Well done Labour NEC - Corbyn can stand

'Well, they have a lot in common with Corbyn then, who has spent the last 3 decades plotting to overthrow Labour leaders.'

Yes, but COrbyn is a rebel, true and steadfast to his convictions, opposing Blairite wars from the start.

The 172 aren't rebels, they are Establishment, many of them voted for war the Iraq War and even voted to stop the enquiry into it, they contain the Establishment's favourites and Corbyn is definitely not one of those.

Owen Smith was a lobbyist for Pfizer and a SPAD, Jeremy Corbyn was a socialist running Stop the War.

'Claig - I find it odd that you refer to Labour Party Members as 'the people'. Which people exactly?'

I use the term 'people' to refer to individuals who are not part of the established political class, whereas the 172 are the established political class who are trying to overthrow a Labour leader voted in in a landslide (which shocked the Establishment) just 9 months ago with the biggest mandate in UK political history.

"Jeremy Corbyn And The People Versus The Media

In future history classrooms, students will likely be told the tale of the tag-team assault on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by the mainstream media and MPs. It will be taught as a harbinger of what is erupting into the most pivotal crisis facing Western politics in half a century: the chasm between ordinary people and the elites. We are seeing it with the Republican establishment’s failed efforts to derail the Trump train and the Democratic establishment’s more successful efforts to extinguish the Bern.
...
The unrelenting bullying of the ordinary Party members’ choice of leader may even represent the death-throes of a ‘politico-media complex’ in futile denial that it has lost the hearts and minds of the masses. We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of what Noam Chomsky eloquently deconstructed in his Manufacturing Consent.
...
Most people, however, are declining the Kool-aid on offer. Throughout the West, the chasm between the elite and the other 99% is unprecedented, not only in wealth distribution, but in the perceptions of politics and politicians. The system of manufacturing consent is facing an unprecedented challenge, one that seems still wilfully ignored in the MsM echo chamber.
...

Politicians most in touch with the current popular anti-establishment mood are lampooned as relics of the past. Headlines report an attack on Corbyn by an ‘LGBT activist’ while dutifully omitting any reference to Jeremy’s long history of LGBT activism, including back when it wasn’t fashionable.

The MsM, reassured within its echo-chamber, has mistakenly continued to assume each one of us believes that all our neighbours buy this, that everyone else supports the officially sanctioned line and you’d be a tinfoil-hat-crackpot not to. Instead, a thing called the internet and its social media component have empowered ordinary people to, at least to some extent, see what their fellow citizens really think and connect with them.

These platforms have become stages upon which a rebuff is occurring, one as embarrassing to the MsM as the leadership vote. Article after article, Youtube video after video produced by the MsM touts the official talking points proclaiming Corbyn and other Left figures’ incompetence, bigotry, unpopularity etc. In every one of these, however, a quick scroll down to the comments section reveals hundreds of real people, almost exclusively saying the opposite of what the article/video instructed them to think."

www.huffingtonpost.com/kadira-pethiyagoda/jeremy-corbyn--the-people_b_11048424.html

'And privately educated, career politician Corbyn isn't part of the Establishment?'

No, because if he was, then the Establishment and the 172 would not be trying to remove him and prevent him even appearing on the ballot. The media will now give free access to the 172 on the BBC etc in order to slag Corbyn off and you won't see many Corbyn backing MPs invited onto the BBC.

The media pressure will mount on Corbyn and staff we have never heard of will be given primetime media access to tell the public how unorganised Corbyn is and how he ruins pre-planned publicity stunts (worked on by apparatchiks for months) and pre-planned media stunts by announcing cabinet reshuffles when the event planners had wanted the media to attend a stunt instead.

It won't work because the Corbyn supporting Labour members are wise to the Establishment game.

' I wish the lovely Andy Burnham would stand again'

I wasn't keen on Burnham during the Miliband period. But my respect grew for him in the way he accepted defeat by Corbyn and carried on working constructively for Corbyn. Burnham put personal ambition aside and put the party first. He was the most honourable of the leadership challengers.

The trouble is he is still Establishment even though he is saying more populist things. The tie of the people has changed beyond recognition in just two years. There is no going back to the Establishment for a long time yet, I think. People want change.

Proportional representation will be next and that will usher in real change and democracy and Corbyn's Labour will be a real socialist party.

To be fair, Smith does come across well for Labour. Out of all of them, he is probably the best, apart from Corbyn, because Smith looks serious, is not smarmy and arrogant like some of the other favourites, and comes across as having humility.

It remains to be seen if that is enough to beat Corbyn and the left wing agenda that the Corbynistas like.