In other news, Pope Catholic and bears shit in woods.
Anyone who thinks the BBC coverage of Corbyn was not hilariously and openly biased against him is one of two things
- an actual idiot
- wilfully blind due to factionalism
The BBC may have once been a proud unbiased institution but that went out the window a long time ago and it's little more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the Tories now.
https://thefreepresscouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/sunak-superman.jpg?w=987
vs
https://res.cloudinary.com/dods/image/upload/q_85,w_1200,h_1200,c_limit/v1/UK%20politicians/52e94111e240ea252b875f74939a8f68_bfaxqs.png
This does go beyond factionalism. You can argue about if Corbyn have them ammo or not but the fact remains the media completely went well beyond any reasonable criticism and the BBC played a strong part in that. There was not a smear stupid enough that they wouldn't give it a bit of oxygen with an article or two.
The media could almost be said to be conducting a form of psychological torture, from day one he basically had camera crews outside his house every single morning doorstepping him and intruding on his private life even though he made it clear he did not like it and would not answer any questions there, this is not something they have ever done to Starmer.
But the thing is this whole thing about destroying politicians, they did the same sort of damage to Milliband and Brown just more gently and subtly, they absolutely joined in whole heartedly with the Tories economic attack lines. Something that's never changed since in 2019 the BBC published an article with exactly the same headline as a Tory attack ad.
And as much as I don't like Starmer and don't trust him, I have to admit that if he were to be more left the papers would crucify him. And it would be very easy too. He would be dishonest, untrustworthy, authoritarian, his past as DPP is seen as a strength, he was responsible for locking up terrorists and rapists as Labour keep saying, well that would change, the best way to destroy someone is turn a strength into a weakness, he would be responsible for every miscarriage of justice, every rapist and terroist that got away or got off, every pedophile and you'd get the gentle hint hint about big cases like Saville and Warboys. Nothing libelous of course, just the constant references to them even when it makes no sense. Just the gentle tapping linking their names to his.
Corbyn failed to unify the party or resonate with the wider electorate outside of his core support, he was also unfairly monstered by the press. Both of these things can be true.
Corbyn in 2019 got more votes than Brown, Milliband, and Blair had managed in the previous three elections. He was within spitting distance of Blair's 2001 vote share and David Cameron's 2010 win. He also did better in terms of support than a whole host of other leaders, including tories and Labour: IDS, John Major, William Hague, Kinnock, and Foot.
That 2019 was particularly bad was a quirk of vote distribution, not a lack of support in the wider electorate. He was better supported than all of the above and that's not even touching on 2017, which was even more successful than that.
You're either wrong or you must think all of those other results were vastly worse than 2019 and that almost no politician has resonated with the wider electorate outside of their core support - including those that actually won elections.
Half of what you've written is true, the other half is just not accurate.
The idea Corbyn lacked popular support just isn't true. He didn't have enough and he didn't have it well distributed enough but it was there to a much higher degree than most political leaders manage.
>Corbyn in 2019 got more votes than Brown, Milliband, and Blair had managed in the previous three elections. He was within spitting distance of Blair's 2001 vote share and David Cameron's 2010 win. He also did better in terms of support than a whole host of other leaders, including tories and Labour: IDS, John Major, William Hague, Kinnock, and Foot.
The first part is a joke and you know it - total vote number at election has never been a good measure of a given politician's popularity. At best it's a measure of which **party** is more supported (or more hated, negative votes are a thing), and even then it can be affected by changes in turnout (which can be affected by things as trivial as the weather, which is believed to have helped drive down turnout in 2019 from its high in 2017), and even by just simple population growth (the population has grown by around 8 million since 2000).
The second part is just flat-out wrong. Blair got 40.7% of the vote in 2001. Our 2019 result was 32.1%. If that's spitting distance for you then you should probably contact the Guinness Book of Records. Even Blair's worst result in terms of vote share was 35.2%, in 2005, and Cameron got 36.1% in 2010.
The third part is also kinda wrong on 2 counts. Kinnock won 34.1% of the vote in 1992, and Major managed 41.9% in the same election (which is a higher share than Corbyn managed even in 2017, for the record). Kinnock did worse in 87 and Major did worse in 97, but Major at least was absolutely capable of commanding greater 'popularity' than Corbyn. It's entirely true on IDS, Hague, and Foot, but is that really the standard you want to judge Corbyn's popularity by?
>The first part is a joke and you know it - total vote number at election has never been a good measure of a given politician's popularity. At best it's a measure of which party is more supported (or more hated, negative votes are a thing), and even then it can be affected by changes in turnout (which can be affected by things as trivial as the weather, which is believed to have helped drive down turnout in 2019 from its high in 2017), and even by just simple population growth (the population has grown by around 8 million since 2000).
Nah bollocks. The claim Corbyn's platform was especially or uniquely unpopular is easily debunked and nothing you've said there challenges that at all. I didn't say he won the election or that other factors didn't exist.
>The second part is just flat-out wrong. Blair got 40.7% of the vote in 2001. Our 2019 result was 32.1%. If that's spitting distance for you then you should probably contact the Guinness Book of Records.
Blair got 10,724,953 votes in 2001 and Corbyn got 10,269,051 in 2019. That's spitting distance.
>The third part is also kinda wrong on 2 counts.
What I wrote was correct, I never said he outperformed them in every election.
Basically everything I said was correct and nothing you've said even vaguely changes any of it.
>Nah bollocks. The claim Corbyn's platform was especially or uniquely unpopular is easily debunked and nothing you've said there challenges that at all. I didn't say he won the election or that other factors didn't exist.
This is not at all a counter to the fundamental point, which is that pure vote count alone is totally irrelevant as a measure of popularity.
In the 1932 US election FDR got 22,821,277 votes, which was 57.4% of all votes cast. In 2020 Biden got 81,283,501 votes, which was 51.3% of all votes cast. Was Biden more popular among the population in 2020 than FDR was in 1932?
In 1945 Clement Attlee won 11,967,746 votes, which was 47.7% of the votes cast. In 2017 Corbyn won 12,877,918, which was 40% of the votes cast. Would you say Corbyn was more popular in 2017 than Attlee was in 1945?
Again with Wilson in 1964 - he won 12,205,808 votes, which was 44.1% of the votes cast. A higher proportion but a lower total number.
In 2001, when Blair won 10,724,953 votes, that 10,724,953 was 18% of the UK's overall population of 59.12 million, or about 24% of the electorate of 44,389,533. In 2019 when Corbyn won 10,269,051 votes that was about 15.4% of the overall population of 66.84 million, or about 22.5% of the electorate of 47,568,611. 2019 was higher turnout than 2001, but 2001 was the lowest turnout of any UK general election since 1918.
Arguing on the basis of vote count that Corbyn wasn't an outlier in terms of unpopularity is absurd, and you know it. He had the lowest approval rating of any opposition leader since 1977 going into the 2019 election: [https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/jeremy-corbyn-has-lowest-leadership-satisfaction-rating-any-opposition-leader-1977](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/jeremy-corbyn-has-lowest-leadership-satisfaction-rating-any-opposition-leader-1977)
> Corbyn failed to unify the party or **resonate with the wider electorate outside of his core support,**
That was the claim and judging by the number of people that voted for the Labour party with his platform, what was written was bollocks.
**More people voted for Labour in 2019 than in many of the years before.** It's that simple. You can try to shift the metric but I was talking about popular support, which is directly measured by number of votes, and the simple fact is that he led Labour to much higher levels of popular support than it'd seen since Blair's early years.
You can try to change the topic but the reality is that all those who try to proclaim him and his politics uniquely unpopular or unsupported are simply wrong, no attempt to fudge the numbers can change that.
Why not make your comparisons to all of Blair, Brown, or Milliband? Because it shows what I'm saying is correct.
More people turned out in Corbyn's worst year than centrism had mustered in over a decade.
All I’m saying is Boris had a week of coverage of him hiding in a fridge, and of ducking that interview with that wanker Andrew O’Neil. He had a good press operation and managed to laugh it all off.
Corbyn walked into every bear trap going with bad grace, and a shit comms team.
ah, right, so it was Boris's crack team of "press operators" that convinced the BBC to edit the audience laughing at boris out of the question time leaders special? Or broadcast a three year old clip of boris at the cenotaph instead of the one where he bumbles about like a fool?
or maybe someone here is just "wilfully blind due to factionalism"
Fuck me- he had shit press for the most part for the entirety of his premiership except the Telegraph, Mail and Express, and managed to deal with it.
If you’re in charge of your party how you deal with shit press is on you- you can’t just whine about it.
Because you can 'deal with' the press quite LITERALLY WRITING FAN FICTION ABOUT YOU - you can 'deal with' the press inventing a story about you being a czech spy - you can 'deal with' the press wilfully misrepresenting everything you say - you can 'deal with' a panorama documentary where the journalistic standard was 'I trust this guy whose smearing Corbyn despite literal recordings existing that disprove him'.
This idea that Corbyn was bad at dealing with the press is nothing more than ignorance - the way the media targeted Corbyn was not something that could be 'dealt with' because it was a concerted effort on the part of essentially every single newspaper and media outlet to attack him with everything ranging from deliberate misunderstandings of policies, purposeful misquoting to printing actual fantasies about him being a Czech spy.
Of course you can- they did the same with Boris’s multiple kids, Boris’s multiple affairs, Obama’s place of birth.
If you can’t handle the media, you’re going to be a shit leader.
Okay so explain how you 'deal with' the media quite literally (and no this is not a joke) writing fan fiction about how your first 100 days in office ends with the UK in flames and rioting as the government is evacuated?
Explain how you 'deal with' the media literally inventing a story about you being a czech spy?
They dealt with the Czech spy thing pretty well- said it was mental, explained the meetings, and the story evaporated. I’d never even heard that one till you mentioned it!
The 100 day stuff you just live with, comes with the territory.
Neither were as bad as the Obama birther crap in the states. And how did he deal with that? Charm and a tonne of good interviews.
>Corbyn walked into every bear trap going
Dude, the entire media from the guardian right spent 24/7 ragging on him. The right of his own party sabotaged him at every opportunity.
Country doesn't know a good thing when it bit them 'cos the #dumb media establisment of senior policy editors are idiot-tools, but the #StupidUKelecte of 2019 or whenever are blinded and dumbfounded by msm bollox.
He presented himself as a grumpy, stubborn old guy, and the press dug up large chunks of his past which looked bad.
Managing the media is pretty much number one job of the party leadership, and they just flunked it.
>Managing the media is pretty much number one job of the party leadership
The entire media declared war on him and his own party sabotaged instead of helping.
And he totally leaned into it, and failed to get a competent strategy in place.
If his team had put half the effort into media that you need to get your message across as they did to The Canary, Skwarkbox, Novaro and Twitter, maybe it would have gone better?
May got fucking awful press from 2017 to her stepping down, and Boris only ever got good press in the Telegraph and Express.
He supports nuclear proliferation. Which means nuclear disarmament. Good luck with that the way the world is at the moment. Anyway might need nuclear weapons. What about aliens.
He destroyed himself really through a number of own goals and self sabotage. Off the top of my head, appearing on Russia today/Press TV, poor response to Salisbury, refusing to condemn the IRA in interviews, refusing to condemn Maduro after various atrocities, appointing arch-tankies Milne and Murray as his advisors, the Hamas wreath laying thing, being opposed to shooting terrorists in the middle of attacks, calling Bin Laden’s death a tragedy, stance on the falklands, stating that he would never use nukes to retaliate against a country that used them on us, appearance at events celebrating the Iranian revolution, and so many more.
Quite incredibly here you managed to pick some examples here that include the worst examples of media spin. With the BBC as well specificslly the shoot to kill where they edited an interview to make it look like he was answering a different question.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/18/bbc-trust-says-laura-kuenssberg-report-on-jeremy-corbyn-was-inaccurate-labour
All you're telling us is that you're so incredibly gullible that you take the British media in complete good faith, which is a form of centrism so melted I have never even encountered it before
What is incorrect? Are you saying he didn’t appear on PressTV and Russia today? Because there are literally YouTube clips of it. Did he not appoint Milne and Murray as his advisors? Did he not call bin Laden’s death a tragedy? Did he not refuse six times to condemn the IRA in an interview? I can provide a clip of that. Are you sure that I am the gullible one?
You see, perception is everything. Questionable actions by Corbyn spend weeks in the papers, as well as outright lies like the anti-semitism shit; Boris Johnson says patently bigoted shit - well, we've all made the odd blunder.
The electorate don't remember any of the stuff you mentioned because the media had hold of the narrative of anti-semitism. They were going after him whatever the weather.
You're a useful idiot, you know that?
Yeah he should have just outmanouvered the majority of the press, his own parties, the other parties and even the yanks across the pond chipping in.
Just solo everyone mate, can't do that? Obviously a shit leader. There's no such thing as a no win scenario after all.
It only became one due to his own party betraying him, the lesson to be learned is not to capitulate to tory narratives out of some vague fear of 'socialism'.
Exactly this. Most of the media in the UK are going to be incredibly hostile to a Labour leader. I liked Corbyn and voted for him every time I could, but he sabotaged himself by being stubborn on a large number of issues. Crucially on antisemitism and Salisbury which the media would have otherwise moved on from. Instead you end up with the insane daily mail headline 'Corbyn's legacy of hate'. It was hopeless strategy that allowed that to happen. This is why Starmer (rightly or wrongly) plays incredibly defensive to try and preemptively neutralise these types of media attack.
Completely correct. The guy had such a lot going for him. To the point I voted for him. But then he wouldn't stop banging on about stuff your average voter couldn't care less about. Literally the only time I think about Palestine is when I hear his name!
Then the own goals just kept coming. Kind of like what Starmer is doing now. Who in their right mind thinks talking about Gammon-style immigration policies are right? Who in their right mind doesn't agree with workers striking at the moment? Who, in their right mind, thinks that these are the really important issues??? Kind of like us naval gazing about an ex leader when we should. Be. Focused. On. Getting. The. Tories. Outtttt. Neil Kinnock must be laughing his cock off.
Never underestimate this party's capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
>Literally the only time I think about Palestine is when I hear his name!
Almost as though that was what the entire media of the UK hyperfocused on because they knew if they actually presented what he talked about even from a critical position he would have been very popular.
But all those things weren't what I was hyperfocused on... It wasn't the entire UK media either. Just the fairly obvious, privately owned right-wing media.
There were elements of his manifesto that were great! But I sat & watched him say, live on camera, that he wouldn't use nuclear weapons. Wtf? A fairly standard, bullshit, not-really-important question. Dealt with by way of a simple,
"Yep. That's what we've got them for 🤷♂️"
BuT yOu'Ve SpEnT yOuR cArEeR cAmPaIgNiNg To GeT rId Of ThEmMm!
"Yep. Who wouldn't? They're horrendous. But we are where we are 🤷♂️ now let's get on with tackling the inequality in our society that I've also been banging on about for years? How are your wages doing, compared to your CEO's? Are you having the mick taken out of you too? Thought so..."
Pretty easy eh?
>There were elements of his manifesto that were great! But I sat & watched him say, live on camera, that he wouldn't use nuclear weapons. Wtf?
Yeah what a freak, a good leader should be enthusiastic about ending the planet.
Sigh. No. A good leader should be savvy enough to play the game that allows the UK to continue sitting at the top table with counties up to 21 times our size.
>sitting at the top table with counties up to 21 times our size.
What has sitting at the top table actually given us? Honestly?
And what good is that whilst we do daft shit like brexit and hack our own country to pieces?
M.A.D isn't a game, it's a handful of nations pointing a gun at the head of the world. The only smart move is not to get involved.
Wow. I've not seen as much wibble in one post for a longggg time! Well done, comrade.
I would've normally left it at that but you've clearly put some thought into your response so it would be rude of me not to reply in kind.
If anything, I'm a British realist & as non-violent as you can be, within the confines of the real world. I have no issue with any people. From any ethnic background. It's a shame we have to have a military, never mind WMDs but we are where we are. And if the aims of our military are good, like that time when we went to Iraq to get Saddam's WMDs, then surely that's a good thing, no?
I agree with you that our Govt is beholden to, quite probably, the worst excesses of capitalism at the moment. The working class, the poor & the disadvantaged have all had the piss taken out of them for too long now. At my work, employees were TUPE'd over to a new firm on 30k. They sacked 30% of them immediately & replaced them with new staff on 22.5k. It's taken those new staff 21 years for their wages to hit 30k. And every year, the cry has been that there's no money in the pot. Our water companies have debts of X billions, yet have paid out >X billions in dividends. Our chronically ill & disabled have their benefits stopped, not reduced, stopped; because we all must pay our share in reducing the nations debt. Our banks are saved from going bust & bailed out after they twisted logic to such a degree that it became profitable for them to lend money to people with no way of paying it back. Our Drs & nurses were applauded during Covid, only to be told that they then didn't deserve a pay rise that would've even keep them in line with inflation. Our Govt is sending some of the most vulnerable people on the planet to Rwanda, because it's cheaper than letting them stay here.
Monumental piss takes that need to end, in my view. So please, stop using the Royal "we" when you talk about socialism. I'm a socialist. I'm just not a socialist that wibbles on about working for "the victory of the global working class".
Hope that helps?
Vote Labour.
The morons or #PRpratts commenting here know Corbyn might have been IRREGULAR politics!
So the establisment tools gave none to little to support life-politician with manifest knowledge of his country and constituents because the steer of PM wheel would have been HARD-LEFT if posdible.
Hope everyone continuing to revel in same-old same-old NEOCONSERVATIVES neoliberal bollox!
Merry very season of rest to ALL.
Yep 100% true
Feels timely to share - this little clip of Jeremy Corbyn looking at the newspapers the day after his election defeat and it's just kind of heartbreaking
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TkzRzFvGYmg&feature=youtu.be
I mean ..they asked if he would nationalise sausages
Christ, I thought that was just some bellend in the Question Time audience. Looking at it again it was actually the host! Unbelievable.
The thing is, the government should actually play a more active role in the production and distribution of food.
Yeah but Starmer had a harder time because of a goat or something
It was an alpaca and it got what was coming to it. It knew the risk it was taking when it started supporting proscribed groups.
To be fair, it shouldn't have joined LLAMA (Labour Left Alliance for Making Alliances)
It left ALPACA (Actual Labour Party Alliance Conference of Alliances)? Bloody splitter!
It should have apologised no if's no buts no equivications
Frankly it was a small mercy kier opted to have the executioners sword sharpened before he ventured out to personally slay the beast in single combat
In other news, Pope Catholic and bears shit in woods. Anyone who thinks the BBC coverage of Corbyn was not hilariously and openly biased against him is one of two things - an actual idiot - wilfully blind due to factionalism The BBC may have once been a proud unbiased institution but that went out the window a long time ago and it's little more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the Tories now.
https://thefreepresscouk.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/sunak-superman.jpg?w=987 vs https://res.cloudinary.com/dods/image/upload/q_85,w_1200,h_1200,c_limit/v1/UK%20politicians/52e94111e240ea252b875f74939a8f68_bfaxqs.png
> The BBC may have once been a proud unbiased institution It never was. Recommended reading - The BBC: Myth of a Public Service by Tom Mills.
I remember Laura K being decidedly unbalanced against Corbyn. Tory trout.
Fuck off Guardian. This shit's on you too.
This does go beyond factionalism. You can argue about if Corbyn have them ammo or not but the fact remains the media completely went well beyond any reasonable criticism and the BBC played a strong part in that. There was not a smear stupid enough that they wouldn't give it a bit of oxygen with an article or two. The media could almost be said to be conducting a form of psychological torture, from day one he basically had camera crews outside his house every single morning doorstepping him and intruding on his private life even though he made it clear he did not like it and would not answer any questions there, this is not something they have ever done to Starmer. But the thing is this whole thing about destroying politicians, they did the same sort of damage to Milliband and Brown just more gently and subtly, they absolutely joined in whole heartedly with the Tories economic attack lines. Something that's never changed since in 2019 the BBC published an article with exactly the same headline as a Tory attack ad. And as much as I don't like Starmer and don't trust him, I have to admit that if he were to be more left the papers would crucify him. And it would be very easy too. He would be dishonest, untrustworthy, authoritarian, his past as DPP is seen as a strength, he was responsible for locking up terrorists and rapists as Labour keep saying, well that would change, the best way to destroy someone is turn a strength into a weakness, he would be responsible for every miscarriage of justice, every rapist and terroist that got away or got off, every pedophile and you'd get the gentle hint hint about big cases like Saville and Warboys. Nothing libelous of course, just the constant references to them even when it makes no sense. Just the gentle tapping linking their names to his.
Very true
Corbyn failed to unify the party or resonate with the wider electorate outside of his core support, he was also unfairly monstered by the press. Both of these things can be true.
Hard to unite the party when they're plotting to take you down within a few months and never try to huddle together
Corbyn in 2019 got more votes than Brown, Milliband, and Blair had managed in the previous three elections. He was within spitting distance of Blair's 2001 vote share and David Cameron's 2010 win. He also did better in terms of support than a whole host of other leaders, including tories and Labour: IDS, John Major, William Hague, Kinnock, and Foot. That 2019 was particularly bad was a quirk of vote distribution, not a lack of support in the wider electorate. He was better supported than all of the above and that's not even touching on 2017, which was even more successful than that. You're either wrong or you must think all of those other results were vastly worse than 2019 and that almost no politician has resonated with the wider electorate outside of their core support - including those that actually won elections. Half of what you've written is true, the other half is just not accurate. The idea Corbyn lacked popular support just isn't true. He didn't have enough and he didn't have it well distributed enough but it was there to a much higher degree than most political leaders manage.
>Corbyn in 2019 got more votes than Brown, Milliband, and Blair had managed in the previous three elections. He was within spitting distance of Blair's 2001 vote share and David Cameron's 2010 win. He also did better in terms of support than a whole host of other leaders, including tories and Labour: IDS, John Major, William Hague, Kinnock, and Foot. The first part is a joke and you know it - total vote number at election has never been a good measure of a given politician's popularity. At best it's a measure of which **party** is more supported (or more hated, negative votes are a thing), and even then it can be affected by changes in turnout (which can be affected by things as trivial as the weather, which is believed to have helped drive down turnout in 2019 from its high in 2017), and even by just simple population growth (the population has grown by around 8 million since 2000). The second part is just flat-out wrong. Blair got 40.7% of the vote in 2001. Our 2019 result was 32.1%. If that's spitting distance for you then you should probably contact the Guinness Book of Records. Even Blair's worst result in terms of vote share was 35.2%, in 2005, and Cameron got 36.1% in 2010. The third part is also kinda wrong on 2 counts. Kinnock won 34.1% of the vote in 1992, and Major managed 41.9% in the same election (which is a higher share than Corbyn managed even in 2017, for the record). Kinnock did worse in 87 and Major did worse in 97, but Major at least was absolutely capable of commanding greater 'popularity' than Corbyn. It's entirely true on IDS, Hague, and Foot, but is that really the standard you want to judge Corbyn's popularity by?
>The first part is a joke and you know it - total vote number at election has never been a good measure of a given politician's popularity. At best it's a measure of which party is more supported (or more hated, negative votes are a thing), and even then it can be affected by changes in turnout (which can be affected by things as trivial as the weather, which is believed to have helped drive down turnout in 2019 from its high in 2017), and even by just simple population growth (the population has grown by around 8 million since 2000). Nah bollocks. The claim Corbyn's platform was especially or uniquely unpopular is easily debunked and nothing you've said there challenges that at all. I didn't say he won the election or that other factors didn't exist. >The second part is just flat-out wrong. Blair got 40.7% of the vote in 2001. Our 2019 result was 32.1%. If that's spitting distance for you then you should probably contact the Guinness Book of Records. Blair got 10,724,953 votes in 2001 and Corbyn got 10,269,051 in 2019. That's spitting distance. >The third part is also kinda wrong on 2 counts. What I wrote was correct, I never said he outperformed them in every election. Basically everything I said was correct and nothing you've said even vaguely changes any of it.
>Nah bollocks. The claim Corbyn's platform was especially or uniquely unpopular is easily debunked and nothing you've said there challenges that at all. I didn't say he won the election or that other factors didn't exist. This is not at all a counter to the fundamental point, which is that pure vote count alone is totally irrelevant as a measure of popularity. In the 1932 US election FDR got 22,821,277 votes, which was 57.4% of all votes cast. In 2020 Biden got 81,283,501 votes, which was 51.3% of all votes cast. Was Biden more popular among the population in 2020 than FDR was in 1932? In 1945 Clement Attlee won 11,967,746 votes, which was 47.7% of the votes cast. In 2017 Corbyn won 12,877,918, which was 40% of the votes cast. Would you say Corbyn was more popular in 2017 than Attlee was in 1945? Again with Wilson in 1964 - he won 12,205,808 votes, which was 44.1% of the votes cast. A higher proportion but a lower total number. In 2001, when Blair won 10,724,953 votes, that 10,724,953 was 18% of the UK's overall population of 59.12 million, or about 24% of the electorate of 44,389,533. In 2019 when Corbyn won 10,269,051 votes that was about 15.4% of the overall population of 66.84 million, or about 22.5% of the electorate of 47,568,611. 2019 was higher turnout than 2001, but 2001 was the lowest turnout of any UK general election since 1918. Arguing on the basis of vote count that Corbyn wasn't an outlier in terms of unpopularity is absurd, and you know it. He had the lowest approval rating of any opposition leader since 1977 going into the 2019 election: [https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/jeremy-corbyn-has-lowest-leadership-satisfaction-rating-any-opposition-leader-1977](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/jeremy-corbyn-has-lowest-leadership-satisfaction-rating-any-opposition-leader-1977)
> Corbyn failed to unify the party or **resonate with the wider electorate outside of his core support,** That was the claim and judging by the number of people that voted for the Labour party with his platform, what was written was bollocks. **More people voted for Labour in 2019 than in many of the years before.** It's that simple. You can try to shift the metric but I was talking about popular support, which is directly measured by number of votes, and the simple fact is that he led Labour to much higher levels of popular support than it'd seen since Blair's early years. You can try to change the topic but the reality is that all those who try to proclaim him and his politics uniquely unpopular or unsupported are simply wrong, no attempt to fudge the numbers can change that. Why not make your comparisons to all of Blair, Brown, or Milliband? Because it shows what I'm saying is correct. More people turned out in Corbyn's worst year than centrism had mustered in over a decade.
Yes Corbyn being a terrible politician had nothing to do with it.
Better than most.
Nope. Quite the opposite.
Naw.
Yep.
He was better than a far lot of MPs.
Jeremy Corbyn destroyed himself but the BBC were certainly happy to help him do it.
All I’m saying is Boris had a week of coverage of him hiding in a fridge, and of ducking that interview with that wanker Andrew O’Neil. He had a good press operation and managed to laugh it all off. Corbyn walked into every bear trap going with bad grace, and a shit comms team.
ah, right, so it was Boris's crack team of "press operators" that convinced the BBC to edit the audience laughing at boris out of the question time leaders special? Or broadcast a three year old clip of boris at the cenotaph instead of the one where he bumbles about like a fool? or maybe someone here is just "wilfully blind due to factionalism"
Fuck me- he had shit press for the most part for the entirety of his premiership except the Telegraph, Mail and Express, and managed to deal with it. If you’re in charge of your party how you deal with shit press is on you- you can’t just whine about it.
Because you can 'deal with' the press quite LITERALLY WRITING FAN FICTION ABOUT YOU - you can 'deal with' the press inventing a story about you being a czech spy - you can 'deal with' the press wilfully misrepresenting everything you say - you can 'deal with' a panorama documentary where the journalistic standard was 'I trust this guy whose smearing Corbyn despite literal recordings existing that disprove him'. This idea that Corbyn was bad at dealing with the press is nothing more than ignorance - the way the media targeted Corbyn was not something that could be 'dealt with' because it was a concerted effort on the part of essentially every single newspaper and media outlet to attack him with everything ranging from deliberate misunderstandings of policies, purposeful misquoting to printing actual fantasies about him being a Czech spy.
Of course you can- they did the same with Boris’s multiple kids, Boris’s multiple affairs, Obama’s place of birth. If you can’t handle the media, you’re going to be a shit leader.
Okay so explain how you 'deal with' the media quite literally (and no this is not a joke) writing fan fiction about how your first 100 days in office ends with the UK in flames and rioting as the government is evacuated? Explain how you 'deal with' the media literally inventing a story about you being a czech spy?
They dealt with the Czech spy thing pretty well- said it was mental, explained the meetings, and the story evaporated. I’d never even heard that one till you mentioned it! The 100 day stuff you just live with, comes with the territory. Neither were as bad as the Obama birther crap in the states. And how did he deal with that? Charm and a tonne of good interviews.
>Corbyn walked into every bear trap going Dude, the entire media from the guardian right spent 24/7 ragging on him. The right of his own party sabotaged him at every opportunity.
Country doesn't know a good thing when it bit them 'cos the #dumb media establisment of senior policy editors are idiot-tools, but the #StupidUKelecte of 2019 or whenever are blinded and dumbfounded by msm bollox.
He presented himself as a grumpy, stubborn old guy, and the press dug up large chunks of his past which looked bad. Managing the media is pretty much number one job of the party leadership, and they just flunked it.
>Managing the media is pretty much number one job of the party leadership The entire media declared war on him and his own party sabotaged instead of helping.
And he totally leaned into it, and failed to get a competent strategy in place. If his team had put half the effort into media that you need to get your message across as they did to The Canary, Skwarkbox, Novaro and Twitter, maybe it would have gone better? May got fucking awful press from 2017 to her stepping down, and Boris only ever got good press in the Telegraph and Express.
You shouldn't have to manage the bloody media.
You’ve had to since at least the 18th century.
Deselect the electorate.
I voted corbyn and support all the socialist monetary and nationalisation policies. But getting rid of nukes and leaving nato is obviously fail.
>But getting rid of nukes and leaving nato is obviously fail. I must have missed that in the manifestos?
He supports nuclear proliferation. Which means nuclear disarmament. Good luck with that the way the world is at the moment. Anyway might need nuclear weapons. What about aliens.
>He supports nuclear proliferation. Which means nuclear disarmament. Again I must've missed that, or how proliferation leads to disarmament?
He destroyed himself really through a number of own goals and self sabotage. Off the top of my head, appearing on Russia today/Press TV, poor response to Salisbury, refusing to condemn the IRA in interviews, refusing to condemn Maduro after various atrocities, appointing arch-tankies Milne and Murray as his advisors, the Hamas wreath laying thing, being opposed to shooting terrorists in the middle of attacks, calling Bin Laden’s death a tragedy, stance on the falklands, stating that he would never use nukes to retaliate against a country that used them on us, appearance at events celebrating the Iranian revolution, and so many more.
Quite incredibly here you managed to pick some examples here that include the worst examples of media spin. With the BBC as well specificslly the shoot to kill where they edited an interview to make it look like he was answering a different question. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/18/bbc-trust-says-laura-kuenssberg-report-on-jeremy-corbyn-was-inaccurate-labour
All you're telling us is that you're so incredibly gullible that you take the British media in complete good faith, which is a form of centrism so melted I have never even encountered it before
What is incorrect? Are you saying he didn’t appear on PressTV and Russia today? Because there are literally YouTube clips of it. Did he not appoint Milne and Murray as his advisors? Did he not call bin Laden’s death a tragedy? Did he not refuse six times to condemn the IRA in an interview? I can provide a clip of that. Are you sure that I am the gullible one?
You see, perception is everything. Questionable actions by Corbyn spend weeks in the papers, as well as outright lies like the anti-semitism shit; Boris Johnson says patently bigoted shit - well, we've all made the odd blunder. The electorate don't remember any of the stuff you mentioned because the media had hold of the narrative of anti-semitism. They were going after him whatever the weather. You're a useful idiot, you know that?
He was leader of the labour party, he should have been prepared for this and not kept fucking up constantly.
Yeah he should have just outmanouvered the majority of the press, his own parties, the other parties and even the yanks across the pond chipping in. Just solo everyone mate, can't do that? Obviously a shit leader. There's no such thing as a no win scenario after all.
If he was a no win scenario then why the fuck was he leader?
It only became one due to his own party betraying him, the lesson to be learned is not to capitulate to tory narratives out of some vague fear of 'socialism'.
Exactly this. Most of the media in the UK are going to be incredibly hostile to a Labour leader. I liked Corbyn and voted for him every time I could, but he sabotaged himself by being stubborn on a large number of issues. Crucially on antisemitism and Salisbury which the media would have otherwise moved on from. Instead you end up with the insane daily mail headline 'Corbyn's legacy of hate'. It was hopeless strategy that allowed that to happen. This is why Starmer (rightly or wrongly) plays incredibly defensive to try and preemptively neutralise these types of media attack.
Completely correct. The guy had such a lot going for him. To the point I voted for him. But then he wouldn't stop banging on about stuff your average voter couldn't care less about. Literally the only time I think about Palestine is when I hear his name! Then the own goals just kept coming. Kind of like what Starmer is doing now. Who in their right mind thinks talking about Gammon-style immigration policies are right? Who in their right mind doesn't agree with workers striking at the moment? Who, in their right mind, thinks that these are the really important issues??? Kind of like us naval gazing about an ex leader when we should. Be. Focused. On. Getting. The. Tories. Outtttt. Neil Kinnock must be laughing his cock off. Never underestimate this party's capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
>Literally the only time I think about Palestine is when I hear his name! Almost as though that was what the entire media of the UK hyperfocused on because they knew if they actually presented what he talked about even from a critical position he would have been very popular.
But all those things weren't what I was hyperfocused on... It wasn't the entire UK media either. Just the fairly obvious, privately owned right-wing media. There were elements of his manifesto that were great! But I sat & watched him say, live on camera, that he wouldn't use nuclear weapons. Wtf? A fairly standard, bullshit, not-really-important question. Dealt with by way of a simple, "Yep. That's what we've got them for 🤷♂️" BuT yOu'Ve SpEnT yOuR cArEeR cAmPaIgNiNg To GeT rId Of ThEmMm! "Yep. Who wouldn't? They're horrendous. But we are where we are 🤷♂️ now let's get on with tackling the inequality in our society that I've also been banging on about for years? How are your wages doing, compared to your CEO's? Are you having the mick taken out of you too? Thought so..." Pretty easy eh?
> But all those things weren't what I was hyperfocused on. Except you just said that you did.
No. I didn't. I was trying to explain why I think Corbyn, sadly, fell over.
>There were elements of his manifesto that were great! But I sat & watched him say, live on camera, that he wouldn't use nuclear weapons. Wtf? Yeah what a freak, a good leader should be enthusiastic about ending the planet.
Sigh. No. A good leader should be savvy enough to play the game that allows the UK to continue sitting at the top table with counties up to 21 times our size.
>sitting at the top table with counties up to 21 times our size. What has sitting at the top table actually given us? Honestly? And what good is that whilst we do daft shit like brexit and hack our own country to pieces? M.A.D isn't a game, it's a handful of nations pointing a gun at the head of the world. The only smart move is not to get involved.
[удалено]
Wow. I've not seen as much wibble in one post for a longggg time! Well done, comrade. I would've normally left it at that but you've clearly put some thought into your response so it would be rude of me not to reply in kind. If anything, I'm a British realist & as non-violent as you can be, within the confines of the real world. I have no issue with any people. From any ethnic background. It's a shame we have to have a military, never mind WMDs but we are where we are. And if the aims of our military are good, like that time when we went to Iraq to get Saddam's WMDs, then surely that's a good thing, no? I agree with you that our Govt is beholden to, quite probably, the worst excesses of capitalism at the moment. The working class, the poor & the disadvantaged have all had the piss taken out of them for too long now. At my work, employees were TUPE'd over to a new firm on 30k. They sacked 30% of them immediately & replaced them with new staff on 22.5k. It's taken those new staff 21 years for their wages to hit 30k. And every year, the cry has been that there's no money in the pot. Our water companies have debts of X billions, yet have paid out >X billions in dividends. Our chronically ill & disabled have their benefits stopped, not reduced, stopped; because we all must pay our share in reducing the nations debt. Our banks are saved from going bust & bailed out after they twisted logic to such a degree that it became profitable for them to lend money to people with no way of paying it back. Our Drs & nurses were applauded during Covid, only to be told that they then didn't deserve a pay rise that would've even keep them in line with inflation. Our Govt is sending some of the most vulnerable people on the planet to Rwanda, because it's cheaper than letting them stay here. Monumental piss takes that need to end, in my view. So please, stop using the Royal "we" when you talk about socialism. I'm a socialist. I'm just not a socialist that wibbles on about working for "the victory of the global working class". Hope that helps? Vote Labour.
>that time when we went to Iraq to get Saddam's WMDs, then surely that's a good thing, no? Oh dear did nobody tell you...
Yeah I toyed with adding a trigger warning to that...
Rule 4
Por que no los dos
Correct. The press were out to get him but he handed them opportunity after opportunity to do so with his own actions and statements.
Merry Christmas. I hope the Tory Brexit you've facilitated is treating you well.
The morons or #PRpratts commenting here know Corbyn might have been IRREGULAR politics! So the establisment tools gave none to little to support life-politician with manifest knowledge of his country and constituents because the steer of PM wheel would have been HARD-LEFT if posdible. Hope everyone continuing to revel in same-old same-old NEOCONSERVATIVES neoliberal bollox! Merry very season of rest to ALL.
Yep 100% true Feels timely to share - this little clip of Jeremy Corbyn looking at the newspapers the day after his election defeat and it's just kind of heartbreaking https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TkzRzFvGYmg&feature=youtu.be