Yes. But remember he was also the Labour leader in 2017 where Labour won 262 seats. So Labour lost 71 seats while the Conservatives gained 49 seats and the Scottish Nationalist Party gained 20 seats [based on the exit polls–the final results will be a little different]. Labour’s Brexit policy was probably a major factor–a lot of traditional Labour voters want to leave the European Union.
Thank you so much, Corbynites. Every single one of you should hang your heads in shame for what you’ve done to this country.
The people of the UK loathe Johnson and the Tories, but when the only alternative is a pompous, moralising circle-jerk with overtones of jew-bashing and neo-stalinism…
And don’t you dare try and blame Corbyn’s critics or the unfairness of the media. Working through and around that shit is the whole god-damned game. Your man had the podium, and it was your lot’s job to bring people on side. Instead, all you’ve done is tell people to fuck off and vote Tory.
Five more years… I feel like I might actually puke.
Think of Bernie Sanders on steroids. He’s got a devoted cult bordering on fanaticism. I texted a friend in the UK who poured his heart into this election. He still thinks there’s a chance.
One bittersweet advantage of choosing a leader separately: even if there were a candidate for President that were literally as bad as this quote, I could still in clear conscience vote for them against Trump because they would not be able to enact their agenda without control of the Senate, whereas if you have a loathsome party leader win in a landslide, they by definition have a working majority in a Strong PM system.
Labour can sit a fair way to the left of where they were under Blair and still be very much electable.
What they can’t do is treat everyone who’s less than 100% in lock step as if they’re scum of the earth, or insist that the most unpopular major leader in British political history is literally the only person in the country suitable to be Prime Minister.
I’ve been very restrained about how I’ve talked about Corbyn and his followers over the past few years, purely because I am so desperate to be rid of the Tories, and only Labour can do that.
The gloves are off now, though. They have behaved appallingly. It’s an absolute disgrace to see the party reduced to this nasty, petty, vindictive personality cult. All the good people I know who initially supported Corbyn have long since turned against him, voting Labour in spite of his pathetic excuse for leadership simply because our electoral system offers no other choice. Hell, if Labour had made even the slightest effort to campaign in my own constituency, I would have given them my vote without a second thought. And if people like me, feeling like I do, were still prepared to vote for them, that shows just how bad the rest of the country must see them to receive such a kicking off a weasel like Johnson.
Part of the problem is that Labour promotors and supporters -especially at the lower levels - have been shrill, and strident informing anyone who cares to listen that non-Corbynites are rich, immoral, have no conscience, are old and are stupid.
What they have done is appeal to people just like themselves and very much insulted those who are not.
You don’t win democratic power that way, and none of us were ever fooled into believing that a ‘peoples vote’ on Brexit was anything other than a vehicle to find some way not to carry out the majority vote on the issue - plus the added prospect of many months more of Euro negotiations, largely in bad faith on our part by a Remain party dressed up as going through the motions of Leave, at the end of which would be a vote for another vote for more years of uncertainty.
The magic money tree that Corbyn produced was never going to be convincing - the last Labour admin did us no favours on their spendthrift policies so an unrealistic set of promises was seen through rather easily.
I will be interested to see just how much support Labour has lost in its heartlands - the ones they have taken for granted, I predict that the Conservative vote in its safe areas has likely held up well and its the Labour heartlands that have swung it.
I think Labour has become more and more (especially so under Corbyn’s rule) London Labour
I really, really, REALLY hate the world right now.
And anyone on here who actually thinks this result is a good thing, I do literally hate you, because you are supporting policies that kill people. That’s not an overstatement. It’s very easy to sit back and talk about niceties but Tory policies will kill people. Fuck it all.
I know fuck all about UK politics, but it does seem like Corbyn is Sanders on steroids, and that the right wing in Britain has achieved the same kind of ironic success, succeeding with blue collar workers as a result of dissatisfaction on trade and immigration.
Wow, that exit poll is massive.
I put it down to the Love Actually ad.
The policies of the last Labour government also killed people - they were Iraqis and around 100k of those are now history, and your point is ?
Not to incessantly drag this discussion back across the Pond but I have a bad feeling that this result, like Brexit in 2016, is foreshadowing what is to come here. A few years ago, they scored a surprising victory; now they’re trying to normalize their brand of nasty nationalism for a generation. I guess at least we in the US can make ourselves feel a wee bit better with victories in the popularly-elected legislature, but nothing suggests that such successes or swings are a long-term trend. And with Trump coming close to putting two trade deals to bed, he appears poised to survive self-inflicted damage.
So get a better leader and make a better argument. That undercurrent of hate from Corbyn, his front bench and supporters has done nothing to bring people over to labour. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t warned.
I’m in a bit of a business-oriented bubble as far as who I talk politics with. But I know several Labour inclined voters who hated Corbyn and McDonnell’s economic plans. It’s fair to say that Blair was centre-left. I think you’re probably correct that a left-center-left (kind of like west-south-west) candidate with charisma could have won for Labour. But Corbyn was all the way left. Presuming the exit polls are accurate, I think Labour lost because they had genuinely bad economic policies. There are other factors including Brexit and antisemitism. But, if Labour has indeed lost the election, it’s because voters rejected their policies.
You can hate the people who really understand what it means, but don’t hate on the majority who are just ignorant of what’s really going on out there. That information is hard to get through the filters.
And that’s why my own rage is directed not at the Tories - they are what they are, and will always be so - but at the Corbynites. Instead of looking to bring people onside through engagement and dialogue, they’ve chosen to make themselves feel all warm and virtuously pure by pushing people away, prioritising the psychological benefits of moral certainty and tribal coherence over the societal benefits of actual change.
I will also add something else, UK folk are somewhat dogged and determined, push them, try to frighten them and they will just dig in out of sheer defiance and push back against you hard.
Labour should realise the British character is that we do not respond well to scare tactics, it didn’t work well during the Brexit campaign as the Conservatives found out to the cost of Theresa May - they assumed the project fear would scare people into voting remain.
Labour had pretty much done the same thing on NHS and some other issues - its been project fear for months now - and we all know that there is a huge amount of hyperbole.
If our politicians try to scare us into making a decision that suits them - we simply won’t do it, and we will bite back and we will keep on biting until it hurts you - no matter how it hurts us - we can deal with pain but in the end you will hurt more than us - so don’t push us. We DO NOT SCARE.
I don’t think that any particular policy was too far to the left for the public to stomach, or even that the general thrust of the programme as a whole was excessively radical.
But I do think that the headline policies were a sack of shit, ranging from the unnecessary through the barely relevant to the downright impossible. It feels like they just sat down and wrote a wish list of things that all good Corbynites are supposed to want, and added a couple they knew would catch headlines, when what they needed was a coherent vision of reforms aimed at the concerns of average voters.
Very good point here. They oversold the dangers of Conservative stewardship of the NHS, but also undersold the benefits of Labour spending. It was all about stopping the Evil Tories, when it should have been about more doctors, more nurses, shorter waiting lists, better care.
Nope, because those who voted for the Tories voted for a really right wing version of Tories and everyone on here who’s British knows that.
Johnson is openly racist and sexist and says things like children of working women are more likely to be muggers. He lies, lies, lies, and lies again, and does it so much that it’s hard to keep up. He hid from almost almost all interviews in this election.
He copied Trump, and Trump won. They even both do the stupid hair thing.
Umunna wouldn’t have won, Smith wouldn’t have won, Cooper wouldn’t have won, no Labour leader would have won, because when people are literally choosing a person like Johnson, they are not choosing on policies, they’re consciously choosing someone who they know is a vile bastard.
And every single person who voted Tory voted to make my life much, much more difficult. I do hate them, because it would honestly be a little weird not to hate people like that, right?
And they’ll turn up at hospital and demand care and complain about not getting it and they fucking voted for it.