Indeed though even if labour get smashed it will apparently be the media's fault that jezbollah has to answer questions regarding Antisemitism and having to take a stance on brexit... And lets not forget the quagmire that the Irish boarder / history with the IRA will become when he is questioned on that
Jeremy Corbyn - Not Not Labour Party(?), not a Communist (BBC)
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I can't see the Unions standing behind him if he fails at the next GE. They could pass the last as an improvement on their previous record, but there won't be any excuses this time. The sad thing is that if Labour do lose it, it could be 20 years of consecutive Tory governments (since 2007) before we see the next elections. During which they applied post-crisis austerity and pressed on with the most divisive action in our lifetimes in Brexit. That'd be a damning indictment on Labour.
Generally, my main gripe with the way Labour functions in general, is that effectively the Unions tend to chose the leaders and in the last 10 years at least they seem to go off by who is more well-meaning (to them) or left-leaning instead of going by who's more likely to win an election. Both Red Ed and Jezza aren't PM material. Say whatever you want about the failings of New Labour (and there were quite a few) but becoming more palatable to the centrist, swing voter was not one of them.
The last time other than under blair the labour party won a majority and served the full term in government was 1966...
So yeah something about the definition of madness when it comes to labour and unions / moving too far left
Re: your first paragraph, 33% of those who voted Labour in 2015 voted to Leave the EU in 2016 so your assertion that staunch Leavers were already lost to Labour before 2017 doesn't stand up. 650,000 more Leavers voted for Labour in 2017 than did in 2015; it's unlikely that this would have happened had they campaigned for a second referendum.
It's also unlikely that all, or even most, of the 3.7m Leavers who voted Labour in 2017 would still have done so if Labour had rejected the referendum result. To take the constituencies in my previous post as an example, had 252 disgruntled Labour Leave voters switched to the Tories in Bishop Auckland, County Durham would have seen it's first Tory MP in 30 years. Darlington would have taken 1600 defections to flip. Considering that an average of about 38,000 people voted Leave in each constituency across the county (higher in the ones I'm talking about here, balanced out by much lower numbers in Durham City constituency), Bishop and Darlo would likely be Tory seats now and Sedgefield and North West Durham would have gone from safe-seats to marginals in the drop of a hat.
The nature of our electoral system means that keeping Leave voters onside was key to Labour's performance in 2017 and remains key to their chances going forward. An unwelcome by-product of FPTP is that huge proportion of Labour's Remain vote effectively counts for nothing when it comes to a General Election as it's concentrated in a relatively small number of constituencies creating a handful of huge majorities. The Labour Leave vote on the other hand is distributed more evenly and basically accounts for Labour's continued hold on it's traditional heartlands outside the big metropolitan cities. The way the two sets of voters are distributed accounts for the odd stat that, whilst only 29% of Labour's voters voted leave, 60% of Labour seats did. Labour's leave vote is disproportionately important to the party's electoral success, which is why they're very reticent to alienate Leave when there could be an election on the way.
Your argument appears to be that, had Labour gone full-Remain, the loss of the Leavers would have been compensated by attracting more Remainers, but even as it was Labour attracted 2.8 million additional Remainers between 2015 and 2017 and 57% of the Remain vote overall. I have no doubt that single-issue Remainers exist who would have voted for Labour if they'd been openly pro-Remain but the numbers suggest they don't exist in sufficient numbers in the right places to swing seats (and, as above, the way they're concentrated makes them less 'useful' in a general election anyway). There were 35 marginals (less than 5% in it) in which Labour came second to the Tories in 2017; looking at vote shares it's clear that even if everyone who voted Lib Dem/Green (the 100% Remain parties) voted Labour they'd still not have won all the marginals, never mind the deeper Tory seats Labour have to win to be looking at a majority. In a fantasy-land 2017 GE scenario where Remain voters had come out of the woodwork to back a pro-Remain Labour and win the marginals, the Lib Dems stuck together elsewhere to win their seats,and Labour didn't lose a single Leave voter, the Tories would still be the largest party by 30 odd seats and a Labour-SNP-Lib Dem coalition would have a majority of 5.
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I'd argue the fact Labour were able to take some key liberally-minded Tory Remain seats in London suggests otherwise. Obviously there are swathes of the country the party just isn't going to win, but there were plenty of disaffected Tory after the Brexit vote who were willing to vote for Labour because they weren't so fervently for Brexit.
There were a lot of Labour constituencies that voted Leave, but then plenty of said constituencies have massive Labour majorities that could take a significant dent and yet remain Labour all the same. That doesn't mean the party should neglect these seats, of course - it's just a Labour constituency voting Leave doesn't mean they're less likely to vote for Labour, since in plenty of these areas you'll have had Tory/UKIP voters who made up the predominant tally of said Leave vote, with most Labour supporters still opting for Remain.
Ultimately, while the party obviously shouldn't abandon its Leave voters who had serious grievances they used 2016 to air, I think there's a significant danger they're going too far in the other direction and essentially ignoring the majority of the party who are massively pro-EU. And it's not just annoying metropolitan London types either - plenty of working-class people supported Remain and will be angry at the party if Brexit fecks them over and Labour were seen to do nothing to fight against its worst elements. Public polling's never stopped Corbyn fighting against, say, austerity, because he quite clearly knew austerity was a bad thing. I'm not sure why his stance on the EU is given a special exemption in this regard. Being anti-Brexit might pose challenges, but at the same time it's the job of a politician to convince people why their stance is right. That's what people liked about Corbyn when he was first elected as Labour leader. Anyone who's not a hardcore Brexiteer should be able to see what a disaster the whole process is - a political leader who claims to represent ordinary people should be fighting against that, or neutering its worst excesses.
And not to mention...Corbyn's approach still hasn't ultimately yielded him much success. 2017 was still an election defeat, and he hasn't established a consistent poll lead. If he's doing this to improve his electability then it isn't going particularly well.
Anyone know what happened to the media around the time May plummeted and Corbyn went up?
When did Corbyn go up?
There's literally a chart up there. Looks to be around June 2017, not sure what happened then.
Its was right after he pressed the stop brexit button but didn't silly old Jeremy push it again and Brexit is back on again again.
''Waves fists in the air''
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To hold the Labour party together by all accounts. To be fair the smaller it is the easier it will be.
Question is, how low will they both be by the end of this whole process?
Is that really the way you see this? “The media” dictate everything? The public are incapable of forming their own opinions?
Were you giving “the media” all the credit when Labour did better than expected in the last GE? (which is, I presume, the cause for that switcheroo on the graph you’re asking about)
I think Dobbs is talking about the media having to give equal coverage to both parties during a election.
The other explanation is that Corbyn is an Obama-esque, once-in-a-generation campaigner.
Or the Tories are fecking shite and when they made a bollox of their last GE campaign everybody started desperately trying to convince themselves that maybe, just maybe, Jezza had the chops to become PM?
I even started supping that Kool Aid myself. The effects wore off pretty quickly.
One hell of a coincidence isn't it?
I think both can be true. The reason why the tories were so ''bad''(They did get 40% of the vote) last time is not down to Theresa May well being Theresa May, you could replace May with any other Tory and the outcome would have been the same. The issue is a electoral and economic one.
- Dying Voter Base - The Thatcherite goon Heseltine mentioned this after the election result, 2 percent of the older electorate which is about 70 percent Conservative voting die and another 2 percent join(No surprise who this group is voting for). Their fecked in the long term which its why they are starting to push stuff like ID cards for voting.
- The Trouble With Capitalism Is That You Eventually Run Out Of Things To Privatise - The Tories are really hitting the acceptable line of just how much they privatise and cut without facing backlash from the public. We saw this in the last election with the whole dementia tax and offering nothing for anyone under 50 years old. The Tory Party really haven't much change since Thatcher, its financial capital above all else, squeeze the welfare state and attack trade unions. Well they've done that, there's no trade union power any more, the welfare state has been destroyed and financial capital shate its pants in 2008, what next ?
- The Further Right Wing Of The Tory Party - Johnston, Davids and one who looks like he went into a David Cronenberg transmitter pod holding a 19th Century panting haven't came up with any sort of alternative model that could win over support in the same way Thatcher could. Just on their social views alone they would struggle to get pass todays Britain(People underestimate the amount of bad will the tories got for trying to bring back fox hunting).
Movie reference = poster points
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I think both can be true. The reason why the tories were so ''bad''(They did get 40% of the vote) last time is not down to Theresa May well being Theresa May, you could replace May with any other Tory and the outcome would have been the same. The issue is a electoral and economic one.
- Dying Voter Base - The Thatcherite goon Heseltine mentioned this after the election result, 2 percent of the older electorate which is about 70 percent Conservative voting die and another 2 percent join(No surprise who this group is voting for). Their fecked in the long term which its why they are starting to push stuff like ID cards for voting.
- The Trouble With Capitalism Is That You Eventually Run Out Of Things To Privatise - The Tories are really hitting the acceptable line of just how much they privatise and cut without facing backlash from the public. We saw this in the last election with the whole dementia tax and offering nothing for anyone under 50 years old. The Tory Party really haven't much change since Thatcher, its financial capital above all else, squeeze the welfare state and attack trade unions. Well they've done that, there's no trade union power any more, the welfare state has been destroyed and financial capital shate its pants in 2008, what next ?
What gave and still gives them today around a 40% of the vote is being the party of Brexit. Brexit acts as the black glue from that awful Ridley Scott movie, its puts together a giant voter base between standard Tories voters who will always vote Tory regardless of what the party does(A socialist being in opposition also helps) and part of the 17 million people who voted for a no deal exit. The result is well this
- The Further Right Wing Of The Tory Party - Johnston, Davids and one who looks like he went into a David Cronenberg transmitter pod holding a 19th Century panting haven't came up with any sort of alternative model that could win over support in the same way Thatcher could. Just on their social views alone they would struggle to get pass todays Britain(People underestimate the amount of bad will the tories got for trying to being back fox hunting).
Movie reference = poster points
Good post. Makes a lot of sense.
Excellent JRM analogy too.
Or that Theresa May is the worst campaigner that most of us have seen in any of our lifetimes?
Sure. Same with @Pogue Mahone
But IMO both my explanation (which I don't believe) and the one about May are both less likely than Sweet Square's about the press, which explains things better than either one.
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Sweet Square’s point (re. election rulings of equivalent coverage) was clearly also correct. It’s a combination of that, JC being a good, passionate campaigner, and the emergence of the Maybot.
The explanation about the press never made any sense. Why would the press suddenly be more favourable to Corbyn in the run up to an election? If we’re to believe this right wing bias is endemic in the media then an imminent GE would, if anything, encourage them to demonise him even more than usual.
I see nothing in there which would stop “the media” doing the hatchet job on Jezza that Corbynites constantly accuse them of. All it might stop them doing is ignoring him.
Brexit also (bizarrely) stopped being a campaign issue, terrorist attacks occurred which highlighted cuts to police, and previous Labour voters that had been wary of Corbyn solidified against the Tories (and have now fallen away again).
Yeah, they were running IRA stories about him every other day, it seemed.
For me if we're going by his personal polling figures this ultimately just boils down to the fact that the public just...don't really like him. It appeared as if he'd reversed this in 2017 after a dodgy start in which he'd been vilified beyond belief, but the graph shows his brief popularity (if it can be called that) has basically fallen away again to the point where you've got someone who's been in charge of the main opposition party for four years while constantly maintaining negative polling. That's dreadful, however you want to look at it.
Yes, the media are dicks to him, but he hasn't exactly helped himself by basically not having a position on the single biggest issues that's impacted the country in decades. He's a solid campaigner when he puts his mind to it but leading an opposition party (or indeed one in government) involves having to do much, much more than that.
While he's arguably more toxic than Corbyn due to some of his past comments, I reckon McDonnell is probably more effective than Corbyn.
Yes, the media are dicks to him, but he hasn't exactly helped himself by basically not having a position on the single biggest issues that's impacted the country in decades. He's a solid campaigner when he puts his mind to it but leading an opposition party (or indeed one in government) involves having to do much, much more than that.
While he's arguably more toxic than Corbyn due to some of his past comments, I reckon McDonnell is probably more effective than Corbyn.
Thats my vote for labour locked in for the next election.
At least Chuka has been confirmed as the next Mayor of London though, glad that's sorted.
It was during the 2017 general election campaign and immediate aftermath.
I would love to see what would happen to his figures if he came out strongly remain and then ran a GE campaign based around that. Yes there are urban labour seats that are heavily leave, but I dont think he would lose those seats to the Tories, maybe a few yeras back they could have gone to UKIP but they're a farce now. I think on a remain campaign he could win outright majority. Also would be good to see the tow main parties take opposite sides of the brexit debate rather than the weird cross party splits, we're seeing at the moment. It speaks volumes that labour is still having a discussion over whether it is a leave or remain party.
Come on Jezza, super soft Brexit please.
the grouping is poor - but Id have thought a bit more practice rather than dismissal would be better
@sun_tzu putting in his application to the army as we speak
Doubt they get dismissed tbh, disciplined certainly but not dismissed.