miliband during the 2015 campaign, simply because Ed was a few micro-millimetres to the left of Tony Blair(too few for anyone to matter, but still too intolerably many for the sectarian Blairite-Brownites, a cult that could tolerate no deviation at all from "Bambi Thought&quot .

And just so you know, Labour HQ(still controlled by the anti-Corbynite party bureaucracy), mandated the reselection of all sitting MPs including the member for Barrow and Furness who insisted on demanding Corbyn's resignation while announcing that he himself wanted to stand for another term, so all the arrogant parliamentary elitists are exempt from any accountability from the people whose hard work is needed to keep them in their jobs.

I'd really like to know how you think Labour can ever regain power by continuing to treat its most committed activists as a nuisance at best and a menace to be crushed at worse. It's not as though Labour can win solely due to focus group tested phrases in a party political broadcast or the bland, empty pronouncements of a "Great Leader" figure. And there's really no good reason to keep punishing Labour activists for the Eighties-most left-wing campaigners now weren't even born then.