No Jeremy Corbyn does not prove that a more open ballot is a mistake

One of the more controversial pieces of underreported news of the past few months was that the Labour party are apparently not going to release a breakdown of the leadership ballot by membership type. This means that there will be no published details of how full members voted versus the £3 supporters or trade union affiliates.

This is in part to avoid a 2010 situation where is was very clear that Ed Miliband had only triumphed because of overwhelming union support after losing to his brother in both the membership and MPs sections of Labour's now defunct electoral college.

Would it challenge the legitimacy of the new leader if we discovered that they had lost the membership ballot but won because of the £3 supporters and trade union affiliates? I suspect this won't be as Jeremy Corbyn will likely storm all three sections given the massive changes in party membership since 2010 but even if it were the case that the traditional membership voted for Andy Burnham but Jeremy Corbyn was pushed over the top by union affiliates and £3 supporters it wouldn't be an argument for restricting the franchise.



Political parties have a major problem as anyone familiar with the decline in membership levels will know. Being a member of a party is a weird thing to do which means that the theoretical democratic function of parties becomes skewed towards the engaged and extreme by the apathy of 'normal people' who only think about politics come election season.

As Patrick Wintour's article mentions, in France the Socialist party held an open primary which Labour's £3 scheme sort-of copies albeit 5 years prior to the election rather than a few months. Expanding the franchise is risky but the reason it's having such a potentially huge effect is that MPs failed to fulfil their obligations in nominating who they actually wanted as leader.
Whether you're a Corbyn-fan or not, his lack of support among the PLP will be a problem if he becomes leader and the reason all major parties have their leaders nominated by MPs is to ensure a situation like this does not develop. Iain Duncan Smith was famously the candidate foisted on the Tory party by members over the wishes of MPs but at least IDS had enough support to survive multiple ballots. Jeremy Corbyn needed the help of Burnham supporters lending him their nominations when they didn't necessarily want him to be leader and that has backfired spectacularly.

Grassroots pressure or no, perhaps if MPs were a little more responsible with their power over nominations the system would work as its architects had hoped?

UPDATE: This article on Capx is quite amusing about how Labour have adopted an idea that Steve Hilton proposed but which the Conservative party (perhaps wisely) did not embrace. I think that it's still possible to have a wider franchise in elections for party leaders while avoiding the complete meltdown that is engulfing the Labour party.
Party leader elections should be a compromise between ideals and practicality. The Buckley rule is that Republicans in the US should always vote for the most conservative viable candidate in primary elections. Given what we know about the sort of person who joins a political party, the nominating process by MPs isn't just the start of the contest but the crucial first round.
Where would all those Corbyn-supporting people have gone? Would they have kept up the pressure on Labour MPs and punished them in reselection meetings for failing to nominate their hero? I doubt it and even then, as the last five years have shown, the leader is a huge factor in whether people join a party or not. How many centrists left after David Miliband became the only person to lose an election to Ed? If Labour MPs were serious about nominating a credible candidate then they could have done so without risking too much.