John McDonnell

And so Gordon was crowned. Bet he was very nasty to anybody who suggested they were going to support John McDonnell.

The hell with Gordon, anyway. His party has no money and no members. Ha ha. Gordon's toadies need to understand that this situation is not just going to self-correct. Ah well. They'll have at least ten years on the opposition benches to sort it out.

TOSSPOTS.

Congratulations to John McDonnell, though. He got thousands of people to his campaign meetings and he would have got a lot of votes if Gordon had been man enough for a contest. Which he wasn't.

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.

For those who are interested in the news (let's assume it's true) that John McDonnell may now get on the ballot paper and challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour party leadership, here is a link to all the stories we've done from the campaign since last year, and the interviews we're published here and on the newstatesman.com site with Labour party members about a party leadership contest.

We don't always agree with John's politics, but we know that old Gordie must be pretty worried about a contest, because the facts are that John has been getting very big crowds at his campaign meetings. We weren't really expecting to find this when we started going along, but we did. 

Photo: John McDonnell speaks to a PCS meeting

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.'

We continue our interviews with Labour party members about the party's future at a time of falling membership, undecided leadership and confused policy direction.

There are interviews with party socialists here
There are interviews with party moderates here
There are interviews with party Blairites here

Party members Nick Parrott, Max Freedman, Omar Salem and Mazher Hussain are as clear as most of us on the key to saving party's future: re-train Labour's straying focus on the domestic agenda, and aim policy at those constituents Labour was meant for.

'Blair maybe put too much of the focus on Worcester Woman and Mondeo Man,' Freedman admits. Re-engaging with Labour's traditional, and presently very sad, supporters will also go some way to keeping that smiley wanker David Cameron in his box. Everybody knows that Cameron will rat the masses out, particularly in areas like housing - everybody is already all too aware of the large and nasty gap that yawns between Cameron's warming, right-on hippie rhetoric and the evil social policies that his Conservative activists, especially in local authorities, are developing and implementing on the ground as we speak.

Hammersmith and Fulham is an excellent example: less than a year has passed since the Conservatives took that council from Labour, and they've already washed their flabby white hands of the needy and the not-so-fabulously rich. Schools are being earmarked for sale to developers and housing centres for closure, housing staff are being made redundant and the Council's committees section is no longer quite staffed. A similar rape of services that are desperately required by the beleaguered poor is underway at the Lib Dem-Conservative Camden council. The Conservatives are not here to make friends.

Bitch story with interviews with Young Labour members on the future of the Labour party is at the New Statesman site. Feel free to comment over there. Can't sort it out here at the moment too wrecked

Labour Party leadership candidate John McDonnell says he's within striking distance of getting his name on the leadership ballot.

A full and rowdy house of trade union activists has rolled up for this evening's John4Leader public campaign event in Euston. The attendees are not all geriatric either: the youth wing of the Labour left is a noticeable force now at many McDonnell events.

The star turn appears on excellent form, not least because the government isn't. Lord Levy has just been chucked in the jug again, and McDonnell tells his very enthusiastic audience that the word - and the hope - on the ground is that one A C L Blair might not be too far behind.

'I think there is a prospect that the Blair government will unravel very quickly now,' McDonnell says with no small pleasure, as he outlines the many encouraging potentials offered by Levy's second exit with the fuzz. 'Things could speed up [with the investigation] even over the next few days.'

If they do, McDonnell says, he and the large number of union members, young activists, reinvigorated leftwing Labour party members and everyday punters who are turning out to these meetings up and down the country will take the opportunity to tell the voting public all about the real traitors to the Labour party.

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.

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

The young Blairites. More interviews to come on all

Legendary online Blairite Shamik Das, 27, thinks a contest for the Labour party leadership is vital for the party, but implies that no sane man toys with the notion that John McDonnell will be anywhere near it. 'Arrrrgh,' he laughs, placing a hand on a pained forehead. 'Arrrrggh. Arrrrrrrgh. No.'

Das would prefer the debate about the party's future to take place at the deputy-leadership level, with the centre-left's Jon Cruddas at the plate for party members of a socialist bent, and Hilary Benn doing whatever it is that he does for the right. Das will support Benn, but he thinks he can probably stand Cruddas, at least for the duration of a contest. It's true, Das says, that Cruddas has made a few socialist noises in his campaign, but he's so far steered clear of serious fruitcake rhetoric. 'He [Cruddas] is not as barking as some of them are,' Das laughs. 'His [voting] record is quite sound from my point of view.'

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.

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.

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Active young Labour party members on joining, staying in, and making a future for the party in these grim times of falling party membership, faltering ideology and other well-documented horrors.

First up: the young socialists

Owen Jones, 22, Marsha-Jane Thompson, 26, Tim Flatman, 22, Mary Partington, 22 and Vino Sangarapillai, 25, are extremely clear about the party's options, or option: socialism is Labour's future. Blairism, on the other hand, strikes them as tantamount to political suicide, what with its thousands of dead Iraqis, collapsed party membership, flaming thirst for a lengthy rape of the public sector by the private one, burgeoning list of cash-for-honours delinquents, et cetera. Everybody normal, they say, knows that they're seeing the end when they look at Blairism.