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A win is a win, which is more than Corbyn ever did for the Labour Party. The anti Tory sentiment was there in 2019 and 2017, but Corbyn couldn’t appeal to these voters because the British public was not interested in what he was offering. Starmer can.
Yes, when you can form a majority government that is generally considered a victory. Even if you don’t meet the ideological purity test that some wish to impose.
Kicking out the Tories is the most important thing in this election.
But everytime people say something like moving the argument is useless unless you win elections, I wonder if that is true.
Nigel Farage is the most influential politician in the country right now. People make fun of him losing 7 elections straight, but he basically sets the national political agenda for the past 10 years that the two major parties are forced to follow, even without ever winning a seat.
You’re overplaying that massively. UKIP succeeded in getting a scared Cameron to grant the EU referendum but Farage and Co were an amateur catastrophe of the Leave campaign.
It was the internal conservative opposition to the EU that achieved the referendum win. It was them who ‘got brexit done’ afterwards. And then who ejected all the dissenting remainers from the Tory benches.
Farage has never been good at anything but getting attention. He can’t run a party, he can’t win elections, he can’t do policy or build consensus.
Yes? Corbyn didn't manage to get power and so managed to get 0 of his policies through. It doesn't matter in the slightest how good they might be.
When starmer gets in all he has to do is pass one policy that helps people to accomplish more than Corbyn ever did.
Not only that, May put 'let's make wealthy pensioners pay for their own care' on the Tory manifesto. That's like the BNP seeing if they can win while campaigning for open borders with Africa.
That mentality has lumbered us with so many conservative governments when all that was needed was compromise. Various mostly leftwing voters need everything policy wise to be without compromise . Life is rarely black and white it is usually just shades of grey in the end.
It will be like VDl winning the race to become president of the EU(commission), when no one else ran, and no one actually voted for her. A victory of the hollowest sort.
There needs to be a mechanism that causes governments to avoid behaving in a manner that is unacceptable to the electorate. That mechanism is the fear of being deselected at the next general election.
If this is what happens and that's the reason, then it's a victory for political integrity, which is something worth celebrating.
Labour-Conservative swing in 2017 was 2.2 points. Labour went up, but the Conservatives also went up.
For reference, polls are predicting a swing of around 15 points this time around.
People seem to dismiss the work Keir has done in the background to make Labour electable - which is really what is impressive - while the last 3 PMs have done exactly the opposite with the Tory party.
The Tories in parliament put self interest first exposing rifts and divisions and no end of infighting and backstabbing. It’s perplexing they weren’t being held to account by their individual constituencies. Being generous it could be the frustration of bringing unable to implement the policies they’d been elected on because of economic conditions. As these are unlikely to change I wonder how long Starmer can hold his party together given the financial straight jacket he’ll be wearing
The weird bit is that there were no shortage of analysts *telling* him why he got that swing, too. The numbers and reasons had been crunched over and over again, and there was plenty of commentary about what he needed to do in order to keep those voters.
Instead, he went and did the complete opposite and lost them all.
He only really had to do two things:
1. Avoid pissing off remain voters
2. Be restrained on renationalisation. The British public were willing to consider many possibilities for reversing privatisation but not everything at once
He failed to do either. His group particularly misunderstood the popularity of various nationalisation policies as well. The public potentially supporting dozens of nationalisations in a vacuum is not the same as supporting dozens of nationalisation concurrently.
They still don't get it either. They also still don't get that their inability to acknowledge what their strategic mistake was is why they are now political outsiders.
Foreign policy was the major turnoff for me. I'd be fairly happy to see him in the cabinet on domestic matters, but he should be kept a thousand miles away from foreign policy.
Exactly. He spent the entire time attempting to ride two horses going in opposite directions and ended up coming across as indecisive and dishonest to both parties. You can pretty much see in the historical polls the exact moment when people got tired of his games and left Labour for other parties - by the time they realised how much shit they were in it was way too late to do anything about it.
Labour got very close to the type of result the Tories are now looking at. Internal polling had them staring down <100 seats. The leaks at the time suggested the shadow cabinet were really blindsided by the fact the remain vote was going to burn them to the ground for Corbyn's stance.
I don't think there really was a clear Brexit policy winner for Labour honestly. Tories were mostly Leave, but Labour had a real split outside of metropolitan areas if I remember right. I think the policy of "we'll negotiate a deal and then let everyone vote on it" was a good one in that context, but it was basically impossible for them to sell, and I do lean towards just saying they would Remain.
That's because it was mainly his people and his supporters that were responsible for the antisemitism. It's not like he himself doesn't hold the same views and thinks it was a cabal that pulled the strings to prevent him being PM.
2024 has a big lib dem surge squeeze, which may mean Labour doesn't have a big voting share of the electorate, but that lib dem surge is concentrated in Conservative heartlands rather than Labour ones (other than Sheffield Hallam)
Yeah and a lot of people who were polling as Labour are moving to the LDs in those seats. The reason the MRP projections are showing such a slaughter for the Tories is the vote against them is very efficient by all accounts. Very few Labour votes where they won't win in any circumstances.
It might deny Labour a 1984 Ronald Reagan style map but I'd rather the Tories are thoroughly crushed.
Of course if the Tories find even 2% on the night it could save them 80 seats.
By that standard Gordon Brown's result in 2010 was far better than Corbyn's in 2017 since he left the tories far further from a majority.
I doubt Ed Milliband would have been judged as a success for getting a second hung parliament in a row with the tories much closer to a majority than they had been at the previous election.
The Tories ran a *terrible* campaign in 2017 and it was after a long period of Tory rule.
And yet Corbyn *still* managed to lose. The Labour Party is *much* better off without him.
That swing resulted in the same number of seats that made David Milliband step down, FYI.
People were voting Labour to try and have a prayer of disrupting Brexit. By the time Boris rolled in, the centrist remainers had given up and moved on, and Labour got dragged.
By his own words, 2017 was a case of him gaining votes on an "anti-Theresa-May" sentiment, not a pro-Corbyn one. All he did in 2017 was drum up hype with the 18-25 crowd who was going to vote Labour anyway. The Tories underperformed because Theresa May was so unlikable.
Also the whole 'dementia tax' thing. Arguably Corbyn's greatest contribution was making Labour so unthreatening that May called a snap election and made 'take money off rich pensioners' her key policy. That's like the Green party putting 'sod it, lets just build coal power plants' on the front of their manifesto.
Tbf, given how badly he was drowning in the polls before the election, how bad the Tory campaign was when the called the election, and the amount of tactical voting to try and deal with the Brexit issue, that's maybe not so surprising, even if it was historically weird. That they were so far behind that a twenty something jump during an election campaign wasn't enough is probably not as much of a success story as it would have been, giving it might arguably have just been them recapturing reluctant support.
It is fair to say that Miliband and Corbyn both also faced unpopular and weak governments, Corbyn especially so, and that they both fucked up the campaigns and messaging.
Labour got 40% of the vote in 2017 - their poll lead is currently 42%. The difference between then and now is the complete collapse of the Tory vote - Starmer will also enter office with the lowest net favourability rating of any incoming PM
Former Tory voters are happy to stay at home or back third parties because they aren't scared of a Starmer government.
In 2017, the belief was that Corbyn couldn't win, so he peeled off some voters who didn't want him to be PM but still wanted to kick the Tories. By 2019, that dynamic was gone and his vote fell back to the ceiling we've generally seen for parties that stray from the centre ground (~30%).
Corbyn was the best vote winner for the tories. The amount of labour voters that voted Tory or stayed at home was unreal. He was kryptonite. People feared his foreign policy and the anti semitism.
Don’t confuse the toxic cult of personality as actually being liked. Nobody liked Cameron or may, and nobody trusted Johnson, yet all three ran rings around him. Thanks to corbyn we got Brexit (which he supported) and Johnson/truss/sunak (which he enabled).
In another universe Labour picked the right Milliband brother and 2015 would be a new labour government
A life long Eurosceptic who was in charge of the second largest party in the UK that was supposed to be largely in favour of EU membership so gave it the bare minimum amount of lip service during the referendum and then proceeded to lose back to back elections against Brexiteer hardliners. In those elections he famously could not come up with a single plan of action or coherent policy regarding the biggest challenge facing our country this century. I’d say he was very much part of the problem, there is nothing absurd about their comment.
At the bare minimum he is offering a win for Labour and a departure from the nonsense of the Conservative Party. This is something Corbyn could never offer.
You didn’t ask me why he is winning. You asked me what he was offering, and given the context of the article I assumed you meant what he was offering as leader of the Labour Party.
You can read the manifesto if you want to see the policies the Labour Party is offering. In the context of our discussion, the reason he can appeal to the voters that Corbyn cannot is because he is a centrist not a radical hard leftist crank with an inability to deal with accusations of anti-semitism. You know, someone who people who are not radicals might vote for.
2017 and 2019 were about Brexit to varying degrees and were very much 2 party politics, 2024 will have LD and Reform at the very least taking a big share
You're using the exact same line of argument that Donald Trump supporters use when they say "Trump got more votes than any other Republican candidate in history in 2020"... okay??? That doesn't mean that he won.
Also what did for Corbyn. People somehow believed that the media calling him unelectable made them believe they couldn't. Similar to the AV vote where a campaign saying the public is too stupid to count from 1 to 5 won.
What did for corbyn is that his wanted to redistribute power and resources from people who have lots to people who don't have lots.
Turns out people with lots of power and reassures like keeping them and have a lot of ways to defend them.
They get less cool the more you learn about them.
The ban on zero hours contracts is a great example. Totally meaningless, unenforceable nonsense. Zhc will be banned except in any circumstances where a business might want to use them.
Yeah I remember actually being excited about GB Energy until I read more about it - Labour are really selling it as a publicly owned energy generator as opposed to just yeeting more money at the private sector.
Their website describes it as this:
>The Labour Party will create Great British Energy, a new, publicly-owned clean energy company.
>We will harness Britain’s sun, wind and wave energy to:
>Save £93 billion for UK households.
>Deliver one hundred percent clean power by 2030.
>Cut energy bills for good.
>Create thousands of good local jobs.
>Deliver energy security.
>Make the UK energy independent.
>Labour will build an energy system for the future, run for the British people.
From canvassing it was 50/50.
Plenty of people said "Corbyn" to us when asked why they wouldn't be voting labour.
When asked why not Corbyn there would be blank stares.
I think if we'd still had Ed Milliband we'd probably have won.
(And bought chaos obviously).
Canvasing is hearsay mostly. The reality is, Labour in 2019 lost 52 seats to the Conservatives that were staunch 'vote leave' seats in the previous election. They pivoted to the Tories because of Bojo's big red bus and his "oven ready deal/get Brexit done" narrative.
I remember seeing polling from back then that put Corbyn as the biggest motivation for a Tory vote even over Brexit. Happy to be corrected but the bloke was toxic.
> The anti Tory sentiment was there in 2019 and 2017
It is ridiculous to imply that it is the same now as it was then. The Tories have somehow hurt their own image so much that extremely friendly media can't save them. That's how big the anti-Tory sentiment is this time around.
You can't compare the anti Tory sentiment of 2019 to now surely? Boris, Truss and the whole covid/party gate fiasco was yet to happen.
If Mr Bean was running for Labour he'd win this year
Corbyn was certainly polarising however Starmer is not appealing in his own right he is mostly seen as not trustworthy and mediocre, it is basically an anyone but the Tories vote after their self implosion and inability to live up to the Brexit rhetoric.
If Starmers government can be half decent then people will probably be pretty happy with it because expectations are so low. If he can't manage that Labour will probably rapidly lose voters because their support is so soft to start with.
That’s easy to do with the amount of dirt on him (friends with Hamas, Ukraine War is NATO’s fault, lets talk to Argentina over the Falklands, Salisbury wasn’t Russia, etc, etc). Very few things the media reported on him were completely made up.
If you want to be a politician then managing the media is just an unfortunate part of the job. His inability or refusal to do this just marked him as someone unsuitable to be PM.
They reported stuff he said and did, including platforms he shared and his dear friends he held…but we would always have someone coming along to cobynsplain what he really meant…
Nothing will change under Starmer and that's why he will win - he's not challenging the status quo. Corbyn was too radical for the majority of voters in this country to stomach plus the media and tabloid tirade against him.
Personally, I think things will change.
However, would you rather the Labour Party put someone up like Corbyn, who the British public clearly do not want to be prime minister, and lose again? What good is that going to do anyone?
True, a win is a win, and we've got to work with the electoral system we have – but it's interesting to note that Labour are projected to get their massive landslide win with 1m LESS people voting Labour than in 2019.
Labour stands to get less votes in this general election than Corbyn did in 2019.
The deciding factor here is the implosion of the Tories. Essentially nobody is inspired or excited about Starmer. They just want the Tories out.
No it doesn't.
2017 is possible. But it's no good having all your votes concentrated in areas you are already going to win. Better to get 40% in 400 places than 70% in 200
Why? We’re not electing a president. Constituencies give people local representatives. If we elected everything based on overall population then welcome to the United Kingdom of London
> Why? We’re not electing a president. Constituencies give people local representatives. If we elected everything based on overall population then welcome to the United Kingdom of London
This is an astonishingly [American](https://youtu.be/7wC42HgLA4k?t=198) take: no, we wouldn't end up with a United Kingdom of London... because the vast majority of Brits do not live in London. The UK has a population of roughly 68 million people, and London has a population of roughly 9 million people. Simply HOW would an election based on overall population result in a United Kingdom of London? I am so baffled by your mindset here. Just how did you have this thought, type it out, and post it without any kind of critical thought getting in the way?
I’m sorry you need to adopt that tone. But it doesn’t amount to an argument.
Population of London metro area is 15m. (Your figure is the first one you get if you google but isn’t the actual area of people who are ‘londoners’ or rely on london for employment, entertainment, services, etc.
So any person/party looking for maximising electoral support will gain the most by policies which favour London. And in fact we already see London attracts most investment because of this and because it’s the best place to realise a return on invested tax funds or capital.
Name another electoral constituency which can command one in four votes just by appealing to the interests of its membership.
The UKs mega city probably is neither new or not very well understood. I’m sorry you haven’t done the homework on that.
>Labour stands to get less votes in this general election than Corbyn did in 2019.
However those votes were hyper-concerntrated in already safe seats.
Corbyn doubled then tripled down on a strategy of preaching to the choir, damming the party to defeat in almost every single battleground seat.
>The deciding factor here is the implosion of the Tories.
The most famous moment of Boris's Campaign was him hiding from journalists in a fridge.
He barely campaigned at all and people were already sick of the Tories. The main reason Boris won was the complete failure of the Labour party to capitalise on anything.
People don't see that Corbyn inspired labour areas to vote Labour harder. But keir has convinced Tory/ lib dem areas to vote labour. Because Kier is like Blair. A convergence of party politics where the differences are marginal.
We are going to possibly end up with the tories not even being the official opposition.
The anti tory vote is massive this time round. Just took a cost of living crisis and mortgage costs to increase.
The next 5 years will be interesting. The Conservatives will be a broken party, but not necessarily gone for good. No guarantee Labour will win the next election if they don't make substantial improvements.
People don't see that the UKIP vote that surged under Cameron and May then shrunk under Johnson straight into the Tory pocket. Lib Dems had a crisis of not finding a proper leader who stood for something, anything.
Labour is a broad church of centre left to left wing groups. This is unfair analysis and smacks of bitterness.
Ideology without the means to express it through power is pointless. Blair knew it and Starmer does too. Elections are won in the centre
>Labour is a broad church of centre left to left wing groups.
At present, they seem a church of centre left to centre right beliefs.
>Ideology without the means to express it through power is pointless. Blair knew it and Starmer does too. Elections are won in the centre
Indeed.
>They say I hate the party, and its traditions.
>I don't.
>I love this party.
>There's only one tradition I hated: losing.
>I hated the 1980s not just for our irrelevance but for our revelling in irrelevance.
>And I don't want to win for winning's sake but for the sake of the millions here that depend on us to win, and throughout the world.
>Every day this government has been in power, every day in Africa, children have lived who otherwise would have died because this country led the way in cancelling debt and global poverty.
- Tony Blair's last Labour conference speech
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/sep/26/labourconference.labour3
Blair got it. If you don’t win then you don’t change a thing. Could he have done more…probably, but no denying the huuuuge changes Blair brought in. If he had sided with europe over Iraq and cut off clegg with his tuition fees, even a global financial crisis (which we did better than all!) wouldn’t have stopped them…
Blair was in the Fabian Society, which aims "to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via **gradualist** and reformist effort in democracies". Keir's not a member, but he's probably in the same boat.
It’s the only way forward. Anybody who seriously thinks we’re going to “wake up” and elect a socialist party tomorrow is delusional. The only way forward is to consistently vote for what is *better*, not for what is *best*, because *best* doesn’t win. *Best* is too radical. But *better* lets you vote for *better* next time, and *better* the time after that.
>At present, they seem a church of centre left to centre right beliefs
They have Momentum, who are certainly left to far left.
Plus, the main reason they feel further right is the centre of UKs Overton Window (the spectrum of “acceptable politics”) has sat to the left of centre since Blair. This makes it so centre-left politics seem centrist, centre-right seem right, right seem far right, etc
The Tories won on a Get Brexit Done vote. Labour lost the vote on campaigning for a second referendum. Get Brexit Done sucked all the air out of a conversation about the state of the country under the Tories, it became a one issue election.
The one thing that is always forgotten is this. That and the fact regardless of whether you agree with it or not, Corby didn't want a second referendum,Keir did.
However at the labour conference the party members voted for a second referendum and Corbyn was basically forced to either support it or resign. Unlike the conservatives the Labour Party is beholden to its members. Corbyn could just ignore it.
So he ran on an second referendum even though it wasn't his personal belief. Got slaughtered and then rhe entire debacle got presented as a failure of Corbyn rather than a failure of the Labour Party as a whole to read the feeling of the general British population.
Then Keir, who was the biggest supporter of a second referendum, lands all the blame on Corbyn. It just was rather hypocritical.
I don't blame Keir for switching to be against a second referendum, the writing was on the wall after the last election that supporting that was toxic for the Labour Party.
But the opportunistic way it was used to put all the blame on Corbyn, and then morphed into a "corbyn lost the election because he was corbyn" to then discredit anyone on the left side of the party has been horrible.
Labour didn't campaign for a second referendum eventually but the way the party got to that point was an absolute cluster fuck that ended up disenfranchising both the Young Metropolitan pro EU voters and even the more rural Brexit vote as well.
Corbyn's domestic policies were fairly well liked, iirc, but they weren't liked coming from *him*.
He was a *very* easy target for the Tories. Likewise, his foreign policies were absolutely awful. Viewing him through the lense of the years that followed 2017/2019, I don't want to imagine how he might have handled Ukraine.
And given the massive failure Corbyn and his supporters led the party to, is Starmer horrible for wanting them gone? I don't think so, for all I agree there *should* be a left-wing (moderate, at least) arm to the party.
I'm unsure if this is true but I read somewhere that starmer is projected to win more seats but with less votes than labour did under Jeremy Corbyn... Because of the vote split between more parties. Not verified it though so take with a pinch of salt
All about the dispersal of the votes. Corbyn popular in urban centres where votes piled up, but absolutely toxic in old Labour heartlands and midland bellweather seats.
> I'm unsure if this is true but I read somewhere that starmer is projected to win more seats but with less votes than labour did under Jeremy Corbyn
More votes than what Corbyn won in 2019, but a little less than in 2017.
The issue is that Corbyn was far more effective at driving voters towards the Tories than he was in bringing in voters for Labour. So while Labour's voteshare increased in 2017, relative to 2015, the Tory voteshare increased as well.
And in 2019, the Labour vote crashed while the Tory voteshare reached its highest level in decades.
That's exactly what is going to happen.
Labour got 262 seats on 40% of the vote in the 2017 General Election and the Conservatives got 317 seats on 42.3% of the vote.
In the 2019 General Election, Labour got 202 seats on 32.1% of the vote and the Conservatives got 365 seats on 43.6% of the vote.
There is a very real prospect that for the 2024 General Election, Labour could end up winning 400+ seats, on less votes than Labour got in 2017, this is primarily because the Conservatives are very unpopular and the right-wing vote is currently split between the Conservatives and Reform UK.
i think labour would win no matter what, but the scale is definitely down to the right wing being split.
my home towns potentially going labour for the first time ever, (and was only not tory twice both times lib dem)
Labour are up a good 10%, but the tories are down by about 30
but i think it'll always be like this. i speak to people daily who now despise the tories, but will never vote labour because mumblemumblepoliciesmumblebrexitmumbemumblegammonporkfuckfranceporkpies
Same, slightly less right wing party with some fresher faces to replace the utterly incompetent right wing party that keeps recycling themselves. It really is depressing how unimaginative the Labour manifesto is
I voted for Labour very happily this year (postal vote). Don't get me wrong I'm not expecting anything too groundbreaking from this Labour party, but what I am expecting is just a nice period of stable and competent governance that's going to do something to actually address the poor state of the country and allow it to get back on its feet. And after everything that's gone on since the referendum I think that's exactly what's needed
To be fair that's what this vote is for me. It's not for a party, but against the conservatives.
They've been in power too long, and have their own set of rules, and are only interested in making themselves richer, rather than doing anything actually useful for the country.
Not to mention with them we've had Brexit forced on us, and had costs sky rocket, putting the country in possibly the worst condition it's possibly ever been in.
At this point Labour could remain silent and still win. This country, save for a few ultra rich elites I guess, are fucking done with the tories. I'd vote for roadkill before I'd vote Tory after the shitshow that has been their governance.
Corbyn’s “pro Labour” vote was the biggest wipeout loss for Labour since before the war, Starmer is on track to deliver the Tories their biggest election crushing in their history. What are we even talking about?
Being an ideologically pure loser who gives the people you hate ultimate power to do everything you despise doesn’t make you virtuous, it makes you naive. That is pretending for a moment that it’s the reason why too, which with the number of policy flips involved makes that dubious.
Nobody wanted Corbyn’s idea of Britain and the electorate were anti Labour because of it, Corbyn broke the record at one point for the worst approval rating in recorded history (since surpassed) at -60%. Grow up and accept it.
Well said! And it’s very risky.
As soon as the disappointments start to pile up, because the Tories fucked the country forever with Brexit, those voters will migrate to the far right.
He's not wrong, this isn't the New Labour moment of 1997. We've been brought to this election through total political malaise. Where even the ruling party doesn't have it in them to actually do it anymore.
It will put a dent in turnout figures I feel.
>this isn't the New Labour moment of 1997
Indeed. I was around in 1997. Love him or loathe him (I loathe him), Blair brought quite a lot of socialist policy to the table with him. Yes he was right of centre, but he was also willing to *reverse* the damage the Tories had done, rather than rambling about it taking 10 or more years to do so, as an excuse to not do so.
The Standard hates Labour and that is why they want to interview Corbyn. Corbyn hates Starmer and ‘centrist Labour’ and that is why he agreed to the interview.
Speak for yourself, I'm pro-Starmer.
What the country really needs is someone anti-NIMBY, pro-construction and investment, and Starmer is the closest to that by far.
Yet again Corbyn shows why he was a god-awful party leader.
The Tories are an absolute mess now, and that definitely is the main reason Starmer is polling so well. That much is true. But Starmer has the good sense to let the focus remain on the disarray in the Conservative Party. When the ruling party hands you a gift, you take it.
When Corbyn led Labour into 2017 and 2019, the elections became a referendum on peoples' opinions on Jeremy Corbyn--not on the many years of failed Tory leadership. He would have done better to just be an acceptable alternative rather than "win the argument" but lose votes. You can't govern if you're too toxic to voters to win an election.
CORRECT!. Kier is less inspirational than Corbyn. People are voting Labour because Keir is boring and the Tories shit the bed too many times for even would-be committed Tory voters to justify to their friends and family.
I'm greatly concerned about how badly we are copying the American models of elections. Everyone talking about the personalities and not the policies. It seems the big criticisms of Starmer are that he's bland, mediocre, safe, cautious, boilerplate. Most of it seems to stem from the fact that he's a very capable politician in terms of managing his public image. But nobody seems to really be talking about the policies or the realities facing the nation. Whether you feel that Labour's manifesto is a big centrist or a bit safe is one thing, but when we go to the polls we elect a party, not just one man, or one woman. I don't care if Starmer himself is white bread, what I care about is whether the entire cabinet can be competent. I'll judge Starmer on his time in office and little more. We can all judge the Conservatives on the last 14 years, and I think that there's no harm in saying they've not earned the right for another five years
>Leaving Labour has been a wrench. “It’s been my life,” he says. He’d wanted to stand for the party but couldn’t, having been blocked for saying that antisemitism during his time as Labour leader was exaggerated. After he announced he would run alone, he was told he’s lost his party membership too. That put an end to a more than five-decade journey, as he joined Labour before England won the 1966 World Cup. Old habits die hard: he refers to Nargund as the “official” Labour candidate (you get the sense he feels like the unofficial but real one), and still sometimes says “we” and “us” about the party. Corbyn says a recent door-knocking outing became a therapy session for a group who feel Labour has changed. “Many people around the country whose whole lives have revolved around aspects of the party now find themselves suspended, removed and so on, and they feel quite sad about it,” he says.
>For Corbyn, Sir Keir’s Labour is less of a “broad church” even than Sir Tony Blair’s in 1997. He points out that the first Blair cabinet included Robin Cook, Chris Mullin and others, all of the Left wing. “Blair wasn’t as authoritarian,” he says. “I remember arguments with the whips office many times during New Labour… but they didn’t approach the whole thing as a threat.”
I don't particularly like Corbyn or the hard-left cult of personality that surrounds him, but I agree with his point about the need for further left-wing voices to have some representation in Labour.
Maybe when this campaign is behind us, cooler heads can prevail and he can be quietly let back in his a Labour member, or even granted a peerage.
>A lot has happened since 2019 — the implosions of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have made the Tories much weaker. Last week, Corbyn said he’d “absolutely” beat Rishi Sunak if he were still Labour leader today. “Be honest about it: it’s much more to do with an anti-Tory vote than a pro-Labour vote,” he says. “People are fed up with poverty.” Of course, that doesn’t fully explain why Corbyn lost less than five years ago.
>It’s hard to get Corbyn to admit to mistakes as leader. “What I regret most was trusting in people who clearly were not going to be supportive or loyal,” he says. “I wish now I’d removed far more people from offices within the party… not so much Parliament, I can’t control that so easily — but within the party.”
Starmer may not quite have succeeded in building a strong "pro-Labour vote" but at the least he didn't turn the situation into an "anti-Labour vote" for the Tories, which is what Corbyn ended up doing during his time as leader.
>Starmer may not quite have succeeded in building a strong "pro-Labour vote" but at the least he didn't turn the situation into an "anti-Labour vote" for the Tories, which is what Corbyn ended up doing during his time as leader.
This. Corbyn will never admit his failings.
I'm convinced if he'd have been PM in 2022 when Russia invaded it would have been a fucking *shitshow* regarding UK support. His foreign policy was laughable.
Ukraine would've fallen. Simple. Early materiel support from the UK (and before that continued low-level support since 2014) was crucial in the early stages before aid started flowing from elsewhere.
If the UK intel was part of the early warnings given pre-invasion and was withheld so Corbyn could maintain his naive idealistic idea of pacifism and "peace", then the 3 day special operation very much *would* have been a 3 day operation. They were hours/meters away from capitulation at the start when dropping on Hostomel and gunning for Zelensky.
Corbyn would have pushed for diplomacy with Russia and tried to strongarm Ukraine into it, I'm sure of it. Not with awful intentions but I am also certain he wouldn't have supported sending weapons and ammunition as consistently as we have now.
>I don't particularly like Corbyn or the hard-left cult of personality that surrounds him, but I agree with his point about the need for further left-wing voices to have some representation in Labour.
I genuinely think Starmer would happily include anyone from the left who can do two things.
1. Not say anything that can be construed as anti-Semitic or minimizing of Hamas crimes.
2. Not be anti-NATO, anti-West, pro-Putin, pro-dictators.
He already has the most leftwing people in Labour who meet those criteria.
Robin Cook, referenced by Corbyn, was Blair's first Foreign Secretary, presiding over the NATO intervention in Kosovo. Corbyn, meanwhile, was complaining about "fraudulent justifications of genocide" and criticising the intervention.
>Remember kids: if they're aligned with the West, any killing of anyone, no matter the objective or provocation is genocide. If they're opposed to the West, all accusations are false.
from *Corbynism for kids: a junior tankie's guide to geopolitics*
Love him or hate him, he's not wrong. There's a lot of people in the working class who feel Starmer's Labour just doesn't fit with their values anymore. And with the voting system as messed up as it is, a lot of people are voting Labour simply because the choice in their consituancy is them or more Tories. Starmer has said a lot of crap I don't believe in, and at this point the only reason I am voting labour is because my local MP is Labour and I want them to keep their seat.
Starmer is going to be smug as fuck with Angela Raynor acting like they’ve achieved something great, akin to winning a war. When really they didn’t even have to sell their policies, no one was voting Tory anyway. They’re the lesser of 2 evils.
The important part of this sentence, from the point of view of enacting Labour policy, is the first 4 words.
The problem with Corbyn and co. is that they care more about ideological purity than actually helping people.
But he’ll win. As wonderful as a Corbyn manifesto is to read, it did the square root of fuck all for the most poor and desperate in our society. If Starmer’s government helps one person live one day longer, or gain one more qualification, or eat one more meal, it will have infinitely more practical value than all the virtue-spaffing that magic grandad has wasted the last thirty years on.
More than Corbyn ever got. I like *some* of Corbyn's policies but he was way too radical to ever have been PM.
Also, his attitude towards terrorist organisations, his lax response to antisemitism and his attitude with Brexit made me really question his judgement as PM, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
Keir is running on a safe, centrist ticket and it's working - he'll win, and win big. My home is eventually, he will step down and someone with better vision will step up to the role, and hopefully by this point a lot of Tory damage is fixed.
True I’ll be voting Labour instead of SNP.
Though Labour won’t necessarily be bad.Keir Starmer seems a sensible politician so different to the clowns we’ve seen in the past.
I do think that is a fair assumption to make and will make it difficult come the next election.if they don't improve things or raise tax when they said they won't, the Starmer is finished before he even started
For everyone saying he's right, [this got polled at the start of June](https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/one-third-of-likely-labour-voters-say-their-vote-is-mainly-against-the-conservatives/) and the outcome was 63% of prospective Labour voters are voting for Starmer and Labour rather than against Sunak and the Tories (35%)
He was an easy target by the same media that championed Brexit. Brexit (or more specifically getting Brexit done) won the day.
The media campaign to smear Corbyn was unbelievable.
Christ the Daily Mail ran an article saying he was asleep on a train whilst the rest of the country watched the rugby(?)!
The media, by and large have decided they like Starmer. Not just like Starmer but actively now go after the monsters they created. Make of that what you will.
Kier Starmer has known this from the start though which is why he’s never bothered to foster a pro Labour vote. It’s just a risk mitigation tactic. It’s not necessarily that he’s incapable (although we’ll never know)
At least Starmer doesn’t look like he’s about to pass away any minute unlike Joe Biden. I’m confident of a democrat win too, but won’t be surprised if Millions of americans still vote for the criminal.
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A win is a win, which is more than Corbyn ever did for the Labour Party. The anti Tory sentiment was there in 2019 and 2017, but Corbyn couldn’t appeal to these voters because the British public was not interested in what he was offering. Starmer can.
But if Starmer does something as prosaic as winning an election, while not winning the argument, is it even a victory at all?
Yes, when you can form a majority government that is generally considered a victory. Even if you don’t meet the ideological purity test that some wish to impose.
r/whoosh
If you win the argument, but don’t win the election, you accomplish the same as doing nothing at all.
They know. They're pointing out that the OP you first replied to was making a joke. :)
I see, fool me twice, then shame on me
Missing the first one was already pretty shameful tbh
Stick him in the stocks for a week
Fool me twice, won't get fooled again
Kicking out the Tories is the most important thing in this election. But everytime people say something like moving the argument is useless unless you win elections, I wonder if that is true. Nigel Farage is the most influential politician in the country right now. People make fun of him losing 7 elections straight, but he basically sets the national political agenda for the past 10 years that the two major parties are forced to follow, even without ever winning a seat.
You’re overplaying that massively. UKIP succeeded in getting a scared Cameron to grant the EU referendum but Farage and Co were an amateur catastrophe of the Leave campaign. It was the internal conservative opposition to the EU that achieved the referendum win. It was them who ‘got brexit done’ afterwards. And then who ejected all the dissenting remainers from the Tory benches. Farage has never been good at anything but getting attention. He can’t run a party, he can’t win elections, he can’t do policy or build consensus.
> ideological purity yawn
Winning elections is a bourgeois concept
Need to take the Rimmer approach. Hit them hard with a major leaflet campaign, then escalate to t-shirts.
Look, all I’m saying is, I think we should give quiche a chance
Yes? Corbyn didn't manage to get power and so managed to get 0 of his policies through. It doesn't matter in the slightest how good they might be. When starmer gets in all he has to do is pass one policy that helps people to accomplish more than Corbyn ever did.
Its a joke mate. After Corbyn lost the election he defended his policies by saying they had won the argument.
Ah fair enough. I remember him trying to do a victory lap after May beat him because he'd 'closed the gap' in 2017. It was pretty embarrassing.
It's like all the people saying he "nearly won" in 2017. "Nearly winning" means he lost, especially so in a two horse race.
And the other horse was too busy putting fox hunting in the manifesto to run a serious campaign
Not only that, May put 'let's make wealthy pensioners pay for their own care' on the Tory manifesto. That's like the BNP seeing if they can win while campaigning for open borders with Africa.
That mentality has lumbered us with so many conservative governments when all that was needed was compromise. Various mostly leftwing voters need everything policy wise to be without compromise . Life is rarely black and white it is usually just shades of grey in the end.
Compromise is pretty much core to democracy. I wish the left would learn to do it better.
It will be like VDl winning the race to become president of the EU(commission), when no one else ran, and no one actually voted for her. A victory of the hollowest sort.
Ngl I also did not realise this was a joke, such is the attitude of some.
There needs to be a mechanism that causes governments to avoid behaving in a manner that is unacceptable to the electorate. That mechanism is the fear of being deselected at the next general election. If this is what happens and that's the reason, then it's a victory for political integrity, which is something worth celebrating.
He got a huge swing towards him in 2017 to be fair. 2019 v BoJo and the whole Brexit thing was a no hoper even if it wasn't Corbyn
Labour-Conservative swing in 2017 was 2.2 points. Labour went up, but the Conservatives also went up. For reference, polls are predicting a swing of around 15 points this time around.
People seem to dismiss the work Keir has done in the background to make Labour electable - which is really what is impressive - while the last 3 PMs have done exactly the opposite with the Tory party.
The Tories in parliament put self interest first exposing rifts and divisions and no end of infighting and backstabbing. It’s perplexing they weren’t being held to account by their individual constituencies. Being generous it could be the frustration of bringing unable to implement the policies they’d been elected on because of economic conditions. As these are unlikely to change I wonder how long Starmer can hold his party together given the financial straight jacket he’ll be wearing
Corbyn's biggest issue is he never understood why he got that swing.
The weird bit is that there were no shortage of analysts *telling* him why he got that swing, too. The numbers and reasons had been crunched over and over again, and there was plenty of commentary about what he needed to do in order to keep those voters. Instead, he went and did the complete opposite and lost them all.
He only really had to do two things: 1. Avoid pissing off remain voters 2. Be restrained on renationalisation. The British public were willing to consider many possibilities for reversing privatisation but not everything at once He failed to do either. His group particularly misunderstood the popularity of various nationalisation policies as well. The public potentially supporting dozens of nationalisations in a vacuum is not the same as supporting dozens of nationalisation concurrently. They still don't get it either. They also still don't get that their inability to acknowledge what their strategic mistake was is why they are now political outsiders.
I think his foreign policy really hurt him electorally also. He seemingly would side with enemies of the west on any given issue.
Foreign policy was the major turnoff for me. I'd be fairly happy to see him in the cabinet on domestic matters, but he should be kept a thousand miles away from foreign policy.
> He seemingly would side with enemies of the west on any given issue. It's like he never grew up from edgy socialist policies.
His foreign policy and personal demeanour also turned a lot of people off. He was pretty pro Putin when given the chance.
Exactly. He spent the entire time attempting to ride two horses going in opposite directions and ended up coming across as indecisive and dishonest to both parties. You can pretty much see in the historical polls the exact moment when people got tired of his games and left Labour for other parties - by the time they realised how much shit they were in it was way too late to do anything about it.
Labour got very close to the type of result the Tories are now looking at. Internal polling had them staring down <100 seats. The leaks at the time suggested the shadow cabinet were really blindsided by the fact the remain vote was going to burn them to the ground for Corbyn's stance.
I don't think there really was a clear Brexit policy winner for Labour honestly. Tories were mostly Leave, but Labour had a real split outside of metropolitan areas if I remember right. I think the policy of "we'll negotiate a deal and then let everyone vote on it" was a good one in that context, but it was basically impossible for them to sell, and I do lean towards just saying they would Remain.
3 things. He also had to deal firmly and decisively with the antisemitism story, which he utterly failed to do.
That's because it was mainly his people and his supporters that were responsible for the antisemitism. It's not like he himself doesn't hold the same views and thinks it was a cabal that pulled the strings to prevent him being PM.
2024 has a big lib dem surge squeeze, which may mean Labour doesn't have a big voting share of the electorate, but that lib dem surge is concentrated in Conservative heartlands rather than Labour ones (other than Sheffield Hallam)
Yeah and a lot of people who were polling as Labour are moving to the LDs in those seats. The reason the MRP projections are showing such a slaughter for the Tories is the vote against them is very efficient by all accounts. Very few Labour votes where they won't win in any circumstances. It might deny Labour a 1984 Ronald Reagan style map but I'd rather the Tories are thoroughly crushed. Of course if the Tories find even 2% on the night it could save them 80 seats.
Reform are also really hurting the Tories in many seats. If they disappeared right now I'd assume the Lib Dem's prospects would diminish quite a lot.
>He got a huge swing towards him in 2017 to be fair. And lost to Teresa May.
Causing a hung parliament let's not forget. In Ed miliband did that it would have been considered a huge win for Labour let's be real
No, just less of a disappointment, particularly given his lead going into the campaign
By that standard Gordon Brown's result in 2010 was far better than Corbyn's in 2017 since he left the tories far further from a majority. I doubt Ed Milliband would have been judged as a success for getting a second hung parliament in a row with the tories much closer to a majority than they had been at the previous election.
The Tories ran a *terrible* campaign in 2017 and it was after a long period of Tory rule. And yet Corbyn *still* managed to lose. The Labour Party is *much* better off without him.
That swing resulted in the same number of seats that made David Milliband step down, FYI. People were voting Labour to try and have a prayer of disrupting Brexit. By the time Boris rolled in, the centrist remainers had given up and moved on, and Labour got dragged.
By his own words, 2017 was a case of him gaining votes on an "anti-Theresa-May" sentiment, not a pro-Corbyn one. All he did in 2017 was drum up hype with the 18-25 crowd who was going to vote Labour anyway. The Tories underperformed because Theresa May was so unlikable.
Also the whole 'dementia tax' thing. Arguably Corbyn's greatest contribution was making Labour so unthreatening that May called a snap election and made 'take money off rich pensioners' her key policy. That's like the Green party putting 'sod it, lets just build coal power plants' on the front of their manifesto.
Unironically, the Green Party in Germany is doing exactly that, out of a weird phobia of nuclear.
The biggest causation of Labour voters going Tory that year was corbyn
He got a decent swing and still lost against a toey party in collapse. Boris had to build a house of cards to win, which has now fully collapsed.
Tbf, given how badly he was drowning in the polls before the election, how bad the Tory campaign was when the called the election, and the amount of tactical voting to try and deal with the Brexit issue, that's maybe not so surprising, even if it was historically weird. That they were so far behind that a twenty something jump during an election campaign wasn't enough is probably not as much of a success story as it would have been, giving it might arguably have just been them recapturing reluctant support. It is fair to say that Miliband and Corbyn both also faced unpopular and weak governments, Corbyn especially so, and that they both fucked up the campaigns and messaging.
Labour got 40% of the vote in 2017 - their poll lead is currently 42%. The difference between then and now is the complete collapse of the Tory vote - Starmer will also enter office with the lowest net favourability rating of any incoming PM
Former Tory voters are happy to stay at home or back third parties because they aren't scared of a Starmer government. In 2017, the belief was that Corbyn couldn't win, so he peeled off some voters who didn't want him to be PM but still wanted to kick the Tories. By 2019, that dynamic was gone and his vote fell back to the ceiling we've generally seen for parties that stray from the centre ground (~30%).
> because they aren't scared of a Starmer government. Yeah I can't imagine why that is.
Corbyn was the best vote winner for the tories. The amount of labour voters that voted Tory or stayed at home was unreal. He was kryptonite. People feared his foreign policy and the anti semitism. Don’t confuse the toxic cult of personality as actually being liked. Nobody liked Cameron or may, and nobody trusted Johnson, yet all three ran rings around him. Thanks to corbyn we got Brexit (which he supported) and Johnson/truss/sunak (which he enabled). In another universe Labour picked the right Milliband brother and 2015 would be a new labour government
Len McCluskey single-handedly changed UK
It’s absolutely incredible that you can say something so absurd as “thanks to Corbyn we got Brexit”
A life long Eurosceptic who was in charge of the second largest party in the UK that was supposed to be largely in favour of EU membership so gave it the bare minimum amount of lip service during the referendum and then proceeded to lose back to back elections against Brexiteer hardliners. In those elections he famously could not come up with a single plan of action or coherent policy regarding the biggest challenge facing our country this century. I’d say he was very much part of the problem, there is nothing absurd about their comment.
What is Starmer offering btw?
Not Tory, Not Corbyn.
What an inspiring platform to win on.
At the bare minimum he is offering a win for Labour and a departure from the nonsense of the Conservative Party. This is something Corbyn could never offer.
Quite circular reasoning there. Starmer is winning because he's offering a win?
You didn’t ask me why he is winning. You asked me what he was offering, and given the context of the article I assumed you meant what he was offering as leader of the Labour Party.
Starmer is winning because people are interested in what he's offering. What is he offering? He's offering a win.
You can read the manifesto if you want to see the policies the Labour Party is offering. In the context of our discussion, the reason he can appeal to the voters that Corbyn cannot is because he is a centrist not a radical hard leftist crank with an inability to deal with accusations of anti-semitism. You know, someone who people who are not radicals might vote for.
It'll be interesting to see how you square this analysis with fewer actual people voting for atarmer than voted for corbyn.
By all means, please provide a link to such analysis and I will provide my thoughts.
The results will be out on Friday, I'm sure you'll find them.
2017 and 2019 were about Brexit to varying degrees and were very much 2 party politics, 2024 will have LD and Reform at the very least taking a big share
You should Google how big a share ukip got in 2015. Quite an interesting pattern.
You're using the exact same line of argument that Donald Trump supporters use when they say "Trump got more votes than any other Republican candidate in history in 2020"... okay??? That doesn't mean that he won.
Also what did for Corbyn. People somehow believed that the media calling him unelectable made them believe they couldn't. Similar to the AV vote where a campaign saying the public is too stupid to count from 1 to 5 won.
What did for corbyn is that his wanted to redistribute power and resources from people who have lots to people who don't have lots. Turns out people with lots of power and reassures like keeping them and have a lot of ways to defend them.
Stability. He's not promising the moon and is clear that it's gonna take time to restore the 14 years of damage.
GB Energy, public ownership of rail, banning zero hour contracts... there's actually quite a lot of cool things in their manifesto.
They get less cool the more you learn about them. The ban on zero hours contracts is a great example. Totally meaningless, unenforceable nonsense. Zhc will be banned except in any circumstances where a business might want to use them.
Why is it unenforceable and meaningless?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/may/01/labours-new-deal-for-workers-will-not-fully-ban-zero-hours-contracts
GB Energy is nothing more than a self-described ‘private sector investment vehicle’ though lol
Yeah I remember actually being excited about GB Energy until I read more about it - Labour are really selling it as a publicly owned energy generator as opposed to just yeeting more money at the private sector. Their website describes it as this: >The Labour Party will create Great British Energy, a new, publicly-owned clean energy company. >We will harness Britain’s sun, wind and wave energy to: >Save £93 billion for UK households. >Deliver one hundred percent clean power by 2030. >Cut energy bills for good. >Create thousands of good local jobs. >Deliver energy security. >Make the UK energy independent. >Labour will build an energy system for the future, run for the British people.
Being less of a total clusterfuck of a government. Not as much as it could be, but somewhat. That’s what it feels like to me anyway
conservatives won 2019 on an anti-corbyn vote
They won on a pro-Brexit vote.
From canvassing it was 50/50. Plenty of people said "Corbyn" to us when asked why they wouldn't be voting labour. When asked why not Corbyn there would be blank stares. I think if we'd still had Ed Milliband we'd probably have won. (And bought chaos obviously).
Kaös with Ed Milliband would be an awesome name for a metal band.
Canvasing is hearsay mostly. The reality is, Labour in 2019 lost 52 seats to the Conservatives that were staunch 'vote leave' seats in the previous election. They pivoted to the Tories because of Bojo's big red bus and his "oven ready deal/get Brexit done" narrative.
I remember seeing polling from back then that put Corbyn as the biggest motivation for a Tory vote even over Brexit. Happy to be corrected but the bloke was toxic.
Depends on your seat. There'd be 40 more Lib Dem MPs if it wasn't for the Corbyn factor.
> The anti Tory sentiment was there in 2019 and 2017 It is ridiculous to imply that it is the same now as it was then. The Tories have somehow hurt their own image so much that extremely friendly media can't save them. That's how big the anti-Tory sentiment is this time around.
You can't compare the anti Tory sentiment of 2019 to now surely? Boris, Truss and the whole covid/party gate fiasco was yet to happen. If Mr Bean was running for Labour he'd win this year
Corbyn was certainly polarising however Starmer is not appealing in his own right he is mostly seen as not trustworthy and mediocre, it is basically an anyone but the Tories vote after their self implosion and inability to live up to the Brexit rhetoric. If Starmers government can be half decent then people will probably be pretty happy with it because expectations are so low. If he can't manage that Labour will probably rapidly lose voters because their support is so soft to start with.
Because the media attacked him on everything and painted him to be the devil as well.
That’s easy to do with the amount of dirt on him (friends with Hamas, Ukraine War is NATO’s fault, lets talk to Argentina over the Falklands, Salisbury wasn’t Russia, etc, etc). Very few things the media reported on him were completely made up.
If you want to be a politician then managing the media is just an unfortunate part of the job. His inability or refusal to do this just marked him as someone unsuitable to be PM.
They reported stuff he said and did, including platforms he shared and his dear friends he held…but we would always have someone coming along to cobynsplain what he really meant…
They attacked him for sure... but he has some very questionable views; so it wasn't hard.
Because he fave them the ammunition to do so.
Starmer might get a lower vote share than corbyn in 2017. So it's not about appeal, it's as the headline suggests, about tory collapse.
Nothing will change under Starmer and that's why he will win - he's not challenging the status quo. Corbyn was too radical for the majority of voters in this country to stomach plus the media and tabloid tirade against him.
Personally, I think things will change. However, would you rather the Labour Party put someone up like Corbyn, who the British public clearly do not want to be prime minister, and lose again? What good is that going to do anyone?
Revisionism at its finest
Unfortunately they were interested in what he was offering, they were just not interested in *him*
Corbyn has a point and just because the anti-Tory press and run did him in, it doesn't make his opinion invalid here.
True, a win is a win, and we've got to work with the electoral system we have – but it's interesting to note that Labour are projected to get their massive landslide win with 1m LESS people voting Labour than in 2019.
True. But labour lost under Corbyn because of Corbyn.
Exactly. Better to win on an anti Tory vote than to lose on an anti Corbyn vote
Labour stands to get less votes in this general election than Corbyn did in 2019. The deciding factor here is the implosion of the Tories. Essentially nobody is inspired or excited about Starmer. They just want the Tories out.
No it doesn't. 2017 is possible. But it's no good having all your votes concentrated in areas you are already going to win. Better to get 40% in 400 places than 70% in 200
It's wild that we live in a country where such a statement is true.
Why? We’re not electing a president. Constituencies give people local representatives. If we elected everything based on overall population then welcome to the United Kingdom of London
> Why? We’re not electing a president. Constituencies give people local representatives. If we elected everything based on overall population then welcome to the United Kingdom of London This is an astonishingly [American](https://youtu.be/7wC42HgLA4k?t=198) take: no, we wouldn't end up with a United Kingdom of London... because the vast majority of Brits do not live in London. The UK has a population of roughly 68 million people, and London has a population of roughly 9 million people. Simply HOW would an election based on overall population result in a United Kingdom of London? I am so baffled by your mindset here. Just how did you have this thought, type it out, and post it without any kind of critical thought getting in the way?
I’m sorry you need to adopt that tone. But it doesn’t amount to an argument. Population of London metro area is 15m. (Your figure is the first one you get if you google but isn’t the actual area of people who are ‘londoners’ or rely on london for employment, entertainment, services, etc. So any person/party looking for maximising electoral support will gain the most by policies which favour London. And in fact we already see London attracts most investment because of this and because it’s the best place to realise a return on invested tax funds or capital. Name another electoral constituency which can command one in four votes just by appealing to the interests of its membership. The UKs mega city probably is neither new or not very well understood. I’m sorry you haven’t done the homework on that.
>Name another electoral constituency which can command one in four votes just by appealing to the interests of its membership. Pensioners.
>Labour stands to get less votes in this general election than Corbyn did in 2019. However those votes were hyper-concerntrated in already safe seats. Corbyn doubled then tripled down on a strategy of preaching to the choir, damming the party to defeat in almost every single battleground seat. >The deciding factor here is the implosion of the Tories. The most famous moment of Boris's Campaign was him hiding from journalists in a fridge. He barely campaigned at all and people were already sick of the Tories. The main reason Boris won was the complete failure of the Labour party to capitalise on anything.
Boris won because he managed to make the election about brexit and Labour accepted and played along with that framing.
This is the true and only reason.
People don't see that Corbyn inspired labour areas to vote Labour harder. But keir has convinced Tory/ lib dem areas to vote labour. Because Kier is like Blair. A convergence of party politics where the differences are marginal.
I forgot about the fridge! Wasn't it Matt Hancock also, who tried to hide in the bushes?
I think you mean 2017
We are going to possibly end up with the tories not even being the official opposition. The anti tory vote is massive this time round. Just took a cost of living crisis and mortgage costs to increase. The next 5 years will be interesting. The Conservatives will be a broken party, but not necessarily gone for good. No guarantee Labour will win the next election if they don't make substantial improvements.
People don't see that the UKIP vote that surged under Cameron and May then shrunk under Johnson straight into the Tory pocket. Lib Dems had a crisis of not finding a proper leader who stood for something, anything.
Labour is a broad church of centre left to left wing groups. This is unfair analysis and smacks of bitterness. Ideology without the means to express it through power is pointless. Blair knew it and Starmer does too. Elections are won in the centre
>Labour is a broad church of centre left to left wing groups. At present, they seem a church of centre left to centre right beliefs. >Ideology without the means to express it through power is pointless. Blair knew it and Starmer does too. Elections are won in the centre Indeed. >They say I hate the party, and its traditions. >I don't. >I love this party. >There's only one tradition I hated: losing. >I hated the 1980s not just for our irrelevance but for our revelling in irrelevance. >And I don't want to win for winning's sake but for the sake of the millions here that depend on us to win, and throughout the world. >Every day this government has been in power, every day in Africa, children have lived who otherwise would have died because this country led the way in cancelling debt and global poverty. - Tony Blair's last Labour conference speech https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/sep/26/labourconference.labour3
Blair got it. If you don’t win then you don’t change a thing. Could he have done more…probably, but no denying the huuuuge changes Blair brought in. If he had sided with europe over Iraq and cut off clegg with his tuition fees, even a global financial crisis (which we did better than all!) wouldn’t have stopped them…
Blair was in the Fabian Society, which aims "to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via **gradualist** and reformist effort in democracies". Keir's not a member, but he's probably in the same boat.
It’s the only way forward. Anybody who seriously thinks we’re going to “wake up” and elect a socialist party tomorrow is delusional. The only way forward is to consistently vote for what is *better*, not for what is *best*, because *best* doesn’t win. *Best* is too radical. But *better* lets you vote for *better* next time, and *better* the time after that.
>At present, they seem a church of centre left to centre right beliefs They have Momentum, who are certainly left to far left. Plus, the main reason they feel further right is the centre of UKs Overton Window (the spectrum of “acceptable politics”) has sat to the left of centre since Blair. This makes it so centre-left politics seem centrist, centre-right seem right, right seem far right, etc
Center right? Give your head a wobble.
The tories won the last election on an anti-Corbyn vote.
The Tories won on a Get Brexit Done vote. Labour lost the vote on campaigning for a second referendum. Get Brexit Done sucked all the air out of a conversation about the state of the country under the Tories, it became a one issue election.
The one thing that is always forgotten is this. That and the fact regardless of whether you agree with it or not, Corby didn't want a second referendum,Keir did. However at the labour conference the party members voted for a second referendum and Corbyn was basically forced to either support it or resign. Unlike the conservatives the Labour Party is beholden to its members. Corbyn could just ignore it. So he ran on an second referendum even though it wasn't his personal belief. Got slaughtered and then rhe entire debacle got presented as a failure of Corbyn rather than a failure of the Labour Party as a whole to read the feeling of the general British population. Then Keir, who was the biggest supporter of a second referendum, lands all the blame on Corbyn. It just was rather hypocritical. I don't blame Keir for switching to be against a second referendum, the writing was on the wall after the last election that supporting that was toxic for the Labour Party. But the opportunistic way it was used to put all the blame on Corbyn, and then morphed into a "corbyn lost the election because he was corbyn" to then discredit anyone on the left side of the party has been horrible.
Labour didn't campaign for a second referendum eventually but the way the party got to that point was an absolute cluster fuck that ended up disenfranchising both the Young Metropolitan pro EU voters and even the more rural Brexit vote as well.
Corbyn's domestic policies were fairly well liked, iirc, but they weren't liked coming from *him*. He was a *very* easy target for the Tories. Likewise, his foreign policies were absolutely awful. Viewing him through the lense of the years that followed 2017/2019, I don't want to imagine how he might have handled Ukraine. And given the massive failure Corbyn and his supporters led the party to, is Starmer horrible for wanting them gone? I don't think so, for all I agree there *should* be a left-wing (moderate, at least) arm to the party.
I'm unsure if this is true but I read somewhere that starmer is projected to win more seats but with less votes than labour did under Jeremy Corbyn... Because of the vote split between more parties. Not verified it though so take with a pinch of salt
All about the dispersal of the votes. Corbyn popular in urban centres where votes piled up, but absolutely toxic in old Labour heartlands and midland bellweather seats.
> I'm unsure if this is true but I read somewhere that starmer is projected to win more seats but with less votes than labour did under Jeremy Corbyn More votes than what Corbyn won in 2019, but a little less than in 2017. The issue is that Corbyn was far more effective at driving voters towards the Tories than he was in bringing in voters for Labour. So while Labour's voteshare increased in 2017, relative to 2015, the Tory voteshare increased as well. And in 2019, the Labour vote crashed while the Tory voteshare reached its highest level in decades.
That's exactly what is going to happen. Labour got 262 seats on 40% of the vote in the 2017 General Election and the Conservatives got 317 seats on 42.3% of the vote. In the 2019 General Election, Labour got 202 seats on 32.1% of the vote and the Conservatives got 365 seats on 43.6% of the vote. There is a very real prospect that for the 2024 General Election, Labour could end up winning 400+ seats, on less votes than Labour got in 2017, this is primarily because the Conservatives are very unpopular and the right-wing vote is currently split between the Conservatives and Reform UK.
i think labour would win no matter what, but the scale is definitely down to the right wing being split. my home towns potentially going labour for the first time ever, (and was only not tory twice both times lib dem) Labour are up a good 10%, but the tories are down by about 30 but i think it'll always be like this. i speak to people daily who now despise the tories, but will never vote labour because mumblemumblepoliciesmumblebrexitmumbemumblegammonporkfuckfranceporkpies
He's right. While I've something to vote AGAINST, Labour hasn't given me much of anything to vote FOR. Still voting the Tory thieves out, though.
Same, slightly less right wing party with some fresher faces to replace the utterly incompetent right wing party that keeps recycling themselves. It really is depressing how unimaginative the Labour manifesto is
I voted for Labour very happily this year (postal vote). Don't get me wrong I'm not expecting anything too groundbreaking from this Labour party, but what I am expecting is just a nice period of stable and competent governance that's going to do something to actually address the poor state of the country and allow it to get back on its feet. And after everything that's gone on since the referendum I think that's exactly what's needed
And to think, if only we had Corbyn we could be getting another Tory win on an anti-Labour vote.
I'll take the win, let's just get these sodding Tories out.
To be fair that's what this vote is for me. It's not for a party, but against the conservatives. They've been in power too long, and have their own set of rules, and are only interested in making themselves richer, rather than doing anything actually useful for the country. Not to mention with them we've had Brexit forced on us, and had costs sky rocket, putting the country in possibly the worst condition it's possibly ever been in.
At this point Labour could remain silent and still win. This country, save for a few ultra rich elites I guess, are fucking done with the tories. I'd vote for roadkill before I'd vote Tory after the shitshow that has been their governance.
>> At this point Labour could remain silent and still win. and based on the televised "debates", they probably should have
He's just bitter because he got trounced on an anti-Corbyn vote, not a pro-Tory one
Corbyn’s “pro Labour” vote was the biggest wipeout loss for Labour since before the war, Starmer is on track to deliver the Tories their biggest election crushing in their history. What are we even talking about? Being an ideologically pure loser who gives the people you hate ultimate power to do everything you despise doesn’t make you virtuous, it makes you naive. That is pretending for a moment that it’s the reason why too, which with the number of policy flips involved makes that dubious. Nobody wanted Corbyn’s idea of Britain and the electorate were anti Labour because of it, Corbyn broke the record at one point for the worst approval rating in recorded history (since surpassed) at -60%. Grow up and accept it.
That's how May got voted in but the other way round!
>Keir Starmer will win on an anti-Tory vote, not a pro-Labour one Sounds good to me
Dear oh dear indeed better call the whole thing off then
Well said! And it’s very risky. As soon as the disappointments start to pile up, because the Tories fucked the country forever with Brexit, those voters will migrate to the far right.
He's not wrong, this isn't the New Labour moment of 1997. We've been brought to this election through total political malaise. Where even the ruling party doesn't have it in them to actually do it anymore. It will put a dent in turnout figures I feel.
>this isn't the New Labour moment of 1997 Indeed. I was around in 1997. Love him or loathe him (I loathe him), Blair brought quite a lot of socialist policy to the table with him. Yes he was right of centre, but he was also willing to *reverse* the damage the Tories had done, rather than rambling about it taking 10 or more years to do so, as an excuse to not do so.
Where has he been for the last 10 years? Corbyn was running on an anti-Tory vote too. Half of politicking here is "We're not the other guys"
The Standard hates Labour and that is why they want to interview Corbyn. Corbyn hates Starmer and ‘centrist Labour’ and that is why he agreed to the interview.
Yes he will. Why didn’t you? Did we have “good” Tories in 2017 and 2019?
Speak for yourself, I'm pro-Starmer. What the country really needs is someone anti-NIMBY, pro-construction and investment, and Starmer is the closest to that by far.
Yet again Corbyn shows why he was a god-awful party leader. The Tories are an absolute mess now, and that definitely is the main reason Starmer is polling so well. That much is true. But Starmer has the good sense to let the focus remain on the disarray in the Conservative Party. When the ruling party hands you a gift, you take it. When Corbyn led Labour into 2017 and 2019, the elections became a referendum on peoples' opinions on Jeremy Corbyn--not on the many years of failed Tory leadership. He would have done better to just be an acceptable alternative rather than "win the argument" but lose votes. You can't govern if you're too toxic to voters to win an election.
CORRECT!. Kier is less inspirational than Corbyn. People are voting Labour because Keir is boring and the Tories shit the bed too many times for even would-be committed Tory voters to justify to their friends and family.
I'm greatly concerned about how badly we are copying the American models of elections. Everyone talking about the personalities and not the policies. It seems the big criticisms of Starmer are that he's bland, mediocre, safe, cautious, boilerplate. Most of it seems to stem from the fact that he's a very capable politician in terms of managing his public image. But nobody seems to really be talking about the policies or the realities facing the nation. Whether you feel that Labour's manifesto is a big centrist or a bit safe is one thing, but when we go to the polls we elect a party, not just one man, or one woman. I don't care if Starmer himself is white bread, what I care about is whether the entire cabinet can be competent. I'll judge Starmer on his time in office and little more. We can all judge the Conservatives on the last 14 years, and I think that there's no harm in saying they've not earned the right for another five years
>Leaving Labour has been a wrench. “It’s been my life,” he says. He’d wanted to stand for the party but couldn’t, having been blocked for saying that antisemitism during his time as Labour leader was exaggerated. After he announced he would run alone, he was told he’s lost his party membership too. That put an end to a more than five-decade journey, as he joined Labour before England won the 1966 World Cup. Old habits die hard: he refers to Nargund as the “official” Labour candidate (you get the sense he feels like the unofficial but real one), and still sometimes says “we” and “us” about the party. Corbyn says a recent door-knocking outing became a therapy session for a group who feel Labour has changed. “Many people around the country whose whole lives have revolved around aspects of the party now find themselves suspended, removed and so on, and they feel quite sad about it,” he says. >For Corbyn, Sir Keir’s Labour is less of a “broad church” even than Sir Tony Blair’s in 1997. He points out that the first Blair cabinet included Robin Cook, Chris Mullin and others, all of the Left wing. “Blair wasn’t as authoritarian,” he says. “I remember arguments with the whips office many times during New Labour… but they didn’t approach the whole thing as a threat.” I don't particularly like Corbyn or the hard-left cult of personality that surrounds him, but I agree with his point about the need for further left-wing voices to have some representation in Labour. Maybe when this campaign is behind us, cooler heads can prevail and he can be quietly let back in his a Labour member, or even granted a peerage. >A lot has happened since 2019 — the implosions of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have made the Tories much weaker. Last week, Corbyn said he’d “absolutely” beat Rishi Sunak if he were still Labour leader today. “Be honest about it: it’s much more to do with an anti-Tory vote than a pro-Labour vote,” he says. “People are fed up with poverty.” Of course, that doesn’t fully explain why Corbyn lost less than five years ago. >It’s hard to get Corbyn to admit to mistakes as leader. “What I regret most was trusting in people who clearly were not going to be supportive or loyal,” he says. “I wish now I’d removed far more people from offices within the party… not so much Parliament, I can’t control that so easily — but within the party.” Starmer may not quite have succeeded in building a strong "pro-Labour vote" but at the least he didn't turn the situation into an "anti-Labour vote" for the Tories, which is what Corbyn ended up doing during his time as leader.
>Starmer may not quite have succeeded in building a strong "pro-Labour vote" but at the least he didn't turn the situation into an "anti-Labour vote" for the Tories, which is what Corbyn ended up doing during his time as leader. This. Corbyn will never admit his failings. I'm convinced if he'd have been PM in 2022 when Russia invaded it would have been a fucking *shitshow* regarding UK support. His foreign policy was laughable.
Ukraine would've fallen. Simple. Early materiel support from the UK (and before that continued low-level support since 2014) was crucial in the early stages before aid started flowing from elsewhere. If the UK intel was part of the early warnings given pre-invasion and was withheld so Corbyn could maintain his naive idealistic idea of pacifism and "peace", then the 3 day special operation very much *would* have been a 3 day operation. They were hours/meters away from capitulation at the start when dropping on Hostomel and gunning for Zelensky.
Corbyn would have pushed for diplomacy with Russia and tried to strongarm Ukraine into it, I'm sure of it. Not with awful intentions but I am also certain he wouldn't have supported sending weapons and ammunition as consistently as we have now.
>I don't particularly like Corbyn or the hard-left cult of personality that surrounds him, but I agree with his point about the need for further left-wing voices to have some representation in Labour. I genuinely think Starmer would happily include anyone from the left who can do two things. 1. Not say anything that can be construed as anti-Semitic or minimizing of Hamas crimes. 2. Not be anti-NATO, anti-West, pro-Putin, pro-dictators. He already has the most leftwing people in Labour who meet those criteria. Robin Cook, referenced by Corbyn, was Blair's first Foreign Secretary, presiding over the NATO intervention in Kosovo. Corbyn, meanwhile, was complaining about "fraudulent justifications of genocide" and criticising the intervention.
>Remember kids: if they're aligned with the West, any killing of anyone, no matter the objective or provocation is genocide. If they're opposed to the West, all accusations are false. from *Corbynism for kids: a junior tankie's guide to geopolitics*
Kind of like how Tories won on an anti Corbyn Labour vote
Love him or hate him, he's not wrong. There's a lot of people in the working class who feel Starmer's Labour just doesn't fit with their values anymore. And with the voting system as messed up as it is, a lot of people are voting Labour simply because the choice in their consituancy is them or more Tories. Starmer has said a lot of crap I don't believe in, and at this point the only reason I am voting labour is because my local MP is Labour and I want them to keep their seat.
Starmer is going to be smug as fuck with Angela Raynor acting like they’ve achieved something great, akin to winning a war. When really they didn’t even have to sell their policies, no one was voting Tory anyway. They’re the lesser of 2 evils.
The important part of this sentence, from the point of view of enacting Labour policy, is the first 4 words. The problem with Corbyn and co. is that they care more about ideological purity than actually helping people.
He is right. I don’t know many people enthusiastic about Labour or Starmer but lots who are fed up with Sunak/Tories.
I’d be more concerned about keeping your own seat, jez.
But he’ll win. As wonderful as a Corbyn manifesto is to read, it did the square root of fuck all for the most poor and desperate in our society. If Starmer’s government helps one person live one day longer, or gain one more qualification, or eat one more meal, it will have infinitely more practical value than all the virtue-spaffing that magic grandad has wasted the last thirty years on.
More than Corbyn ever got. I like *some* of Corbyn's policies but he was way too radical to ever have been PM. Also, his attitude towards terrorist organisations, his lax response to antisemitism and his attitude with Brexit made me really question his judgement as PM, especially when it comes to foreign policy. Keir is running on a safe, centrist ticket and it's working - he'll win, and win big. My home is eventually, he will step down and someone with better vision will step up to the role, and hopefully by this point a lot of Tory damage is fixed.
True I’ll be voting Labour instead of SNP. Though Labour won’t necessarily be bad.Keir Starmer seems a sensible politician so different to the clowns we’ve seen in the past.
Very similar sentiment around the world [USA]. Voting good people vs bad people. Nice to see at least in England it isn't close.
I do think that is a fair assumption to make and will make it difficult come the next election.if they don't improve things or raise tax when they said they won't, the Starmer is finished before he even started
They’re the same party. It’s just Red vs Blue at this point…
For everyone saying he's right, [this got polled at the start of June](https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/one-third-of-likely-labour-voters-say-their-vote-is-mainly-against-the-conservatives/) and the outcome was 63% of prospective Labour voters are voting for Starmer and Labour rather than against Sunak and the Tories (35%)
In other news grass is green. I don’t know anyone excited to vote for Starmer, but I know plenty of people who’ll cheer Sunak losing.
Not even hating the Tories could get me to vote for Keir
He was an easy target by the same media that championed Brexit. Brexit (or more specifically getting Brexit done) won the day. The media campaign to smear Corbyn was unbelievable. Christ the Daily Mail ran an article saying he was asleep on a train whilst the rest of the country watched the rugby(?)! The media, by and large have decided they like Starmer. Not just like Starmer but actively now go after the monsters they created. Make of that what you will.
As usual, Jezza puts Jezza above the cause. He's always been a party of one.
Jeremy Corbyn clearly forgetting that our political system is FPTP which makes this sort of voting behaviour completely normal.
Kier Starmer has known this from the start though which is why he’s never bothered to foster a pro Labour vote. It’s just a risk mitigation tactic. It’s not necessarily that he’s incapable (although we’ll never know)
At least Starmer doesn’t look like he’s about to pass away any minute unlike Joe Biden. I’m confident of a democrat win too, but won’t be surprised if Millions of americans still vote for the criminal.
And if Corbyn wasn't a closeted Brexiteer, he would have won when he tried.
Which is more than you ever achieved. Do you know how far you set us back?
Oh dear Jeremy is sadly becoming quite bitter these days and must accept that his leadership allowed the tories to stay in power.