The Corbyn surge continues...
Tonight's audience may not have looked balanced, but they were—chosen by a pollster to be representative of the Labour selectorate. That means the "ABC" candidates should be very worried about how much the crowd cheered Jeremy Corbyn. His biggest round of applause came when he said he didn't buy The Sun newspaper—a sentiment with which many Labourites across the spectrum would agree. But they whooped and cheered even his more banal pronouncements, and his fans started intervening; one asked host Adam Boulton to direct his questioning away from Jeremy and towards the other candidates during the foreign policy segment, for example. Corbyn even gave hipster new signups something to cheer about when he backed the decriminalisation of cannabis for medical use. By contrast, what looked to me like a strong performance from Yvette Cooper mostly met with silence or polite applause.
...but the Cooper surge could be over
The consensus among many mainstream commentators was that Cooper had an excellent hustings. This follows a few days of rave reviews after she put forward a bold proposal for the UK to take in 10,000 more refugees. Cooper was widely thought to have improved on a campaign which began in a somewhat staid and cautious fashion. But (admittedly fairly unscientific) polling of Sky's audience and home viewers said differently. Instead, it awarded an overwhelming victory to Corbyn, with around 80 per cent saying he'd won. Cooper came in third, with just over 5 per cent.
Labour can still be an opposition
For all the talk of the Tories getting away unscrutinised during the Labour leadership contest, the combined efforts of all candidates seem to have helped force the government to change tack on its refugee policy. Shortly before the debate, Sky News reported that the government could change tack on its formerly hardline stance and agree to offer asylum to 4,000 more people. Pressure from the press and from other European leaders, as well as a petition, will have played a part. But Cooper's call, and the agreement of her fellow candidates, helped to kick start momentum on the issue.
Foreign policy will be the test
As has often been the case in his campaign, Jeremy Corbyn's most striking moments came when he was pressed on foreign policy. In this case, Liz Kendall managed to tease one of the evening's key news lines out of him, when he said in response to her questioning about circumstances in which he would deploy the armed forces that "I'm sure there are some but I can't think of them at the moment." This led to an uncomfortable series of questions in which it took Corbyn some time to confirm that he would keep Britain's permanent seat on the UN security council. If Corbyn wins, it will be fascinating to see how his pacifist approach holds up to Tory attacks. Interesting, too, will be the development of his stance on the EU. His demand that Britain ask "some serious questions about how they treated the people of Greece" drew one of his biggest rounds of applause.
