That goes back to his stuck-in-time attitude. Thatcher switched from support to opposition for EU membership in large part because the super-state recognised labour rights to a degree* that repulsed the Tories. But from his statements and behaviour, it seems Corbyn never got that message back in the 1980s.
It didn’t matter because this election was about one thing and one thing only, and the old ditherer either didn’t have the guts or – more likely – the inclination to make a clear statement on it. Instead, as Frankie Boyle said, he instructed the party to read poetry at an orgy.
I can definitely agree on his nice ideals (which moved the party back in the proper direction) and his crap leadership skills (in general if not in the specifics). He’s yesterday’s man, if you measure the hours in two-year increments – the wrong leader at the worst possible time.
[* a very small degree – acknowledging that workers are humans worthy of dignity rather than cogs in a capitalist’s machine is enough to repulse a Tory – but a degree none-the-less]
In better news the DUP have lost 3 of their seats in NI, 1 to Sinn Fein, 1 to SDLP and the other to Alliance. All thanks to their voting pact. If Labour had been willing to work the LDs and the Greens we could’ve prevented 10-20 seats going to the Tories (LDs would’ve picked up seats in London, Labour would have retained more in the north), it wouldn’t have been enough though, Labour have only themselves to blame.
Edit: DUP didn’t lose a seat to Alliance, it used to be an Independant Unionist seat, but it would’ve gone to them without the pact.
I’ve seen people describing Corbyn as being at least one generation out of date, and that seems accurate enough to me. Also, he was an opposition leader who seemed unwilling to do much opposing, because of his own Brexiteer leanings.
How fucked? Indescribably, infinitely, absolutely, unutterably, desperately fucked.
Long rant deleted - it was becoming incoherent, I’m so full of despair and anger today. But nobody who voted Tory in any of those previously safe Labour strongholds will ever get any sympathy from me when they start bleating about how they’ve been shafted - as they certainly will be, one way or another. Whatever befalls them now, well they can just suck it up, with zero sympathy, as far as I am concerned. Every time these voters object to some newly invented fuckwittery by the Tories that threatens to harm them, I hope they enjoy being told how they gave him a mandate to do whatever the fuck he likes.
A man who doesn’t give a fuck about anything at all - beyond himself - has just been given permission to do whatever the fuck he likes. It’s terrifying.
This was being actively mooted on the Today programme this morning (BBC Radio 4). The DUP have lost those seats and are now fewer than Sinn Fein. Boris has no need of their votes anyway.
Acid test: will Rees-Mogg be allowed back out of his Somerset hidey-hole and into a new cabinet?
See same strategy in action against “The Squad” here. If you support justice, or even recognition of the the humanity of, Palestinians, you are obviously one step away from advocating for a final solution. This is the insidious nature of Trump’s executive order about classifying, in effect, Jewishness as a national origin (Israeli) so that you cannot criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic. Stupid timeline.
This! The old ‘anti-zionism is/is not anti-semitism’ argument strikes again. Most leaders anywhere are afraid of being too positive in defending the Palestinians simply because it leads down a road where anti-semitism becomes an accusation. And just like Brexit enabled the (admittedly significant) minority to start abusing anyone with an Eastern-European accent, or non-pink skin colour, and so on, whereas previously they’d have kept it to themselves, Corbyn’s criticisms of Israel and sympathies for the Palestinians, made a small but significant minority of Labour members think it was ok to let their anti-semitism show. Corbyn is not anti-semitic. But he is an enabler - indirectly, as above and directly by not dealing with it when it started bubbling up.
OK, as a USAian, I cannot help but see this in that context. I will lay serious odds that there was some Russian psyops supporting BJ, since anything that weakens the EU works to Putin’s gain. We in the US need to recognize this as a shot across our collective bow. The polls did not seem to see this coming, just as the polls here seem to see Trump losing in a landslide. Apathy and laziness are our most dangerous enemies and Putin’s machine will try to push that as much as possible to keep their agent in office.
Whilst it is likely the Putin brigade did try to interfere here, with oppositions like the Labour Party, he hardly needed to do much at all. But many now conveniently British citizens are former Russian citizens who donate a lot to the Tories, so there’s no breaking of electoral/donation rules there, is there? (Yeah, right!)
And then there’s that Parliamentary Committee report Boris refused to publish before the election…
How fucked? NI will leave. Scotland will have a referendum and leave. London will stop being a world financial hub in short order, and its real estate market will collapse. American drug companies will make Brits pay American drug prices while Bojoke dismantles the NHS
But at least you will replace curry with fish-and-chips, a dish brought to Britain by Jewish refugees
And then he campaigned for them after they tweeted anti-semitic tropes.
Sara Gibbs – the very funny comedy writer who wrote the Medium piece linked upthread – is getting a lot of post-election hate on her twitter feed. The thing is, by not having a useful stand on Brexit, the Labour leadership made it much much easier for people appalled by Corbyn to vote LDP or Green or even Tory with a clear conscience. The reality is that Brexit is going to cause a huge economic mess that will exacerbate unemployment and force defunding of public and social infrastructure like hospitals and schools and pensions, and that would have happened with Brexit under a Labour government as well.
The issue is the size and scale of the mess. Labour would have negotiated a far less damaging (but still very damaging, of course) exit, to the extent possible, than Boris is ever likely to, unless he really does tell the ERG to fuck off and turns into a lover of EU regulatory standards.
Given his statements about a US trade deal, it is not yet clear which he will go for, but he cannot have both. Whichever way he jumps I cannot believe he has any intent to reach a close EU deal like the one Labour were after. And Labour would then have given us a vote on the deal.
No no, of course not, but the people who voted for these shits in areas of the country that have been held for generations by labour and have been directly ruined by thatcherism will be the ones who will suffer the most. As others have said here, i too will have no sympathy for those who fell for bozo’s serial lying and turned tory on the promise of something that cannot be delivered in anywhere near the short term. These are strong manufacturing areas and brexit’s tariffs are going to be ruinous for them and at the moment i am feeling incredibly depressed so my initial reaction is to lay the blame on those who voted for the leopards eating their faces.
We can only guess. Corbyn, after all, has decades of Euroskepticism at his core, and huge confidence that anything he believes is true and right and just. Johnson, by contrast, doesn’t really take anything seriously. The ideal would have been a left-wing coalition, but it is not even clear if that was possible with Corbyn at the helm.
In any event, I suspect many of the people who drifted away from Labour through dislike of one or another aspect of Corbynism might have stayed if an unambiguous remainer was at the head.
