The Tories are largely to blame for Brexit but Cornyn has revealed himself as a useless chocolate teapot of a politician when we need visionary leaders to step up.
Jeremy Corbyn - Not Not Labour Party(?), not a Communist (BBC)
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
Because those 2/3rds will carry on voting Labour but the 1/3rd who feel betrayed won't. Not that it works like that anyway but the early analysis dictated they'd lose a lot of key constituencies.
Arguably Corbyn should have taken that loss and hoped that the lost constituencies came back with his successor(s) but since they're all heavily remain I'm not sure this generation of Labour would be forgiven.
However I'm fairly confident taking a pure remain position wouldn't have made one bit of difference in parliament.
That doesn’t make much sense to me. Why would leavers be put off remain backing labour leadership but remainers be ok with one that is leave backing in all but name? In larger numbers too, since remainers are the majority. And if it’s to attract new/swing leave voters with no strong party affiliation, why wouldn’t they vote Tory or UKIP if Brexit means so much to them?
Voters might be dumb but not that dumb. Let’s not forget that firstly, it’s the party line that to break the impasse a 2nd referendum is required. Secondly, taking a “neutral” position, while the Tory party is effectively controlled by ERG and the de facto legal state is no-deal Brexit, means he’s backing no deal Brexit in all but name by not throwing everything behind the only viable alternative.
I don’t know what the math is based on, but the math I’ve seen places Corbyn bottom of the approval ratings with one of the lowest scores of all time among even historical leaders, mostly because of his handling of Brexit. And I don’t think a party leader has ever won a GE with such ratings. May is in the same doldrums but the Tories would never let her lead them to another election.
I dunno. It sounds more like made up math to validate Jezza’s world view to me.
I'd vote SNP if I could.
Why? Because Leavers are dogmatic simpletons, we know they follow a unique outlook.
I don't see many Labour remainers voting for the Tories any time soon.
Tbh, who really gives a shit? He wants brexit so there's not point of him being disingenuous about it.. There'll be a leadership election at some point in the future and we can start putting things tight.
Worth remembering in this discussion that, in safe Labour seats there was a swing to the Tories in 2017 precisely because they were seen as being more 'Brexit-y' than Labour. Votes that Labour lost to UKIP in 2015 in the North East went to the Tories in 2017. On that basis it's fair to assume that if Labour had gone full Remain before the snap election they'd had lost seats like Bishop Auckland and possibly Darlington and seen unprecedented challenges in places that used to be safe-seats. If, post-referendum, Corbyn had done what most people on here are trashing him for not doing, we'd currently have a massive Tory majority in Parliament and May could have gotten whatever old shit through the house.
Which isn't to say I'm not frustrated with how he's dealt with things since 2017, but ultimately he's banking on another election and he's assumed that the Tory strategy in that eventuality will be to chip away at the Leave-leaning section of Labour's base in the hopes that it loses them enough votes to swing a few seats blue. Given that I've been getting Tory targeted Facebook ads for months criticising Labour, my sitting MP and Corbyn for 'betraying Brexit', I'd say he's correct in that assumption. May being ousted would also increase the likelihood of a general election. I can understand therefore why he's not come out swinging for the peoples' vote, although if it came down to the wire and he didn't vote for it I'd be as critical as anyone.
But they don't need to vote Tories; they could vote Lib Dems or not vote at all. Labour are the opposition, not the government, they need to motivate their supporters to the polls in the case of an election and swing any neutrals to their favour. By playing neutral, you achieve none of those things. The popularity ratings don't lie.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...next-prime-minster-odds-bookies-a8834791.html
Corbyn bookmakers' favourite to become next prime minister as Theresa May's Brexit crisis deepens.
You know how bookmakers work, right? They balance the books by adjusting the odds based on the bets they receive. If I go and put £5m down on Corbyn winning the election, I can change the bookies odds while in no way or shape increasing the probability of Corbyn actually winning the elections.
This misunderstanding of odds has been explained several times, but here we go again:
The odds you have quoted are for several leaders, Corbyn is favourite because being a settled leader he is the only Labour choice, whereas there are several Tory choices due to a likely change of leadership. If you look at the odds for a party winning, as below, the Tories are odds-on favourites. It is extremely unusual for an opposition to be so far behind at this stage of the electoral cycle, and the most likely explanations are that the government is regarded as being much better than usual, or the opposition much worse. Take your pick.
https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-uk-general-election/most-seats
To be fair to yourself the Independent headline is totally misleading, but then again if you're going to post it then you should really look into it a bit more
https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-prime-minister
He's 4th favourite by the looks of it
Gove 4/1
Liddington 4/1
Johnson 8/1
Corbyn 10/1
Perhaps more telling are the following two set of odds for the next general election
Most seats
https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-uk-general-election/most-seats
Conservative ahead of labour
And overall majority odds
https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-uk-general-election/overall-majority
No overall majority (hung parliament)11/10
Conservatives 15/8
Labour 4/1
I can't agree with that assumption. In 2017 essentially both two major parties were endorsing Brexit and obviously Tories with Bojo, Davies, JRM and the like were more Brexit-y. Therefore staunch Brexiteers and swing voters went for them instead. So how does the strategy of being pro-Brexit or neutral work then? The Tories swallowed the whole UKIP vote in 2017 anyway and won the election.
As an aside it's worth mentioning that, ironically, if the Tories had a achieved a clear majority they wouldn't have gone to bed with the DUP. So their MP base would likely have been more moderate and the influence of ERG likely diminished. With whatever implications that would have about May's red lines and ability to get her deal passed through parliament instead of us heading off a cliff.
Now you're also ignoring the fact that there also swing voters who are remainers and would have coalesced around Labour had their stance been pro-Remain. Labour could have carved up a piece of the Lib Dem or SNP vote if they had offered a pro-remain alternative. For example, I generally vote Lib Dem but I'm also aware they are far from winning an election. And if in 2017 Labour had became the pro-Remain alternative to the Tories I would have gladly backed them because that issue is significant enough that it warrants casting a vote where it matters most. But they didn't, so I persisted with Lib Dems who were the only ones staunchly pro-Remain.
This is anecdotal, obviously, but so is the assumption that backing Remain would have been even worse for Labour.
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The report is also old, since the leaks emerged last night that May could soon be gone three Tory MP's have moved ahead of Corbyn (Gove, Lidington and Johnson) which obviously makes sense because that would take place before any general election. The link you've given is the more relevant one, who would win the most seats, and the polls do suggest that the Tories are a reasonable way ahead at the moment which I find inexplicable and depressing, despite not being a particularly big fan of Corbyn's, given how much of a shambles the Tories are at the moment and how damaging their government has been over the last 9 years.
Given Corbyn's awful position on Brexit has allegedly been a way of boosting the electoral math in his favour, that's a pretty grim portent. Especially given the government he's opposing is literally inept.
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
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.