To answer the question in the title -
The party put the candidates there, the constituents elected them.
You can't get away from the fact that there are two factions, the Tory-lites and the socialists. The Tory-lites formerly held sway, and as I perceive it foisted many candidates in their own image onto the constituencies.
Perhaps the foisting was wrong, and the branches should have more freedom to select candidates. That might of course make things worse from the point of view of electability.
Corbyn (or any successor of similar views) has three bridges to cross.
- He has to persuade the electorate in sufficient numbers to buy into his own personality, his socialist policies and those of his like-minded comrades, and
- contrive for similarly minded candidates to stand on the Labour ticket, since a majority government of the kind of MPs making up the Labour benches currently would simply depose him; and
- win a general election.
The chances of that happening seem low.
It's a terrible mess, because there is so little common ground and a workable compromise between the two factions is not there to be found by negotiation.
The last time something like this happened, there was a split (albeit a very uneven one), the gang of four formed the SDP, and Labour was out of power for 18 years.
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