Apparently, Corbyn is just that bad.
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Possibly that this wasn’t so much a pro-Johnson vote as an anti-Corbyn one. The Tories didn’t do especially well.
The Guardian:
But it was less of a vindication for Boris Johnson than the emphatic ultimate result might appear: his party is on course to win about 43.4% of the vote – just ahead of Theresa May’s 42.34% in 2017 – a result reflected in seat after seat where the Conservative vote often increased only slightly.
Instead, it was Labour’s vote that slumped from the famous 40% close finish in 2017 to 32.6% this time around.
So the Tories didn’t win, Corbyn lost.
That could be what Corbyn and Fuckingmomentum are missing, locked away in their echo chamber: Centrism is about as far left as the majority of British voters will consider. It doesn’t matter how fervent the hardcore supporters are - there just isn’t mass support for 70s-style socialism.
Not in me. I ****ing loathe him, and hold him fully, personally responsible for this election result.
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Not sure if Borist is happy about this. Now he has no excuses left but has to decide what he really wants, and if ha can’t get it he will have no one to blame.
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I really hope you’re right.
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Scare tactics. Never underestimate the power of a well funded propaganda machine.
If you can’t make your own guy seem halfway decent, paint the opposition to be the literal devil instead.
As has been pointed out, a lot of people, especially from the lower classes, were probably really voting against Jeremy Corbyn, who has been thoroughly smeared by “independent” organizations such as “Campaign against Corbyism” Yeah, that’s their actual name.
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Mr Corbyn should have said that three elections ago.
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“Jeremy should have tackled that issue far earlier than he did.”
Presumably by booting Livingstone out of the party faster?
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He left the party in 2018 after having been suspended, but go ahead and blame Labour for what he says anyway.
I’m also a bit skeptical about this type of quote mining. Apparently he first said Corbyn hadn’t done enough to tackle anti-semitism in the party, so from the quotes it’s unclear if he is blaming Jews for not voting for labour or Corbyn for scaring them away.
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I have to admit, I look at Corbyn and I see Sanders or Biden. Please convince me that the same result of yesterday will not play out next November here in the US. Because if Trump can pull off what Boris did, I will literally be suicidal.
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None of the forerunners in the Democratic primaries have anywhere near the sort of baggage Corbyn did and does, including both Biden and Sanders. Furthermore, the Democrats are not on a downswing like the Labour has been for a while now, but are energized, increasingly active, and making real gains in the off-year elections. Finally, not only is Trump is much more unpopular, more corrupt, more stupid, and more blatant about it all than Johnson, the Republican Party as a whole is worse than the Tories, and there is no Brexit to serve as an unifying focus.
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Right, the vote proportions pretty accurately reflect current polling on leave/remain, with the remain vote split and the leave vote consolidated. The rest is our crappy FPTP voting system.
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Corbyn has socialist policies popular with progressives, but was backward-looking and made excuses for bigots in his party.
Sanders has socialist policies popular with progressives and is forward-looking, and doesn’t make excuses for bigots in his party.
Biden has neoliberal-lite policies that aren’t popular with progressives and is backward-looking and makes excuses for bigots who are his colleagues in both parties (as long as he’s worked with them for a a couple of decades).
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Something tells me Britain is going to get a taste of American style healthcare expense.
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Not really. Poor people sick and tired of Brexit not being done (because they’d been conned into believing Brexit was the gateway to the sunlit upper lands) and sick and tired of a Labour leader refusing to lead or realise he was in the 21st century, was more of a reason.
And actually, @Papasan the one word answer to your question is “Corbyn”. It really is that simple.
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Being led by a hardcore socialist who yearns for a time in history that was over 40 years ago.
Corbyn (despite some timid attempts on the contrary) is more euro sceptic than Johson (who is merely a chancer). His glorious plan for brexit was to re-open negotiation of the withdrawal agreement to get a “better deal” to the UK by offering “a sort of customs union” but not single market, no 4 freedoms, no adherence to the ECJ, freedom to strike individual trade agreements and some sort of “saying” in the future trading agreements of the EU. Then he would have proposed a referendum on the agreement with maybe an option for remain (this was not clear) and the Labour party would have decided their official line in a one day conference, opening the possibility of having to campaign against their own deal.
This did not satisfy anybody, neither remain or leave votes because voters are not stupid and can see through this as a unicorn filed imposibility
On top of that he proposed a type of state run and state controlled economy the world has not seen outside china in the last 40 years, that is what he would like, a return to an economy reliant on heavy industry and primary sector jobs, heavily unionised with hundreds of thousands of blue collar jobs, supported by state own services in rail, water, electricity and telecom.
The fact is that a few people believe that is possible, specially outside the EU, unless they want to compete in costs with asia.
On top of that Jeremy Corbyn is hated by a very large chunk of the population, for whatever the reason.
I think that if the Labour party had other leader and maybe some policies where better defined, they would have put a better fight
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Looking at it from a distance (US) I might not even go that far. While it certainly looks like Corbyn’s fault. It doesn’t seem that Labor had anything like a consistent platform or arguement for their existence.
I mean if the key issue (or only issue) in an election is Brexit, and you can’t assert a clear position on Brexit. How the hell is that gonna attract support.
It just sounds like a recipe for turn out problems and split votes.
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So you’re saying that yesterday was more of a rerun of 2016 than a glimpse of 2020?
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Labour under Corbyn is an arrogant cult that doesn’t realise that winning an election when not an incumbent requires the support of people that have previously supported other parties. They built everything on the basis of pleasing subsets of people who already vote Labour, and treated everyone else as hostile infiltrators trying to undermine Corbyn and who need to be told to fuck off.
On the Brexit question Labour’s position treated people like idiots. Instead of come up with a position and supporting it, and trying to change people’s minds, their position boiled down to a ‘neutral stance’ that involved a vote between Remain and a deal Leave voters are certain to reject. Thus while the Tories could argue on the merits of their position (what little exists of it), Labour told Remainers their position amounted to Remain and told Leavers their position amounted to Leave, and were somehow shocked that both thought their position was bullshit.
At every turn, Labour chose reactions to criticism that buttressed their fortress psychology, and alienated people on the fence. Labour essentially denied their criticisms existed, acted like it’s all a plot, acted like you’d have to be an idiot to believe in the critique. Well, to people who thought those critiques had some merit, the utter lack of humility sounded like simply calling them an idiot, and therefore they stayed home.
Also Labour took entirely the wrong lesson from 2017, reading the late surge of desperate Remain voters as a sign that you can ignore the party’s unpopularity, that no matter what happens, at the last minute there will be a magical invisible group of voters that will emerge and save Corbyn’s bacon.
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Depends on if Biden or Sanders are going to get into the habit of telling Leftists and Centre-leftists respectively to “fuck off because we know you’ll vote for us in the end”.
How Corbyn dealt with Livingstone was one of the origins of the labour anti-semitism thing. He’s still part of ‘Labour Against The Witchhunt’ and working with various parts of the party.
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