"The workers' party," indeed!
I have never been keen on all-women shortlists. But they worked.
20 years ago, several years after Margaret Thatcher had left office, most people still at least broadly considered it odd for a woman to be a Member of Parliament at all.
Absolutely no one thinks like that now.
It would be wrong to overstate the working-class character of the Parliamentary Labour Party of old.
The ranks of veteran councillors and trade union officials were expected to march in lockstep behind a frontbench Officer Class of Oxbridge Fellows and Hampstead public schoolboys, with a large number of county schoolmasters providing the NCOs.
But those ranks were at least there.
Trade union money should be used to help in the development and delivery of a recognised qualification for "non-graduates" with life and work experience who aspired to become MPs.
If that development and delivery could be done in partnership with local government, then so much the better.
Could there be all-working-class shortlists? Class is a fluid concept, and none of the sociological definitions is perfect. Very far from it, in fact.
But these days, unlike in the 1990s, the same is apparently true of sex. However baffling and disturbing some of us may find that, it is where our culture and our society now are.
All-women shortlists have done their job. It is time for every seat that Labour does not currently hold to have an all-local, all-working-class shortlist. The Corbyn Surge in membership has made this more than practicable.
The identification of even the existence of such potential political leaders in many of those areas would be more revolutionary than anything of which any Marxist had ever dreamed.
Trade union money should be used to help in the development and delivery of a recognised qualification for "non-graduates" with life and work experience who aspired to become MPs.
If that development and delivery could be done in partnership with local government, then so much the better.
Could there be all-working-class shortlists? Class is a fluid concept, and none of the sociological definitions is perfect. Very far from it, in fact.
But these days, unlike in the 1990s, the same is apparently true of sex. However baffling and disturbing some of us may find that, it is where our culture and our society now are.
All-women shortlists have done their job. It is time for every seat that Labour does not currently hold to have an all-local, all-working-class shortlist. The Corbyn Surge in membership has made this more than practicable.
The identification of even the existence of such potential political leaders in many of those areas would be more revolutionary than anything of which any Marxist had ever dreamed.
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