I decided this probably belongs more in this thread than any other.
I really don’t understand why it seems so many in the Labour Party are angry at him and that this will destroy him. As it is, it seems that almost his entire Shadow cabinet has resigned or been fired and he’s about to get sacked as well.
Now, I’m not trying to defend him, but I’d like to know why. I keep hearing that he’s been a Euroskeptic and many “traditional” Labour supporters and “working class voters” opted for Leave
Ok, but he still supported Remain and I don’t see why he should be blamed for working class voters.
For that matter, isn’t the very reason to call a political party the “Labour Party” is because they’re supposed to represent the working classes?
Anyway could someone explain why he is being blamed for a referendum he didn’t support and for results he opposed?
There have always been plenty of those in the upper echelons of Labour for the pretext to get the knives out for Corbyn and now they have it. I think where he’s run into problems is that he did not take that much of a central role in the remain campaign and the campaigning he did was fairly tepid, and it did not help he was known to be personally ambivalent towards the EU. Why this could spell the end for Corbyn is that a key part of his support were young new/grassroot members, many of were passionately in the remain camp. If Corbyn’s perceived role in Brexit is enough to dislodge a significant portion of this support then a candidate from the more pro-EU New Labour camp might be able to beat him in a leadership challenge.
The following is not a perfect analogy but it shall do: imagine the US having a referendum on abortion, the anti-abortion side winning, and it’s widely suspected the leading Democrat of the day had not campaigned hard enough for the pro choice side. The EU is that important to most Labour Parliamentarians.
He probably couldn’t have made a difference, given his extreme weaknesses as a political communicator, so it’s not like he fumbled an otherwise sure opportunity. People are just enraged that he tacitly supports Brexit and was content to give such a non-performance for remain.
He’s a man of integrity, but he’s not a politician in any meaningful sense of the word (perhaps those two things are related). It meant he had no way of manoeuvring his way into a credible performance over Brexit, so ended up looking quite cynical and aloof over it.
It’s the end of the line for him now - something I suspect he will privately be quite happy about. Back to the back benches and the echo chamber of protest politics where everyone in your circle agrees with you. Brexit is a meteor strike - it’s chaos and could mean a general election in months, so you can’t go into that with JC at the helm.
I don’t claim to be all that knowledgeable about UK politics, but my sense is that Corbyn isn’t being blamed for Brexit. Rather, my guess is that Corbyn is being blamed for not building successful coalitions and not successfully campaigning for ideas that are supported by Labour and that are in the UK’s interests. He seems a man full of passion, good intentions, and ideological purity, but that doesn’t mean he’s qualified to be a political leader who achieves political ends that are ultimately in the country’s broader interests.
I know that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t Bernie Sanders and the Labour Party isn’t the Democratic Party, but there are at least some parallels. And the Corbyn example is exactly why I couldn’t support Bernie Sanders. The U.S. needs his message and his energy, but being a president requires a different skill set than that of a gadfly.
I think it’s mostly just part of the backroom dealing that brought Corbyn to his leadership. He had been essentially a euroskeptic for ages, and part of the deal involved in him being Labour leader was he had to agree to support the EU. In exchange for that and a few other things, he gets to represent his British-Bernie Sanders style protest politics at the forefront of Labour and push for some issues near and dear to his heart.
By not being more vigorously pro-EU he basically is seen by some of the other leadership in Labour to have reneged on his side of the bargain. But most importantly he’s been shown to not be highly effective, and that’s probably the biggest problem. I don’t think Corbyn intentionally didn’t do much to help the Remain campaign, I think he just lacks the ability to be a strong advocate for something he doesn’t believe in that much. For example David Cameron has been a euroskeptic himself for ages, but more along the lines of “let’s negotiate a better deal with the EU”, he didn’t want to leave, particularly because he knew it would be the end of his political career. But Cameron was more than able to suppress some of the euroskepticism he’s expressed in the past to make a vigorous defense of EU membership.
While he’ll go down as the worst British PM probably since Chamberlain, Cameron at least is a form of politician that can do normal, expected politician things. Corbyn is coming up short on that.
Hard to know for sure, since the referendum itself doesn’t measure party support, and the opinion polls need to be treated with a degree of caution.
Still, the opinion polls are not entirely useless. This report from the polling organisation YouGov says that Labour supporters broke 75:25 in favour of “remain”, while Conservative supporters broke 44:56 towards “leave”. But that’s from last February; voting intentions could have changed, plus some of those who expressed voting intentions may not in fact have voted.
Ashcroft polls did fieldwork on 21-23 June. According to them, Labour broke 63:37 for remain, while Conservatives broke 42:58 for leave. Again, while some of the respondents had already voted when polled, some had not, and we don’t know what the breakdown is by party supporters who actually voted.
The day after Munich, Chamberlain met with several Captains of Industry and they decided on a plan for rearmament, the first serious industrial plan to do so. Large number of aircraft were ordered , including all of the Hurricanes and Spitfires which won the Battle of Britain. Chamberlain, never expected the Germans to stop at the Sudetenland.
Please do not insult old Neville by comparing him with Cameron.
In short, he is not a wartime consiglere which is exactly what labour need now.
He is weak and has been from the start. He was a different, grass roots face of labour that appealed to the core labour vote. That is why so many idealistic people instinctively voted for him. He has (by some measures) the strongest mandate of recent labour leaders. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that votes from the party faithful for your leadership translates into votes at a general election.
He has been anonymous during the EU debate and for an opposition leader that is frankly unforgiveable. Cameron, regardless of what you think of him, took a definite stand and the strong back and forth within the tory party was the least to be expected.
To extend the anology with Chamberlain…well, he was much maligned and vilified but pay note to what AK84 said. He realised he was not up to the job of unifying and driving a country entering a period of turmoil and I’ll take self-awareness over idealism any day.
Now a potential UK exit is not in the same ballpark as a war but Corbyn should recognise his deficiencies.
He has had most of his cabinet resign and frankly I’m not sure who he can replace them with. No other leader could survive that situation so I await the outcome with intrigue.
Of course this is just phase one of the story, even if he is forcibly ousted by a vote of no confidence he is still saying he will put his name forward on the ballot for re-election and rely on that membership mandate again! Fun and games. As with the exit vote generally I don’t think anyone knows how this sideshow is going to pan out.
Indeed. To borrow from a friend of mine, the job description for Labour Leader now reads:
Unite party
Win snap general election
Negotiate Brexit.
Corbyn hasn’t got it in him to do that job.
Of course, at this point you might ask who among the ranks of senior Labour figures is capable of doing that. To which I would answer, “Now, look, er, gosh, is that the time? Must dash.” But trying to find someone who can is better than sticking with someone who can’t.
And of course, saying “Cameron is the worst leader since X” can only be hyperbole. By just about every objective benchmark Britain is (was) doing well.
I think it was a terrible misjudgment to let the British people vote on something many know little about, and for that reason he goes from “good” leader in my view to “poor”.
But it would be strange for the public to see this as a great failure: giving them what they’ve asked for.
The pandemonium within our main political parties is reason enough to welcome the Leave victory on Thursday. For a political junkie such as myself this is so much fun! You cannot beat a good dose of political bloodletting.
Because the last time the Tories doublefucked themselves, Labour produced Tony Blair. Of whom no doubt plenty of people have plenty of viewpoints on his time in office, but at the time, was someone who took a situation where the government were shitting themselves repeatedly and made the opposition look like a plausible, exciting, realistic change. Corbyn has a politician’s dream; a government at each other’s throats and in disarray. So where is he?
I like a lot of his politics and he seems personally like a decent guy. But, and I don’t think this is a complaint I’ll make very often, he isn’t enough of a politician.
He is a good man but no leader not all of us can be. The Labour Party was founded to be the party of the working class, alas no longer, they are now the party of the champagne socialist. Many Labour voters are now voting UKIP they like the way UKIP fight local politics on local issues, there is no big stick telling councillors to toe the party line. For labour to return as a force in British politics they need to decide who they are, the Champaign Socialist or the like of the beast of Bolsover to whom I am politically opposed But I admire his outspoken and passionate style. The Labour party has a proud history and need to return to their roots to become the strong opposition that our country needs
