I don't think anyone denies that Corbyn is popular with the Labour Party membership. The issue is whether he's popular with the public at large. Maybe you think he does; you have every right to your view, obviously.
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I don't think anyone denies that Corbyn is popular with the Labour Party membership. The issue is whether he's popular with the public at large. Maybe you think he does; you have every right to your view, obviously.
tsubaki
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The one time that question was asked though (of the public as a whole) he got 12.8 million votes and 40% of the electorate, a swing of nearly 10% to Labour. That was after two years of almost constant negative headlines.
That was after the Tories ran the worst campaign by any political party in living memory. Since that election, Labour's share of the vote has declined in by-elections, Local Elections and European Elections. I do expect them to improve in the election campaign, though.
tsubaki
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One might say that Labour ran one of the better campaigns in living memory - certainly it was the only one that I can remember from a main party that actively tried to encourage the non-voting bits of society to turn out and vote, and it was nowhere near the Marxist claptrap that we were all told it would be.
roydo
in memoriam - 1965-2024
How old are you? Or rather, what is your yardstick?
orly
Please check with me for Blammo criteria
If you're 19 or younger, perhaps
They joined after Ed Milliband changed the membership rules and allowed mass infiltration by what is basically Militant MkII. Yes, the overall membership of the Labour party is pro-Corbyn, but that's exactly what I refer to as 'the bubble' - they aren't representative of Britain overall.
That's the problem; that Labour are no longer interested in being electable or representing the every day man on the street. It's ideology over pragmatism - because Corbyn represents the socialist ideals they envisage, they ignore any criticism of him and any attempt to moderate the extreme aspects of that ideology that is unpalatable to the general electorate.
tsubaki
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Not this again. For a start, Miliband did not change the membership rules - what the NEC changed (after complaints by the centrists following their Miliband losing in 2010) was the rules around leadership elections - specifically that "registered supporters" could vote in the leadership election (on payment of £3), and that it would be a straight one person one vote election with no chicanery.
Whilst a lot of people did register as supporters and vote for him, the membership voted for him by a long way as well - in a four horse race he got almost half the votes, 25% more than any other candidate. All of the polls after the start of August showed him in the lead. I am not sure why a left wing candidate winning most of the support from the membership of a left wing party should require infilitration, cults, or leader worship, or indeed be a surprise to anyone especially when he was arguably the only actually left wing candidate in the race.
Finally, can we please drop this absurd pretence that the political centrists represent the "every day man in the street"?
tsubaki
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Mid-40s, and the yardstick was the 1992 Tory one (edit: which although they acted disgracefully and collapsed after a few years, was probably the best campaign in terms of persuading people to turn out and vote for them in British political history).
1. Yes he did. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33976474
2. All you've done is bluster on about what I've just said - the party was infiltrated by the harder left and, therefore, the party went harder left. You say "no chicanery" when that's exactly what the rule change achieved - entryism.
3. The centre-left and centre-right are far more representative of this country as a whole than the hard left and hard right are. By a massive margin too. If you're in 'the bubble', you won't see it, but Corbyn isn't unpopular just because of the media - it's because 'normal' people rightly see him as the loon he is.
It's like how if some bloke ran on a platform promising to give everyone a million quid - really nice gesture, that's a man who 'wants to do nice things' for everyone; but I shouldn't need to explain why in practice that would be an incredibly stupid idea and how everyone would think he was a madman and wouldn't put him anywhere near power.
Most people respond well to moderated ideas - things that at least look and sound like they've been thought through and have a chance of succeeding in the real world.
With Corbyn, the redistribution of wealth idea isn't automatically a bad one - indeed, it needs to be done to a degree as the wealth gap is insane - but it's not moderated. It's taken to ideological extremes. Nothing seems to be rationally costed. It's pie in the sky ideology, and the average person looking at it will be revulsed by it.
If I were the Tories and Johnson, I'd run a campaign that actually promoted Labour's policies and spelled out exactly what they'd mean. I'd use the Labour manifesto as an electoral tool rather than their own one, as it's one that is much more likely to win them an election.
Because the majority of this country are approximately "middle class". The country as a whole is centre-right. We have a service led economy and the traditional 'working class' is diminishing. This isn't my 'take' on it - it's absolutely true. This is why Corbyn is toxic - people don't want to risk losing what they have through ideological revolution.
Boss_Blue
I will find you and consensually bum you
tsubaki
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1. From literally the first sentence of that article:
If you are going to continue this, please can you understand the difference between membership rules and leadership election rules. Miliband did not change the membership rules - in fact if you want to be pedantic he didn't change the leadership election rules either (the NEC did, though it was something he encouraged).
It should perhaps also be pointed out who actually came up with the idea of the registered member scheme (and changing the leadership election to one member one vote) - a little known hard left faction called "Progress" (it is in Steven Twigg's section of the 2011 "Purple Book"). The left opposed it.
2. The rule change did not allow "entryism". Almost anyone was free to join Labour (in the sense of the word of actually becoming a member) before 2015, including left wing people - that is how left wing people (like Corbyn) got in the party. It is why even in Blair's change to Clause IV started with "The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party". This was a party after all that was set up by socialists, which brought about the one nearly socialist government this country has ever had.
3. If the centre-left and centre-right are so representative of this country, why did so many of their politicians go to the same universities, have the same sort of jobs, the same sort of pre-political careers, meet in the same social groups and believe in the same sort of things? Why did participation in politics generally, and membership in the two main parties specifically, go down when the centrists were in charge?
Or do people out there think "You know, I have been taking the piss here - I want to have a worse pension, for my kids to get into loads of debt going to university and then be unable to afford a house when they finish. I'd much prefer my taxes to go to pay off the local hospitals PFI debt to an offshore firm than for the A&E to get modern equipment or enough staff to treat me when I inevitably break down after my lifetime of hard work. I deserve it for not using effective tax planning methods".
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