The company you keep matters.
Standing on a stage with someone legitimises their worst actions, and failing to call them out makes you complicit.
I’ve got far more respect for Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness than I have for Corbyn. They owned their choices. He never has.
Speaking as an outsider, it seems to me Labour lost because they tried to straddle the fence on the most important issue, Brexit. Their lukewarm attitude lost them a lot of the most ardent Brexiters in their party. And the same totally failed to bring over any similar number of Remainers from the Tories.
Corbyns weaknesses probably helped there. Tory voters tend to prioritize the economy and Corbyn as leader raised the the threshold a lot for movement from the right to the left, while lowering it going the other way.
The sum total was a transfer of voters from left to right, especially in heavily Brexit areas.
These are from a couple of days ago but they have been niggling at me and I must respond.
The Lib Dem vote increased by over a million. They increased their vote share in almost every constituency where they stood (Except Ms Swinson’s, obviously).
She lost her seat to the anti-Brexit SNP.
Yes, Jo Swinson was disappointing but this narrative that the Lib Dems lost badly is seriously misleading.
They were the natural party of those who wanted Remain - once Remain is moot (or has turned into Rejoin) those people may not have reason to stay with the LD’s.
The SNP were also strongly Remain, so that advantage was neutralised in Scotland.
The thing I never understood about the LibDems this campaign season was the attempt to make this a personality contest. Branding them “Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats” only works if people like Jo Swinson specifically, and there doesn’t seem to have been any evidence of that (quite the contrary, in fact). Paddy and Vince could have done it, but Jo was a no-go.
If I had to guess, I’d say they did it to draw attention to the fact that she was neither Boris Johnson nor Jeremy Corbyn.
I don’t think it worked (as you say, she did not seem terribly popular and the Lib Dems only gained 1,300,000 votes) but I think that’s what they were shooting for.
A great article from Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP and son of former Labour leader Neil Kinnock.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/12/nightmare-friday-13-december-needs-shake-my-party-action
May be paywalled, may require registration. The New Statesman is a very temperamental website when accessed out of the U.K.
Kinnock’s points are quit blaming everyone (just like I’ve mentioned) The incessant whining about Corbyn media bias and rigged polls gets really old. Just like a football manager who wants to always blame the referees.
Second, quit making policy to just appeal to urban elites. There’s still a lot of Labour support in the north of England that doesn’t necessarily want what the wonks think up in a trendy Shoreditch cafe.
This is why I want Corbyn’s resignation NOW. I know what he’s doing, trying to pull every string to make sure a Corbyn clone is the next leader. Labour needs a 100 percent rejection of Corbynism to be a major political party.
This is so true. Swinson was a disaster from the moment she won the leadership. Her acceptance speech was a study in bad identity politics, focusing on how important an achievement it was for her - as a woman - to get the job.
The British public don’t really give a shit about the gender of our leaders. There are obviously gender-specific expectations of any given politician - we always look for recognisable patterns in people - but simply being male or female isn’t any kind of consideration at this stage, and any politician who makes it so is asking to get their arse handed to them.
My husband finally received his ballot today. WHAT THE FUCK.
So we shouldn’t blame the referees even when we can openly see one team paying them off?
Then you pay them more or have a player take the referee out.
Corbyn looks so smug during the State Opening. He should have already stepped down and be hanging his head in shame on the far back benches where he used to sit and belongs now. He wouldn’t even have to wear a necktie!
And if they send one of ours to the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue. It’s the Westminster way. Got it.
Of course he’s smug. He and his mates are going to spend the next three months pocketing salaries that most of the rest of us could only dream of, despite having failed so badly at their jobs that any other organisation would have sacked them already.
It’s increasingly clear that the whole thing has been a self-serving act from the start. They have absolutely no shame about rinsing every last penny from the party, and clearly do not give the slightest shit about either Labour or the people it is supposed to represent.
I have no love at all for Corbyn and his mates but I don’t think this is right.
I think it’s more likely that he is so convinced of the righteousness of his cause that he doesn’t trust anyone else to not fuck it up. He is staying (and keeping his cronies in place) to make sure the flame stays alive.
I don’t doubt this is what they’re telling themselves. But I think that’s just a comfortable delusion they’ve settled into, when in fact it’s the money and status they don’t want to let go. The underlying truth is they’re all finished as soon as this ends. In contrast to other losing teams, they are all too old and their failures too extreme for them to have any future in public life, and they are too strongly anti-capitalist to have lucrative private-sector opportunities ahead of them.
One of the biggest mistakes people made in giving so much support to Corbyn was imagining him to be on some higher level of purity than other politicians. It was bullshit from the start, and his efforts to cultivate that image over and above the interests of the party and its voters have revealed just how cynical and selfish he really is.