Scrap the leadership election - Have the Blairites gone completely crackers?

In my last article about the Labour Party leadership contest I concluded by noting that every time Labour right-wingers like Tony Blair, John McTernan, Chuka Umunna, David Blunkett and the three other leadership contenders spout their extraordinary anti-Corbyn rhetoric, they're actually helping him by boosting his public profile. 

Just like the way that the bigoted antics of so many Ukipper fruitcakes has kept UKIP firmly in the headlines, the more hyperbolic fuss the Labour right-wingers make about Jeremy Corbyn, the higher his public profile becomes.

Judging by his lunatic assertion that the unelected interim Labour leader Harriet Harman should cancel the leadership contest because the wrong candidate might win, it's pretty safe to assume that the Labour MP John Mann is not a follower of my work, nor smart enough to figure out for himself the self-defeating nature of his ludicrous suggestion.

52,000 people have joined the Labour Party since the General Election in May and the Another Angry Voice Facebook page has been flooded with comments from people stating that they've joined/rejoined the Labour Party in order to back Jeremy Corbyn. However this surge of new members is not being welcomed by the Blairite rump of the Labour Party at all.

After the Scottish independence referendum the SNP gleefully celebrated a huge rise in party membership which made them the third biggest political party in the entire UK; before the General Election the Green Party were delighted with the rise in membership they called "the Green Surge"; after their catastrophic General Election performance the Liberal Democrats took some solace in the surge of new membership; but the Labour Party seem to have a completely different attitude to this big surge in interest in Labour politics: Instead of welcoming and engaging with their new members, people like John Mann openly resent them, and even describe them as "infiltrators"!

Any other party would be delighted to have picked up 52,000 new members and counting in just ten weeks, but the Labour old guard are not. It seems that they'd rather stick with the failed austerity-lite rubbish that ruined their chances in the last election and set about driving all the new members back out of the party, rather than let Labour Party members choose the proper straight-talking left-winger they'd like to see given a chance to prove himself.

Of course the decision to allow anyone who was prepared to pay £3 to become a registered supporter and have a vote in the Labour leadership contest was a very silly idea from the beginning, however once the terms of the leadership contest have been decided, and some 17,000 people have already paid their £3, it would be insanity for the Labour Party top brass to suddenly scrap the contest because they're afraid that Jeremy Corbyn might win.

Just imagine the reaction if John Mann got his wish and the leadership contest were to be abandoned. There would be an awful lot of discontent within the party about the decision, and Corbyn's public profile would get another huge boost as "the man the Labour leadership are so terrified of they scrapped their leadershipelection rather than have him win".

Even if the Labour leadership found some way of ensuring that Corbyn couldn't win the revised leadership contest, what legitimacy would the new leader have when it is obvious to all (including very many Labour Party members) that this other candidate only managed to get the job because the rules were redrawn to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from winning?

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