Ed Miliband barely lost in 2015 and stood down immediately. Corbyn could give 3/4 of a flying fuck about actually becoming PM, his goal from the get go was to purify Labour and drive out every evil Blairite. He was bent over and spanked on his bare ass last night. It’s time for him to pull up his trousers and go!
Yeah, it was, but that also means there’s no real comparison for standing down immediately in the same circumstances. I don’t think there’s been a leader of a political party that won an election with such a landslide so shortly after becoming leader, either. We are living in interesting times.
(Assuming we’re both talking in the UK within living memory, obvs. Otherwise there are probably dozens of examples of both but they don’t mean much for this conversation).
Though I’d strongly dispute that the loss was largely down to Corbyn’s personal attributes. The spread of votes makes that unlikely. It was Brexit.
Mrs McGinty - one of the things that really annoyed me about the media was exactly that superiority complex, especially in the Brexit referendum. But the thing is that a lot of those commentators aren’t Labour at all, they’re LibDem or undecided. Supposedly left wing newspapers like the Guardian hated Corbyn and talked down to working class people at the same time.
Another interesting idea was that the old mining towns have got fed up with being told to feel sorry for themselves. Thatcher won, and while the rest of the country has moved on, Labour has continued to treat them as little more than charity cases and reliable loci of anti-Tory sentiment. From this perspective, voting for both Brexit and the Tories who promise it represents a break from stasis. Since the Tories keep ending up in power anyway, there is a sense that at least those towns will have someone in government who has to give a shit what happens there, and who will be motivated to press for something more aspirational than mere sympathy.
And they might even be right. Having won off their backs, Johnson will have it high on his list of priorities to be seen as delivering tangible benefits to those places before the next election. The Tories can’t win in the big cities - which is one reason why the urban poor are the people most endangered by this result - but there are certainly ways in which they can promote new economic activity in the towns that turned blue this time.
Did he promise to bring coal mining back? 
There’s no need to improve neglected northern towns though; just convince them, yet again, that the real problem is anything except failed Thatcherite trickle-down economics. Job done.
You’re absolutely right that it goes way beyond Labour, and that Lib Dems were equally culpable. The thing is, though, it’s not and will never be their constituency. They weren’t chasing those votes. Labour was.
On the Guardian, I’m afraid you’re just reading the half of the story that fits with the Corbynite excuse. Both in terms of its writers and those who comment on their pieces, the paper has been quite finely balanced between pro- and anti-Corbyn perspectives. And on both sides there have been those who talked down the leave voters, and those who appealed for a more considered approach.
From the perspective of the working class leave voter, the distinction between the two groups matters little. But when you combine the general vibe with Corbyn’s North London worldview, his waffling indecision on brexit, and his life-long anti-patriotism, what you end up with is something close to a perfect storm of perceived condescension.
There’s some truth in your first paragraph. Nobody likes being taken for granted.
The Tories won’t suddenly start helping out those communities, although it’d be nice to think they might. They don’t even make any effort to help long-lasting working class Tory strongholds in the South East, many of which used to be industrial, like most of the towns along the Thames estuary.
Is that the same Guardian that’s been publishing Owen Jones, Ellie Mae O’Hagan and Dawn Foster for years? Not to mention the other Corbyn outriders?
This is true though, the Guardian has never been a paper aimed at the working class
This is far too reductionist.
For one thing, Thatcherite economics are not the sole cause of their problems. That shit has been in force everywhere, but these towns have suffered far more than the rest of the country, while the reliably Tory-voting towns in the midlands and south have mostly done quite nicely out of it.
For another thing, the voters in those towns aren’t stupid. They know the Tories aren’t on their side by instinct. Mistrust of their intentions is still in full force. Street interviews I heard today frequently featured something to the effect of “brexit + corbyn = reluctantly give the blues a chance, but stand ready to vote the bastards right back out again if they don’t deliver”.
My wife’s family live around there, and from what I’ve seen the towns along the estuary are brutal if you’re in genuine poverty - the cost of housing being the main problem - but most people are in fact pretty comfortable.
The Tories are never going to give a shit about the poor. But they are very much inclined to help those with aspirations to move from the working class to the middle class, and Thatcherite economics allowed a hell of a lot of people in those southern towns to do so.
As much as you and I might wish them to vote with more altruistic reasons in mind, can you really blame people in those northern towns for having those same aspirations for themselves?
For all the things I despise about Blairism, one thing it got absolutely right was the notion that winning over ‘Mondeo Man’ is key to achieving power in this country.
“His dad voted Labour, he said. He used to vote Labour, too. But he’d bought his own house now. He’d set up his own business. He was doing very nicely. “So I’ve become a Tory” he said. In that moment, he crystallised for me the basis of our failure… His instincts were to get on in life. And he thought our instincts were to stop him. But that was never our history or our purpose.”
This was how Blair explained his view of what had been wrecking Labour chances during the 80s and 90s.
With the scheduled end of this parliament due to mark a half-century in which he is the only non-Tory to win a general election, Labour probably ought to stop focusing on the many awful things Blair did, and start digging out the positive lessons his successes offer.
Swinson: “so sorry I couldn’t get them re-elected”
Corbyn: “very sad for colleagues who have lost their seats”
Both useless, but at least Jo has the guts to take responsibility for it.
Corbyn and his entourage really need to fuck off now, and stop trying to rebuild Labour in his image.
The party needs to be of the left. That’s a given. But his brand of leftism is a total crock, and offensive with it.
Interesting thing a friend said to me:
One stark but largely underappreciated difference between Johnson and Corbyn is their response to criticism. Corbyn takes it personally whereas Johnson treats it as an occupational hazard.
The effect is that Johnson rides past his most egregious personal failings, while Corbyn gets bogged down in his.
Johnson runs away from criticism.
I’m despairing and simply questioning what is the future of democratic politics after this. The Tories have lied and broken the law and trampled over fair play to a degree I’ve not seen in history and they’ve been rewarded for it. What’s to stop this becoming the norm?
People being bored of Brexit does not change the fact that it will crush this country despite what they want to believe about it.
It seems people yearn to be lied to and rewarded those who say lies they like.
So what is the future of British democracy, because I can’t see one.
I will try and find it but buried in the Guardian live feed yesterday was a poll on why people had not voted Labour.
The top reason? Even amongst Labour voters who turned tory? Corbyn. Second was Brexit. That is exactly in line with what I’ve heard, with what labour activists and canvassers have heard with what the vox pops has been saying with the leadership popularity polls have been saying.
If that many people tell you something, in so many ways, over such a long period of time and back it up with actual voting then it is probably wise to listen.
Corbyn and his fans have yet to acknowledge that fact, is it any wonder that they lost?
It is my go-to and I apologise in advance but I was reminded of this Mitchell and Webb sketch.
heres the poll that I saw yesterday, do people still think Corbyn wasn’t the main reason?
I don’t, and I can’t stand the bloke - he’s the easiest target in the world to take the blame, though.
He polled 40% of the vote in 2017 - that is an electable person in anyone’s language. Don’t care how bad Teresa May was, this indicates the current narrative that JC was despised on the doorstep up and down the country cannot be true (unless you’re saying he’s changed in the intervening 2 years - JC, change, genuine LOL).
When you’ve got ex-miners on benefits queuing up to vote Tory in the NE, after 9 years of harsh and increasingly incompetent Tory government, the current PM a punchline to a joke, this tells you very powerful forces are afoot that are far far bigger than Corbyn. Honestly think prime Tony Blair would have gotten rinsed last Thursday.
Labour’s national constituency was rent asunder by brexit (plus fifty odd seats in Scotland are gone, which devestates their political arithmetic). There is no trite ‘just support leave’ solution to this - you’d need some sort of LBJ political operator to strategise a way out, and then a genius communicator like Blair to take it to the people.
So it’s easy to talk about JC’s failings, and it would make for a very long thread, but labour were steam-rollered by events IMHO. JC merely the salt in a gaping red wound.
I think the only way to know what people think is to ask them, that is what the poll did and the results do show that he was by far the biggest reason why people didn’t vote labour.
I’m not sure what other cite would carry greater wieght, what would convince you that he was the biggest factor?