Labour’s rogue voters problem may be ‘woefully underestimated’

Labour’s knocked out 56,799 people who’d signed up to vote in the leadership contest but only 3138, it says, have been slung off the list because of infiltration. Of them, the Party says, 1900 are suspected of being Green Party activists, 400 are Tories, leaving around 700 who are from parties to the left of Labour.

One aide in a leadership campaign said “that 700 number woefully underestimates” the problem that exists.

Of the other 53,000 or so deemed ineligible to vote so far, 15% of the names were chucked out because they don’t appear on the electoral register. Some on membership lists have been rejected because their subs are in arrears. A big chunk (no numbers have been given) appear to be duplicate names that appear on more than one list, contravening the rules that allow only one vote per supporter/member.

Some campaign aides were suspicious about these and thought unions might be signing up people they knew were sympathetic to the union leadership support for Corbyn to boost that vote. Others said it was more likely to be a case of laziness and officials signing up members as affiliated supporters without checking if they were members and leaving it to the Party to do that.

Harriet Harman agreed to go back to the Party’s Procedure Committee to see if it would reconsider its decision not to allow checks against canvas returns when specific concerns were raised at constituency level. The leader has also suggested the party might relent and allow a breakdown of figures when the full result comes out so all can see which parts of what is now a kind of electoral college voted which way – the affiliated supporters signed up by the unions, the £3-a-go registered supporters and the full members.

That, some have suggested, might give Jeremy Corbyn’s opponents a chance to challenge his mandate if it comes from outside the full membership. But YouGov’s polls have suggested that he could win in every section of the system, and win quite convincingly.

I asked Dave Nellist, one of 2 Labour MPs expelled from the Party for infiltration more than 20 years ago, now a chair of Trade Unionist Socialist Coalition, whether the “700” number sounded a bit low and might suggest the Labour machine was missing a few. He laughed and insisted he had not urged his members to infiltrate.

You don’t get the impression the other campaigns think all this matters hugely for the actual result. If the non-Corbyn camps thought the contest was truly tight today would have been a bruising meeting, the stakes would dictate some level of hysteria. It wasn’t like that.

Dave Nellist said Jeremy Corbyn was horribly out-numbered by pro-business Labour MPs who weren’t up for his agenda. He said Mr Corbyn needed to revive the deselection movement of the 1980s to chuck out masses of existing Labour MPs and make it more his own. Frank Field, who nominated Jeremy Corbyn and has been on the receiving end of deselection efforts himself over the years, said that would be an extremely ill-advised exercise and given the balance of numbers in the parliamentary party, would be an exercise of Herod-like “kill the first born” bloodiness.

Next Tuesday at 7pm: Channel 4 News hosts a Labour leadership debate with the four candidates. #LabourLive