 These surprise rule changes which have been sprung on the party at the very last minute have generated a lot of heated debate. Most backbench Labour MPs have tweeted against the reforms, as have at least two shadow ministers. Rachel Maskell is shadow minister for the voluntary sector and charities, she tweeted the following. As a Labour MP I should have a no greater say in leadership elections than other UK Labour members. The members are ultimately the party and they should equally elect their leader, so one member, one vote is the most democratic system. Let's respect our members, let's respect party democracy. Sam Terry who's a shadow transport minister had a very similar message. No one so far from the shadow cabinet has sort of tweeted about this but there was a quote in an article by Owen Jones today which suggested that Andy McDonnell, who is the Secretary of State for Employment Rights, is opposed to the changes. The usual suspects however have come to the defence of Sir Keir. In a parliamentary system it's politically sensible and more democratically optimal for MPs to have an important say in choosing the leader of their party. They are much more in touch with the electorate than party members. That has rightly caused a lot of people to scoff at what Sonia Soda there is saying. MPs might be a lot of things. In touch with the general electorate they aren't especially. For examples of that you could see how many Labour MPs were vociferously pushing for people's vote when their constituents had absolutely no interest in one and in fact were quite offended at the prospect of having one. It's also worth noting as the journalist John Stone mentioned that MPs are most notable for spending vast amounts of their time socialising with talking to and listening to other MPs. They spend most of the week at Westminster speaking to another bunch of self-important and I think fairly out of touch people in the halls of the House of Commons and much less speaking to ordinary people in the street. Labour members on the other hand these are hundreds of thousands of people working in public sector jobs speaking to a huge variety of people every day. So I would say they are probably a little bit more representative than the 200 MPs that Labour sends to Parliament. For a very clear example of how out of touch with popular opinion these people are I think we can go to a tweet from Gabriel Pogrand. So the briefing they've been giving to the press are just ridiculous. We might not be able to get this up. So two key Starmer allies who are philosophical about early union opposition to electoral college even if it doesn't pass coming close would demonstrate to the public that everything that went wrong in 2015 is over. Question is whether leader himself is spooked. Now why I say this demonstrates how out of touch they are is the public don't care. This idea even if Keir Starmer loses narrowly and we maintain a one member one vote system for electing the Labour leader that will impress the public because at least he took the left on. This idea that anyone cares about this other than I mean primarily people on the Labour right who sort of are obsessed with destroying the left is just completely, completely laughable. Have you ever spoken to anyone who's not a Labour party member who says oh the reason I'm not voting for the Labour party is because of the particular rules you have in your leadership election or because your leader was never willing to even try and change them. They're thinking that Keir Starmer is going to be rewarded for trying to change the rules for the leadership election and failing. It's completely bizarre. What I do want to show you though is what these MPs do have on their side because they might be out of touch with the general public. They are very much in touch with the mainstream media and we are really seeing this when it comes to reporting of the purges we're seeing and this attempt to railroad through rule changes without any consultation. The most apt example of this I think is from Rachel Wim of She Is A Political Journalist at the Mirror in response to that Mish Rahman tweet that we showed you before so with that news that conference delegates were being suspended without being told why, getting their letters after conference happened. She tweeted Labour in full on interneesine mode. Labour in full on interneesine mode. Now that's a funny way to describe people being suspended for no reason before a conference. A more reasonable, a more common way to talk about that would be to say a purge, right? A purge. Now you might say, oh, look, she's a political journalist who wants to sound really, really neutral. She doesn't want to use the kind of loaded languages or the loaded words such as purge because that sounds too emotional. Well, this is how Wim of Covered Labour Party fights in December 2015 when Corbyn was in charge. Deputy Chief Whip Alan Campbell MP to be demoted by Corbyn as part of a purge of moderates in the new year, according to reports. Let's go to June 2017. Jeremy Corbyn allies planned purge of Labour HQ in bid to stamp his authority on party. Now let's go to 2018. Scottish Labour reshuffle dubbed purge of the moderates. And now we can go again. This is from October 2018. Given Sawa learned he was sacked while leading a debate on health and Dugdale being left to foot her own bills in the Wings case. This is looking like a symbolic purge of the moderates in Scottish Labour. So these are nearly all examples of shadow ministers being demoted. It's a completely ordinary thing that happens all the time in political parties. Party leaders are allowed to demote people on their front bench. This was a purge because Corbyn was doing it. Now we have the classic example of a purge, which is bureaucrats in a party are kicking people out for political reasons without giving them any good reason why. And suddenly this is just interneesine war. This is just two sides battling who's to say who's right and who's wrong and who's the aggressor and who's the person subject to aggression. Dahlia, I want your thoughts on this. I suppose a couple of things to say, which is, you know, do these people realize what they're doing? Do they realize how inconsistent they're being? And then also I've heard some people say Corbyn should have done this. Corbyn should have been tough like Keir Starmer has been. But I do think that potentially ignores the fact that if Jeremy Corbyn had tried any of this, he would be being dragged through the mud by the media like left, right and centre. Maybe you should have taken that flak, but it would be a completely different situation to the one we're in now where Starmer is trying to do it. Well, I don't know about you, Michael, but, you know, when I was trudging through the rain in Newcastle under Lyme, all I heard on the doorstep was one member, one vote, can't believe Labour is, you know, is running their system on why it should be an electoral system. And, you know, for that reason, I'm going to vote to continue to decimate the NHS and make it impossible for my kids to ever own a house. I mean, this is obviously firstly, like to address like Sonja Sotter's tweet. When I saw that tweet, I was just like, have you like been outside recently? Like if you if you think that MPs actually represent that necessarily represent their constituency in this country, the entire political system is designed so that people are given, you know, MP status in particular constituencies, particularly secured things that are seen as safe constituencies as political favours. Like I have Kate Hoey is a perfect example of this. She is, you know, a very, very strong Brexiteer appeared on the campaign trail with Nigel Farage. Meanwhile, she was the MP for Vauxhall, which is estimated to be 50% black and minority ethnic. Many, many, many of those are Europeans and also voted 77% to remain in the EU. And the irony as well of that is that when you actually look at how Kate Hoey became MP of Vauxhall, there's a lot of echo between what happened in that case and what is happening right now. You know, for those who don't know the story, Martha Ossimore, who's Kate Ossimore's mother was actually had the support of the local party and had, you know, done everything that she needs to do in order to be, you know, the Labour candidate for Vauxhall and the NEC as part of a crackdown on the Labour Black section, which was, you know, radical black members of the Labour Party, Diana Abbott, Bernie Grant. These were all people who came up through those ranks. And the NEC was basically on a war path with at that time, what was the inset, insurrectionary left force within the Labour Party, largely where a lot of the socialist energy was coming from. And the NEC blocked Martha Ossimore and forcibly implemented Kate Hoey. And we all see how that works out. You end up with these incredibly out of touch MPs who actually in end up literally campaigning against the position of the party 30 years later. So the way that, you know, the party has historically treated, this is the way the party has historically treated radical and socialist and insurrectionary forces within the party. And I think that in terms of, you know, should Corbyn have done this, you know, of course, it would have been absolutely slammed in the press. I mean, he every time he tried to reshuffle this shadow cabinet, he was accused of doing a purge every time, you know, looked sideways. That, you know, Tom Watson, he was accused of doing a purge. So you would have absolutely been dragged in the press, but it could have been done in a way that makes that opposition to what you're doing look like it is, you know, fighting for the establishment, fighting for anti-democratic values, which is what they are fighting for. So, for example, if you said, right, we're going to do, you know, let's say something like reselections, right, which was, you know, the big fight that happened within within the Labour Party, which was, you know, which obviously Corbyn never pursued. If you had, you know, said, right, we are only fielding local candidates with fed up of having, you know, candidates that have no connection to the community being parachuted in. That's something that is very, very popular. Everyone hates the fact that, you know, MP positions are passed around like party like party favours, essentially. I think that's a big reason why we lost the red wall, because many of those seats were seen as so safe that they could be given away to people as, you know, bargaining chips and in order to call in favours further down the line. And it meant that, you know, the Labour Party became synonymous with, you know, corruption and neglect in a lot of these seats. And then, you know, the second referendum position was the kind of final nail in the coffin there. So if you had made this an issue about, you know, local democracy, local community, you know, not having this kind of corrupt system that we know is so deeply unpopular with MPs that have no connection to their community being forced on these varied communities, then you would have still gotten all of the flak, you would have still gotten dragged, you would have gotten smeared, but you would have had a stronger counter narrative that would have, if not necessarily, you know, managed to seep through those headlines and seep through that media noise, it would have at least made, created a little bit of ambivalence around it. Whereas when you try to play nicey nice and you tried to say, I'm going to be soft, I'm going to be small, I'm going to try and sort of not do anything to trigger this machine that exists precisely to make sure that people like me never get anywhere near power, then what you end up doing is you end up getting dragged anyway, but you look weak while you're getting, while you're being dragged and then not only do you sort of lose the immediate battle, but you also lose the long term battle because your legacy goes down as a kind of weakness and that those who dragged you had a reason to and, you know, were right to because your voice didn't come, didn't come through in that. And, you know, I think that this was always part, always needed to be part of a longer term kind of strategy where, you know, you don't undo decades of neoliberal centrism with just one, you know, even if Jeremy Corbyn did win, the, the, you know, did become Prime Minister, you can't undo all of that in just one term in office. But what you could have done is built a sustainable legacy of a PLP that actually reflects the concerns of voters, reflects the concerns of members, has the buy-in of the membership who are the people that go out and create the kind of like the campaign that means that you have any chance of winning in a society where the Conservatives hold all of the media power. And so, yes, you know, even if Corbyn had won, he would have, I think, would have eventually fallen under the weight of the forces against him, but at least either before or after the election. But he could have left behind something more resilient than what we started with. And that would have been something like a, a Labour Party who's make up more accurately reflects the people who vote for the Labour Party. And let's not forget, that's the strategy that Keir Starmer is employing. It's very, very clear. And, you know, the Sharon Graham, Laura McNeill, for the reasons that they've outlined, very clear that at the moment, he's not there to, like, win over people to labour. He's not there to, like, win, you know, win sort of like the polls, because, you know, he's focusing on things that people don't care about. And I don't think he doesn't understand that. What he's there to do is to systematically change the Labour Party so that there is to block every future pathway for power for the left in this period. And so they sort of have the right in the centre have that sort of medium to long term vision of what work they're trying to do, regardless of the flak it might incur in the short term. And I think that maybe things would have been better if we kind of had a similar, a similar attack. Thank you very much.