Stand With Jeremy Corbyn(from Jacobin.com)
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/jeremy-corbyn-labour-brexit-cameron-leadership-momentum-coup/Here are five reasons left-wingers need to rally to #KeepCorbyn
1. It's not about Brexit
Thursday’s vote to leave the European Union has been used as pretext for the coup against Corbyn. In its immediate aftermath articles appeared in the BBC, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere alleging that Corbyn had “sabotaged” the Remain campaign.
The numbers simply do not bear this out. According to Lord Ashcroft’s poll 63 percent of Labour voters went for Remain with 37 percent against — almost exactly the same numbers as the SNP (64–36) whose leader Nicola Sturgeon is being lauded by the press.
The party whose voters disobeyed their leader in the largest numbers were in fact the Tories, 61 percent of whom went for Brexit. This is a crisis of David Cameron and Boris Johnson’s making — that is the argument that Labour should be drilling home right now.
In reality, Corbyn is being stitched up by people who planned to replace him a long time ago. Weeks before the referendum it was being reported that “Labour rebels hoped to topple Jeremy Corbyn in 24-hour blitz” after its result. It was even telegraphed how they would do it: “by fanning the flames with front bench resignations and public criticism . . . to trigger a leadership race within a day.”
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Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Margaret Hodge’s own constituency in Barking was one of only five boroughs in London to vote to leave the European Union — and by 62 percent. In Corbyn’s Islington more people turned out than during the general election and 76 percent voted to remain.
Those resigning from the shadow cabinet have no better records — Gloria de Piero’s Ashfield, for instance, voted for Leave by almost 40 points. Chris Bryant’s Rhondda, Lilian Greenwood’s Nottingham, Lisa Nandy’s Wigan, Karl Turner’s Hull, and Vernon Coaker’s Gedling followed suit.
If these MPs were such excellent campaigners and better understood the mood of the electorate, why couldn’t they deliver their own constituencies?
There is no question that Labour failed to win a number of its strongholds in the referendum. One part of its base — those who have suffered from globalization: older, less well-off, less well-educated workers in centers of deindustrialization — decided to give the establishment a bloody nose.
But it’s untenable to propose that establishment MPs would have stood a better chance of winning over those voters.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)The Brexit referendum has exposed deep divisions in British society.
One of the most important of these, broadly speaking, was between winners and losers of globalization.
Remain tended to win among younger, more educated, and more culturally liberal voters, particularly those in diverse and prosperous urban areas. But it lost badly among older white workers in places like the North East, Yorkshire, and Wales.
In order to build a social majority and win elections the Labour Party needs a platform that can bring together these two wings of its base.This is by no means an easy task — but no one is better positioned to do it than Jeremy Corbyn.
He is the only leading figure in the party with purchase among young Labour voters, almost doubling his rivals combined in the under-forty category during the leadership election.
And he is the only plausible candidate with credibility in opposing the policies of economic liberalization, pursued by both Conservative and Labour governments, which have hollowed out England and Wales’s industrial heartlands.
Take Sunderland, a city which had voted for Labour MPs since the 1950s but went 61 percent for Leave in arguably the biggest shock of referendum night.
Sunderland was once a place of stable, decent-paying jobs in shipbuilding, coal mining, and glass-making. Today, it has one of England’s highest unemployment rates.
More than four times as many people work in the service industry as in manufacturing — but they are around half as likely to reach professional-managerial grades as their counterparts elsewhere in the country.
And those left in manufacturing? Recent years have seen soaring production amid falling wages in the local Nissan plant.
Faced with this reality it is Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, not those plotting against it, which speaks about “a radical break with the past” on the economy — pursuing a serious industrial strategy and returning investment to the places left behind by globalization.
MADem
(135,425 posts)Labour is simply going to have to rebuild, IMO.
Both sides are a hot mess, so it's a new race to capture the hearts and minds of the electorate in the out years--on your mark, get set, go!
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)No significant blocs of voters in the UK want Labour to be just barely distinguishable from the Tories again.
MADem
(135,425 posts)What they are in need of, though, is competent leadership.
JC doesn't have the confidence of those who used to be closest to him. He is ineffective.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)And the people who oppose him are simply the people who always opposed him...the MPs, the sector of Labour with the fewest strong convictions and principles of anyone in that party.
They not only want Corbyn out, they want to increase the number of MP nominations a leadership candidate must have to be on the leadership ballot...a change that would mean only the most conservative, pro-austerity, pro-military intervention candidates will be put out there for Labour voters to "choose" from...as if it could matter who wins in a race where all the candidates are "moderates"-as if anyone elected in a process like that could ever be an inspirational leader who creates the popular enthusiasm needed to win a general election. No one the anti-Corbynites approve of has any support at all among voters under 35-a demographic Labour will have to win overwhemingly to have any chance of victory in 2020(it's impossible for Labour to ever again win among voters 45 and older).
They want him out before the Chilcot Report is released, because the report will implicate Blair in war crimes and they want Corbyn replaced with a leader who will denounce Chilcot and do all she or he can to have its findings suppressed.
MADem
(135,425 posts)Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)None of this is about ego with him...he's in it to fight for the people.
Sad that some people can't believe a political leader could actually be like that.
If the rebels want him out, they need to proceed democratically with a leadership challenge according to party rules, with Corbyn automatically having a place in the leadership contest as the incumbent. That is the only legitimate way to resolve this.
MADem
(135,425 posts)He initially came across as quirky, but of late, he's arrogant. He has a certainty of rightness about him that is not shared by a very large cadre of his peers, and he just doesn't see it.
I'm in favor of a "legitimate" resolution, mind you, if that is what it takes--but he simply does not impress me and I think he should stand down.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Nobody is going to be in a good mood when they get that kind of treatment.
T_i_B
(14,749 posts)You have to look at the state of the Labour party since Corbyn was elected leader rather than launching witch hunts against anyone deemed "ideologically impure" by the creepy Corbyn cultists.
chapdrum
(930 posts)The similarity between UK situation and US is striking.
Corbyn's heart may be in the right place, but it's clear by now he was never fit for leadership...
Let him work behind-the-scenes...
Response to Ken Burch (Original post)
rjsquirrel This message was self-deleted by its author.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Response to Ken Burch (Reply #12)
rjsquirrel This message was self-deleted by its author.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)the ones who want the party to go back to standing for noting, as it did between 1994 and 2010. This was never necessary, because Labour was certain to win in 1997 without moving any further to the right than it was in 1992.
If the voters couldn't handle any real change, they wouldn't have given Labour a parliamentary majority even under Blair.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)That alone should be enough for him to go... The antisemitism is just the icing...
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)It isn't antisemitic simply to criticize the Israeli government, or even antisemitic in and of itself to support a single-state solution.
69% of Labour voters voted Remain. It wasn't possible to get that vote any higher. Nothing anyone said, let alone anything Corbyn said, could ever have won over the Northern voters who voted Leave because the felt the EU had left them to rot.
Nobody else in the party was effective in winning Northern support for Remain. Cooper wasn't, Burmham wasn't, Eagle wasn't, Nandy wasn't.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)And if so many longtime Corbyn associates feel so free to broadcast how they *really* feel about the Jewish folks, a whole lot of questions need to be asked...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jews-jeremy-corbyn
T_i_B
(14,749 posts)His contributions tended to be lacklustre at best, counterproductive at worst.
It became obvious to me that Corbyn wasn't doing a very good job from talking to Labour folk involved in the campaign to keep Britain in the EU (left wingery was not a complaint, the running of the party was), and from talking to folk in the sort of old pit villages that Labour was built on, which UKIP are now targeting in a big way. A strong Labour leader would have been able to reach out to those people.
