leadership contest

Finding the old press' new love affair with Gordon B majestically nauseating.

Have interviewed heaps of Labour party members over the last year re: the future of the party and the importance of a leadership contest. Have barely managed to find a single party member who thinks Gordon should be crowned leader. We want a leadership contest, say Labour party members. If we don't take this chance to discuss why we've lost nearly all of our members and most our money, they say, we won't win an election again for many sad, long years.

And they're right.

You can start reading the interviews here - you'll find the rest of them queued in the right-hand menu on that page. They're all headed up 'Saving Labour.' If Gordon is elected leader unopposed, we will do more interviews with Labour party members as what is left of that tatty party rides towards political oblivion.

Another wee interview with a Labour party member on the importance of a leadership contest...

You can read interviews with other party members here

Dan Paskins likes to imagine a Labour leadership contest that starts with Gordon Brown, John McDonnell and Alan Milburn, and ends with Alan Milburn getting a total hiding. Paskins is not too crazy about Milburn - he's pretty sure that Milburn's brilliant ideas for modernising Labour played the fatal role in destroying the party's membership.

Paskins, who is a constituency party organiser and was until recently an Oxford City councillor, will settle for a contest between Brown and McDonnell, though, or Brown, McDonnell and anybody. It would be nice to see Milburn mashed like the wee turd he is, but we may all have to wait for that one. 'I think it will be weird if there isn't a contest,' Paskins says. 'It will be Gordon Brown wandering around on his own.'

Paskins wasn't particularly impressed with the idea of McDonnell in the first instance - 'I was against him' - but says that in recent times, McDonnell has started to make a certain amount of sense. 'This portrayal of him as an extremist is wrong.'

Are you a member of the Labour party? We want to interview you about the direction you think the party should take. Contact us and we'll call you.

The young moderates

You can read Labour young socialists' views on the Labour party's future here

Labour party member Tom Miller, 21, thinks that the party desparately needs a leadership contest, not a Gordon Brown coronation: he just doesn't think that John McDonnell offers much by way of credible competition. 'I don't think that John McDonnell is an alternative. We are not a socialist revolutionary party. He [McDonnell] will not get on the ballot paper and he would not win an election.'

That said, Miller hasn't a lot of time for the party's 'Blairite outriders' either. 'I think that Blair has annoyed the bulk of the party.' And that said, he thinks that Brown is probably the party's best leadership option. 'He has made indications that he could bring the soft left and the soft right together. You can't help feeling that he will be more distributive.'

Fair and equal distribution of life's happier aspects is one of Miller's preoccupations as a party member. He joined the party when he was 16, just a few months before Blair decided to go to war with Iraq. ('I felt like ripping my [membership] cards up [when the war began], but I decided that I didn't want the Labour party to be dominated by extremists, right or left.'). He joined the party because he thought that party membership would complement his A-level studies. Now, he's a final-year law and politics student at Manchester University and a member of the Labour students group there.