“Unelectable” is a pretty slippery word. It clearly doesn’t mean “can’t win any sort of election” - so what does it mean?
Well, I think it probably means “the Labour Party as led by Jeremy Corbyn is very far from success in a General Election”. It clearly doesn’t mean “he can’t win his seat as an MP”, though I’m fairly sure anyone wearing a red rosette could win in Islington North - and clearly he’s popular in large parts of the left. I find myself agreeing with him and his principles on lots of stuff.
But he’s not going to break through, and he’s not going to win. I can’t say for sure why I think this - it’s based on personal anecdotes and other non-evidence, although it’s also based on Labour’s pretty dire polling performance. My mum, who is a loyal Labour voter, has been for years, is making noises about not voting for them now - although gods knows who she’d vote for instead. I think there might well be a lot of people like her. This is not, ultimately, a country full to the brim with frustrated socialists - quite the opposite - though it can seem that way sometimes depending on the company you keep.
I hope - I hope! - that he can create the conditions for a sea change in attitudes, to shift the terms of debate and the electorate’s perspective leftwards: I think that’s the best we can expect in the short term, and not even that. I don’t think I’ll see a Labour government in power before my mid 30s, and I’m 24 now - my little sister, who’s 10, will not even remember a time when they were in power before she goes off to university. I find that so very sad - and I don’t know how the tide can be turned.
Or Thomas Hughes fanfic.
Not my comment, but a mate of mine from the UK comedy scene when I sent this link to him:
“Preeminent? That gormless one-joke fuckin hack? Putin’s pet happy-clapper? Pig’s arse. There’s no accounting for taste, and thank god for that else every comedian in the UK would have this “Robbo” chap out the back with rubber hoses doing a lot of accounting.”
Corbyn was elected by ~313K votes to ~193K for his opponent. While that’s a lot more than, say, a US Libertarian Party chair election, or the number of people who actually thought Donald Trump was seriously running for President, it’s still only half a million votes on an island with over 50 million people. It’s 1%, about the same number as out gay people or Pakistani-born residents, a bit over the number of Sikhs but fewer than Hindus, about half the number that speak Scots.
The real question is whether the UK’s voters want a Labour Party that’s actually about Labour, as opposed to a second or third Tory party (depending on what the LibDems are up to at the moment), which is a fairly separate question from whether the dues-paying party-members want Corbyn, or whether the elected MPs are representative of either the party membership or voters.
She also wrote recently about ‘why Harry Potter would support Israel’ or something like that. Not sure she’s doing anyone any favours there, but it is a fascinating window into a very peculiar mental state.
Or a crypto-nazi vote against a mainstream that is suddenly vulnerable.
Well, Corbyn doesn’t have to appeal to the entire electorate in order to get in. The current government nabbed over 50% of the seats for less than 40% of the vote.
That reason is corporatism. Scottish Labour is very much a “party of power”, they are still living in the '90s; which is why they are so unappealing: they basically cover the Tory political space in a country where Tory is a dirty word.
Your mom will likely pinch her nose and vote Lab. First past the post inevitably requires significant parts of the electorate to pinch their nose and vote for the lesser evil; for 20 years it was the poor and voiceless who had to do that, whereas now it’s the people with second houses and “a social conscience”.
Regardless, if Lab candidates are not competitive in her (newly gerrymandered) constituency, she can just vote “anything but Tory” and it will be perfectly fine.
I hope so! Not that my mum fits into the latter category, but not the former either, and I take your point. I can only wish it translates into the reality of a Labour-led government.
J. K. Rowling did not have a grant to write the first Harry Potter novel.
She wrote it while on welfare, which is technically illegal, but very obviously one of the laws that need breaking if there’s no jobs around anyway. I daresay she’s repaid her dues. 
That said, she should have know better than joining the anti-Corbyn fray.
The first time I was old enough to vote was '97. That was the year Blair won with ‘New Labour’, a party that was more right-wing than the Tories at the time, especially economically. Whenever election day has come around and I’ve found myself in the booth with my paper, I’ve never had a choice between two main parties with a single meaningful differentiation between them. As far as the Conservative agenda is concerned, Corbyn is the first challenge to it’s supremacy in coming up two decades. About ****ing time.
(NB: I don’t blame Brown for his economic policies. All the cool economists were listening to Greenspan at the time and at least he had the decency to admit he was wrong)
Labour’s power structure will have been studying the DNC closely to figure out how they screwed up the fix
I’m well aware of that, but Labour only got around 30%, Corbyn won’t do much better. I can see them losing votes to the Lib Dems next time around, like they lost votes to UKIP last time. They might claw back some of the UKIP vote though, as it’s likely that they will thankfully drift off into insignificance.
Traditional Labour heartlands in Wales and the north of England have shifted to the right in recent years, and any attempt to win them back with nationalistic anti-immigration rhetoric (which has already started) will just further alienate existing Labour voters in the south of England, and younger voters across the country more generally. Scotland is a total lost cause at this point, they’re now less popular up there than the Tories!
The Tories will probably comfortably win the next election, things might look different 5-10 years down the line if brexit ends up being the disaster I predict it to be, but other than that the only hope of defeating them sooner would be for the brexit negotiations to go so spectacularly badly that it brings down the government.
Even in that case though I certainly wouldn’t want to (and couldn’t) see a Corbyn led coalition forming a government after that, best case scenario would be pro-EU Tories and the Lib Dems + defectors from Labour, worst case would be a toss-up between anti-EU Corbyn Labor winning a majority (which seems spectacularly unlikely) and an even more authoritarian and right wing conservative party under new leadership taking over (either of which would almost certainly see me fuck off home to Ireland).
It’s not really a surprise that Labour heartlands shifted to the right when Labour themselves shifted drastically to the right under Blair, the populations of those areas has aged and younger voters have been disaffected with the entire system their entire voting lives. If anything, Corbyn bringing the party back to the left again can only help to start shifting this country out of the deplorable situation we’ve had for the last 19 years in which we’ve had the choice of the Conservatives or the Tories.
“First, the Scottish Arts Council gave Rowling a grant to finish the book.”
So yes, you are technically correct but my memory had not totally betrayed me. She needed the grant to finish it.
Which is bizarre really, given that every concrete step toward self-determinism for Scotland in my lifetime has come from Labour.
I’m not sure I understood that but it sure seems funny!
It is really frustrating that the left has thrown the Blair years under the bus. No, Blair was not to the right of the Tories economically. The Blair years delivered almost unprecedented improvements in the standard of living for the poor without any increase in inequality:
http://imactivate.com/incomeandinequality/
Amongst the general public Blair is the second most popular recent PM - after Thatcher. The failure to capitalise on that is a big chunk of Labour’s current issues. Iraq is important, but the left shouldn’t be blinded by it.
