I briefly joined the Labour Party in 2016 to vote against Corbyn as leader. My candidate, Angela Eagle, had to drop out of the Labour leadership race when her campaign office was firebombed. So it’s worth remembering Corbynistas were not only utterly deluded idiots but often abusive thugs as well.
My last political comment on Facebook in was defending a Labour MP in Exeter who dared question Dear Leader Corbyn and consequently was receiving abuse online. I suggested people get in a car and drive 50 miles in any direction outside London and try and find a Corbyn supporter anywhere - then I got abuse. That was 2016.
Obvious from v early on that this would boil down to an election pitting witless old diffident Corbyn against charming confident young Johnson. It's still faintly unbelievable to me that in an environment where vast numbers of voters in the U.K. were indicating their extreme displeasure with decisions and attitudes based in London, the Labour Party chose to elect a private school educated MP for Islington as leader.
A soft spoken weak out of touch airy fairy intellectual that confirmed every negative stereotype of left wingers perpetrated by the right wing, it is hardly surprising that Corbyn's initial election was heavily rumoured to be a result of a campaign by Telegraph readers. (This was enabled by previous Labour leader Ed Miliband's decision to massively simplify voting rules).
“Sign up today to make sure the bearded socialist voter-repellent becomes the next Labour leader - and dooms the party forever,” the Telegraph article reads.
“A lot of people, both in the Labour party and outside it, think that would be dreadful for Labour, the sort of political disaster the party last suffered in 1983 when Michael Foot’s leftwing views saw the party lose by a landslide to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives.
“Not everyone thinks it would be a bad thing if that was to be repeated at the next general election in 2020.”
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| Daily Telegraph July 2015 |
It’s a long right wing narrative that the liberal left are weak ditherers who can’t be relied on to make tough decisions and Corbyn supporters could not have found a better 'leader', in a breathless hesitant diffident substitute teacher who is totally out of his depth to fulfill that narrative for the Right.
How does any political party manage to lose to this current Tory party in these circumstances - how? Disastrous management of public finances, disastrous management of a referendum, a clown as leader, how did Labour lose to this? How many Labour Leaders since 1945 would have lost to Johnson's TrumpLite Conservative Party?
The 2016 elections indicated a historic vote against wet ineffectual leadership delivered from urban central government. In reaction Labour chose to stick with their leader, a London MP for notoriously out of touch borough of Islington. In last night's catastrophic election apparently his vote in Islington has stayed firm. I lived in Islington for a bit, but mainly elsewhere, and none of this surprises me. Like much of London it feels like a completely different planet to the rest of the country.
The 2016 elections indicated a historic vote against wet ineffectual leadership delivered from urban central government. In reaction Labour chose to stick with their leader, a London MP for notoriously out of touch borough of Islington. In last night's catastrophic election apparently his vote in Islington has stayed firm. I lived in Islington for a bit, but mainly elsewhere, and none of this surprises me. Like much of London it feels like a completely different planet to the rest of the country.
Corbyn was blatantly, obviously unpopular and un-electable right from the start but the Corbyn cult refused to accept any argument otherwise and brutally shouted down any opposition in every medium. This year Labour had a chance to enact a genuinely progressive set of policies; and to present them they selected a cranky, insecure back bencher, with nil previous experience of anything beyond undermining his own political party from the back of the room.
Out of touch? He called for Article 50 to be enabled the day after the EU referendum vote
Labour part members have enabled the hardest of Brexit and the worst kind of conservatives at the point when we most needed them, and have wrecked any chances for genuine reform of this country for a generation.
There will be many painful comparisons to Micheal Foot's disastrous result against Thatcher in the 1980s. Let's get this straight -Micheal Foot was an articulate intellectual who had the bravery to enlist and literally fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War (Roughly about the same time the right wing British press like The Daily Telegraph was cheering on Herr Hitler and Il Duce).
Micheal Foot resigned as Labour leader within days of the 1983 election defeat. Corbyn has suggested he will stay on for months.
Jeremy Corbyn makes Micheal Foot look like Richard the Lionheart.
Jeremy Corbyn makes Micheal Foot look like Richard the Lionheart.
My blog From 2016
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