Tuition fees were just the tip of the iceberg. LibDems reneged pretty much the entirety of their manifesto, enabling the Tories to carry out savage budget cuts that disproportionately hit social policies, the poor and the helpless, while doing little to improve public finances. It’s not just millennials who abandoned the LibDems; it’s pretty much the entirety of their left wing - people like Cory, people they had picked up after Blair clearly betrayed the mandate he was elected with. Without their left wing, the LD basically lost all those constituencies where they would have been the leftist alternative to Tories, all but ensuring the current Conservative majority.
In fact, Corbyn is good news for everyone except Tories: Labour activists will be energized to campaign in marginals where they’re competitive against Tories, with policies that are clearly different and a guy with a pretty clean past; and LibDems should pick up a good amount of “moderates” they need to win in constituencies too right-wing for Labour to even be competitive. What a lot of people don’t consider is that Corbyn doesn’t need a landslide majority to get in; he just needs enough to ensure the Tories cannot get a clean majority. He has to ensure anti-Tory voters are not split in all marginals Tories are contesting, so they don’t have a majority; since nobody will ever ally with them (especially not after seeing how they treated the LibDems), you either get a Labour-led coalition government (which he’d probably relish, playing the “reasonable” guy between Greens and SNP) or you get a Tory minority government that can be easily conditioned and is destined to fail.
Yep. And for me, at least, I jumped right (or left, rather) over the decidedly uninspiring Miliband-led Labour and their anti-immigration mugs, and voted Green. Which I really shouldn’t have, because I was voting in a Con/Lab marginal that Labour should have taken back, but even with the sitting MP standing down, the Tories increased their majority.
If a UK General Election were to be restricted to people who watch Question Time, it could be held in a single pub.
Also bullying and nasty, which is something she clearly expresses in posture and words. Theresa May exemplifies the Nasty Party of yore: all cruelty and backstabbing in Westminster, and no idea on where to lead the country. The proof is that, two months after getting the job, the only new policy her cabinet proposed is… the return of grammar schools, an extremely unpopular policy that quickly turned into a massive own-goal and PR failure. All the fawning around May’s charisma will soon morph into stories about “how could she get it so spectacularly wrong?”.
Bloody ironic, given it was her going on about that in the first place that drew attention to her. But yeah, she exemplifies the authoritarian aspect of the Conservative party.
Her what now? She’s awful. Johnson is their only charismatic MP, even with all his many, many faults.
Whatever is being fabricated today by pundits paid to sell papers; the actual attribute does not really matter, what matters is to draw May as the Second Coming of Thatcher. Once she’s utterly self-discredited, all this fawning will come to haunt her. Pundits don’t mind, they can write everything and its opposite day-in day-out.
It’s rather weird having a political leader who doesn’t seem to believe in focusing on winning elections (preferring to build a Venezuelan-style insurgency movement instead).
The planned 2018 boundary changes are predicted to result in Labour losing around 35 seats, and Labour doesn’t look likely at the moment to regain the seats it lost in Scotland.
With the Conservatives polling at between 6%-14% ahead of Labour, it looks like the Conservatives will win the 2020 election and therefore be in power until 2025.
In an American election the style/personality contrast would make a huge difference. Unfortunately. As parliamentary elections are more local, maybe it is less important, though at the last UK national election the fact that Milliband seemed to be ferret on oxycodone did seem to have a national effect.
(In the 1987 British General Election my local MP was a worm who ran on the “I’ll do whatever Mistress Thatcher tells me to” platform. He won handily, despite having no ideas, personality, looks, or anything else.)
Elections are won mostly on the marginal seats, typically swing constituencies in the Midlands and Essex: Loughborough, Warwickshire North, Thurrock,and Sherwood. A win would require a lot of semi-affluent people to vote hard/real Left.
The move left strategy has been tried before - Michael Foot in the 1980s. It did not go well for Labour.
There’s likely to be rather fewer of them in 2020, and a lot more people angry about losing their jobs. Do you think when it comes to it they’ll remember that they voted Leave? No, they will blame the party in power. They’ll suddenly remember they were lied to by Johnson and Gove.
(That’s also a hypothetical, but I just wrote it to point out that from here on we are in very uncharted territory and nobody knows what will really happen, though the Japanese have gone into print on their views.)
I agree and Foot was relentlessly lied about - like Corbyn. However, between then and now something has changed. Thatcherism was the end of deference. In the 1980s many people still believed in the established social order. Now only old people do that, and they’re dying off/losing interest. If Thatcher and co. were around today, they would be mocked. Thatcher’s silly voice and hairstyle would be laughed at on Twitter. The rumours about her drunkenness would be being confirmed by Wikileaks, who would also be leaking Dennis Thatcher’s tax affairs.
I fear you may be right, but arguing about the 1980s is like being a general preparing for the last war. The gap between then and now is greater than that between WW1 and WW2.
Livingstone (and Galloway) are marginal figures in the Labour Party; the Party did not want him as London mayor because of his colourful behaviour. He is Labour’s Boris Johnson, good for column centimetres but not a guide to the membership as a whole. Generally, anti-Semitic incidents are not reported in the national press because that tends to cause copycats. You would need to read the Jewish press [edit: research] to find out what happens. [edit: anecdotal personal experience deleted.]
I think either I’ve misunderstood the thrust of your post; or you’ve understood the thrust of mine My point, made in maybe a rather vague manner, is that you can’t trust surveys as you don’t know who financed them and so who set the tone of the questions.
I’m a Corbyn supporter; even if he is “unelecteable” (and, as you say, only the General Election can truly answer that), I support him because he at least brings a slightly left-wing agenda to parliament. The fact that he remains popular despite pretty much every media outlet in the UK throwing crap at him (including the Guardian), might be a sign that he can stick the course.
With changes to election boundaries, and the pro-right-wing atmosphere generated by the media, I’m expecting that Tory rule will continue to grind our country to bits in the name of “Austerity”. However, I’m hoping for Corbyn to pull of a John Major and flummox all of the pundits.
My point, made in maybe a rather vague manner, is that you can’t trust surveys as you don’t know who financed them and so who set the tone of the questions.