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Reinventing the block vote? Trade unions and the 2010 Labour party leadership election

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British Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Labour's electoral college chose Ed Miliband as the party's new leader on the basis of votes that were influenced by trade union activities. Some trade unions made a number of decisive interventions in the 2010 leadership election contest: they coordinated their nominations, canvassed intensely for their nominees (channelling considerable resources into their campaigns), and distributed ballots with strong recommendations in the same package as the voting slips. Such was the closeness of the election that, we argue, these interventions determined the result. This conclusion is all the more surprising since commentators and academics alike had maintained that the introduction of ‘one member, one vote’ had fundamentally reduced the role of trade unions in Labour party politics. In contrast, our opinion is that having been apparently deprived of control by the introduction of one member one vote, trade union elites developed a strategy to mould the outcome of the Labour leadership contest and so reassert their traditional influence over the party. Such was the extent of the role played by the trade unions that, we believe, the normative legitimacy of the electoral process by which Ed Miliband was elected can be called into question although the rules of the contest were not broken.

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Notes

  1. Iain McNicol was appointed General Secretary of the Labour party in July 2011.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous referees and editors of the journal, especially Steve Kettell, and staff at Palgrave Macmillan. We also thank Lewis Baston, Dominic Byatt, Glen O’Hara, Thomas Osborne, Andrew Thorpe, Richard Toye, and, especially, Hugh Pemberton, for their helpful comments: responsibility is ours. This article draws on fieldwork conducted at the 2010 Labour party conference in Manchester. It makes use of elite interviews with Labour MPs, party officials, and trade unionists as well as members of David Miliband's and Ed Miliband's campaign teams. We are grateful to those participants who have discussed issues with us but who would prefer to remain anonymous.

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Jobson, R., Wickham-Jones, M. Reinventing the block vote? Trade unions and the 2010 Labour party leadership election. Br Polit 6, 317–344 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2011.20

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