The main candidates are Andy Burnham, David Miliband, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls (after left winger John McDonnell pulled out). However Ms Abbot had not picked up enough votes, and looked to be out of the contest until fellow candidate David Miliband then said he would give her his support (he already had all he needed), and encouraged others to do so - so in stepped acting party leader Harriet Harman, who said she wanted to see a woman in the contest.
Ms Abbot, doesn't consider it in the least demeaning that the only way she could get to be the token women / ethnic candidate was by the artificial process of vote stuffing, and the support of a white middle class male. But then as we know she has that facility of saying one thing and doing another (aka hypocrisy), so she can apparently genuinely believe that this shows she has a body of support in the Parliamentary Labour Party.
"There's been a huge surge of letters and emails from party members saying that they wanted a diverse group of people running in this leadership contest and I think David Miliband and others responded to the feelings of the membership."
"There is nothing artificial about the party's and public's interest in my candidacy," she told the BBC News channel, adding that she expected to win backing "from across the party" once the contest got under way for real.....
Still she won't have to worry in the future as Ms Harman has also confirmed that from now on the Labour Party cabinet posts will be determined by gender quotas (that give women 50% of the seats even though they only make up 25% of the MPs), so it's only a matter of time before its 'ethnic quotas' as well, so she will probably become leader without the need to ever be voted in, when Labour next get a chance to make race quotas the law next time they are in power.
What a nasty prospective future they are leading us all towards...... it will come though. As a white male, I may as well emigrate now, because "there's no future. In Labour's dreaming," (with apologies to the Sex Pistols)
