So here’s my best guess about where this goes next, with decreasing confidence as it goes on:
The Tories win, but by a closer margin than was originally predicted when the election was called. (About 90% sure of this, but that 10% is my happy place)
They won’t care that they lost ground during the campaign, they’ll be able to point to their seat gains and claim it as an endorsement of their direction, and the media will all go along for that ride. (As long as the first happens, I’m about 100% sure this will be the angle)
Corbyn will argue that their better than expected performance means that the policies are working and he just needs a little time. He won’t announce plans to resign. (About 70% sure of this. He might just decide it’s time.)
The rest of the PLP won’t care and there’ll be another leadership battle. The right of the party will come forward to take his place, and there won’t be any left leaning candidate in the running. (60%)
So Corbyn will win again, but at the expense of any goodwill gained towards the party over the course of the election campaign. (60%)
And my most tentative bet:
May’s government becomes extremely unpopular by 2022, but the opposition, who may or may not be Corbyn-led by this point are still weak enough that it’s a real fight during the general election. (50%)
Brexit deal failing to happen causes an immediate cataclysmic contraction in the economy, Scotland immediately declares a unilateral path to independence, N.I. is busy talking with the Republic to unify and retain EU membership. The new nation of the United Kingdom of England and Wales starts with a project to radically redistrict and create a new Westminster. Somehow this “independent” process turns into a partisan jerrymandering that concretes the ability of the Tories to hold a solid majority even with only a 25-30% result at the polls, although it’ll take a while before this can be pushed through.
But before 2022 happens there is a terrorist attack and the nation must be strong and stable to weather the storm and so power must be moved from MPs to a more powerful executive role for the PM. President May talks up the thousand year empire that will come from the New UK as it expands to meet the global markets. But we just have to wait a bit longer before the elections can happen, make sure all these changes that are up in the air have completed and then elections can happen for a brand new Westminster.
The NHS, operationally privatised by stealth, only offer minimal chances of survival (with the same private firms involved in denying or delaying care as is done with PIP etc today) but the 60 Tory MPs who own private healthcare companies are very optimistic about how well the private sector can take up the slack via insurance options. Unions are effectively outlawed. Human rights obligations are removed from law and “replaced” with non-enforceable versions that don’t actually do anything. But in 2025 there will be elections, but maybe that IRA-supporting party from 2017 shouldn’t be allowed to run, what with the terrorism and all.
I think that particularly if a Tory catastrophe-Brexit plan goes ahead, Scotland would be crazy not to try to escape. I would be strongly tempted to move there in the hope of treating it as a life-raft for sane people.
Whatever happens we definitely need a devolved English assembly to counterbalance the other regions and I kind of feel that the devolved assemblies could create a more democratic second house if we wanted one.
I think this is probably broadly correct but the Tories do seem to be trying to lose at this point, which makes sense because Brexit will be a horrendous trashfire, Iraq cubed, and whoever pushes it through will be unelectable for a generation. It will work, though, because nobody will want to move to a shitty little backward country on the rainy corner of the Atlantic where everyone is miserable and unemployed.
Also there is a pretty good chance of a post-lib-dem/centrist labour party splitting off from Labour in the hope of taking the middle ground, and just possibly managing it. Labour are still mostly stuffed by the fact that anyone who looked like good leadership material was crushed during the Blair Brown years and they weren’t inclined to bring anyone with those kinds of talent on board subsequently. Also with their share of seats declining they are trying to keep the old hands in parliament, never mind encouraging any new blood, which is further making things worse for them…
Interesting notion, but I can’t believe that they called this with the intent of losing.
There has been an interesting change of tactics now, though, and -whisper it- I don’t think it’s a good move for the Tories.
They’ve never treated Corbyn as a legitimate opponent until now, but suddenly we’re seeing a panicked reaction a real possibility that he could, if the trend continues turn this into a fight. Even the idea of that has a chance of creating the very fight the Tories didn’t want, because it messes with the ‘unelectable’ narrative they’ve benefited from for months.
There was a very revealing bit by Theresa May in an interview yesterday where she accused Corbyn of trying to ‘sneak in’ to number 10. It’s a remarkable statement from someone who just called an election, and I don’t know why you would pick those words unless you were someone who had considered the election a formality, and those extra seats as something you were entitled to. The mask is slipping a little more each day, and in May’s case she’s all mask.
If Corbyn and Labour find a way of turning this around I think my delight would be only tempered by knowing the Brexit problem still exists.
If not, it’s difficult to see the party enduring much longer in its current state. I have to imagine, hope even, that something else good will come out of it, and I hope it’s nothing as boring as a new centrism.
I’m the same. I was born in N. Ireland so could apply for an Irish passport. Plenty of tech industries in S. Ireland. I’m thinking Gallway might be nice.
The place where I think the Tories got themselves into a little bit of trouble was underestimating Corbyn. They figured the media coverage had him all sewn up and ready to collapse, but he is - and always has been - a campaigner. He is good on the campaign trail, he’s good at talking with people and when election rules mean that Labour have to get more coverage it turns out that people actually kind of like their policies.
Whatever they achieve, I am glad that they are at least making the Tories a little nervous. A total unchallenged walkover is not a healthy election at all.
I cannot express how furious I am at the Blairite PLP though, their contempt for the populace, for the party membership, for the party’s history, the sense of entitlement they display constantly in an attempt to make Corbyn look like a bad leader, it’s truly disgusting. Like, I know they’re elected, but how many people who voted for them actually supported them and not just the general concept of a Labour government? And not just that, they’re adults! You can’t act like petulant children and then point to your own infantile behaviour as proof that the person you’re supposed to be supporting is bad at his job.
They are awful, that is my greatest disagreement with the current Labour party- the former New Labour types who just wanted a nice easy career or something, but seem utterly devoid of principle or ideology. It feels like the Blair and Brown years were a training ground for pernicious conniving and backroom briefing between factions and now they have a generation of MPs who don’t know how to do anything else.
I don’t think Corbyn’s latest comments will play well. While it’s not wrong that wars abroad contribute to radicalisation of young people, and while he tried to clarify that it doesn’t diminish their guilt, I don’t think it’ll play that way.
It’s a little frustrating as there were far better angles of approach here: what he should have focused on is how he warned at the time that police cuts would put the country at risk from terrorism. And perhaps he should have questioned the government’s ability to act on intelligence, given what has come out about the amount of advance warning they had.
Lib Dems are being useless as usual saying that events like these shouldn’t be politicised. I don’t understand how people are not supposed to take a political stance on what causes this to happen and how to prevent it. As tragic as it is, I wish there wasn’t this bubble around it that meant we just can’t talk about it usefully.
Sometimes you can’t just follow, you have to lead.
I mean, this has been the consistent story of the last two years: the Right of Labour/PLP have been so desperate to keep on with those racist dog whistles and courting the hard-Right ideas that poll as popular that no one asks if this is right and if this is a belief that should be common. No one really inspects if these ideas are capable of shifting or if they’re incredibly deeply-held but just looking at voting intention polls recently would suggest that a lot of people (some of who previously could not see anything to vote for) are capable of being engaged, not by peddling lies and aiming for what polling says is an exploitable Rightist high but by actually just talking about reality and how things can be improved via a socialist agenda.
The Conservative majority foreign affairs select committee has said the same thing. This is the truth. This is why scapegoating that pushes racist narratives (which result in our complicity in murders abroad and increased radicalisation [especially of White ppl, leading to more hate crimes] at home) puts us all at increased risk. As you say, this is something Corbyn has warned about for a very long time - a principled position not opportunism.
I do agree with this, it’s just that accompanying everything that comes out of Labour right now I also have in my head ‘if I was a tory newspaper, how do I spin this?’ and ‘Corbyn blames country instead of terrorists’ is exactly the sort of opportunistic spin they would put on this as it plays into their unpatriotic narrative they’re so keen on.
And now that he’s actually proving that he can win in a straight policy fight, I don’t want him to say anything that the papers will pick up on and parade round for days as a distraction.
I kind of look at it this way: he has to, for about another week and a half, refrain from saying anything that the media can (and will) portray as campaign-ending, because it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s shitty that someone can’t speak the truth without thinking about how it’ll be spun, but this is where we our with our rich right wing press.
Criticism of police cuts and how intelligence works with local communities to fight terrorism are both also valid non-racist angles, and things that I think it would be incredibly difficult to put a negative spin on, so I just think they’re safer ground with less than 2 weeks to go.
I honestly feel grimy for even thinking in this way, just because I’d vastly prefer it if an honest discussion could happen in the open in UK politics.
But… they openly lie. The Tory newspapers waited exactly 2 hours before blaming Corbyn. Explicitly blaming him, in an online op ed, headlined that this is his fault. Before the attack he was already being blamed for everything and reported as an enemy of the state for saying The Troubles were all bad (and not singling out only the IRA for condemnation). The Conservative Twitter account is a great source of explicit, open lies (truth in advertising laws are written to not apply to political parties).
So that spin would happen irrelevant of what he actually says. We know this because it already happened within hours of the attack, someone (The Sun) throwing a hit piece up at 2am. And that’s been backed up with plenty more horrific propaganda since. At a certain point we need to be clear: Right-wing reactionary regressives and racists are never going to vote for Labour over Convervatives/UKIP/BNP (and UKIP currently means voting Tory as they’ve completely folded back into the parent party) and courting them significantly depresses the vote of the millions of Left-leaning citizens who are Labour’s traditional base.
The Tory official platform is that “Corbyn will put up your taxes, raising rates from 20% to 25%” (this is clearly not true). They’re going for person vs person, not party vs party, and openly lying about the manifestos because they are imploding. It’s not a case of ducking back down and letting the establishment go back to destroying the party with lies, it’s time to push the platform, push the manifesto, and ensure May is on the back foot all the way up to polling day.
I agree with all this as well, but I think there’s also a certain type of voter who is less reactionary, not particularly politically engaged but still votes, who can get swayed by the background noise, and I think… ah, I don’t know what I’m trying to say here, really.
The right wing papers will lie, with or without fuel for the lies, I think that’s true. But I actually don’t think what the Sun did played well with that sort of voter. It felt as crass as it was and I imagine the people who aren’t paying too close attention saw it as kind of non-news press banter. I think spin like this will do better because they can point and say ‘look this is a thing he said, just now’ and anyone not paying too much attention might think ‘oh, that sounds dodgy’.
I honestly find it hard to get into the minds of swing voters at the best of times though, so maybe I’m just talking a load of ol’ bollocks.
I mean, listen to the actual speech and then cry at the reaction to it (especially Farron - going all out to back the Tories and a hard-Right extremist lie) because the speech contains nothing that’s contentious. It’s being distorted beyond recognition, just as the propaganda would be whatever he said. There is no winning move when everyone is out to lie and controls most of the media.
The actual speech isn’t controversial. The problem is people reporting on it lying. Which isn’t related to what he did or didn’t say. That could happen if he’d stood up and effectively said “the Tories were right and their position is 100% the best course of action”. It’d still be ripped apart as “communist propaganda”.
There’s no point collapsing down to ignoring terrorism experts and not saying anything when there is a clear case for the many factors involved here. As you say, stuff like what The Sun did can spectacularly backfire and fuel the extreme movement in the polls. This speech could do that because it’s measured and centrist without being simplistic and the responses have been relentlessly unsophisticated. All it takes is reading a speech transcript or seeing it and you realise the detractors are lying to you and can’t be trusted.
I hope you’re right. I really do. I think it’s just that with just how willing to blatantly lie those papers are I feel a little helpless in the face of them right now and my instinct is to think ‘Okay Corbyn, just say nice, safe things for a bit, and ride the wave of approval your domestic policies are getting’ and that very well could be the wrong instinct here.
But that’s the thing, doing so would lead to headlines about how he’s exploitative (despite the campaign resuming and the only reason Tories aren’t on stage is because they’re scared of the questions), more IRA headlines (because why stop that broken message), and so on. There was nothing overly exploitable about this speech and it was fabricated to fit the attack. So removing the piece distorted to be used as an attack would just lead to a different piece being distorted to attack him.
Fighting the Right means fighting at a disadvantage - it’s fighting established power, the accumulated capital, billionaire press barons. Luckily the truth is on our side as are the best interests of the majority of people. That’s how the polls can move so quickly, people realising the future Corbyn has been talking about for 40 years is the one they want and one they can actually have. Even as a few PLP/“media Leftists” desperately try to sabotage a centre-Left platform (who knows why at this point? Hubris?)
It’s a bit sad to watch, predictably, the entire political establishment tear into him for saying this when, between 2005 and 2008, this is what they were all saying: that Iraq and Afghanistan would make terror a domestic threat by emboldening and isolating the extremists and those ripe for indoctrination. I mean, Boris sure said that, and so did Farron. But, naturally, the wind’s blowing the other way now, so off go their opinions and their senses.
It’s sadly predictable really; while the people of Manchester come together, all races and creeds, and as repeated evidence shows friends and community members reporting the attacker without any effect, the media line is “blame Corbyn’s links to the IRA”. Utter nonsensical waffle.
