No. He aligns with the deeply unpopular Blairite wing of the party and has spent an awful lot of time and effort trying to undermine Corbyn.
This is good though. He should stick to doing stuff like this.
This is good though. He should stick to doing stuff like this.
The members, most of whom are disgusted with establishment politics and neoliberal dogma are about 90% behind him though. Enough new members were inspired to join by him that they now have the largest membership of any party in Europe.
Anti-establishmentarianisn is only natural given the failure of the status quo to deliver egalitarian growth and freedom. You can have it from mild liberals like him or the far right. Either way the days of the dominant neoliberal era are numbered.
Labour will never be unified as long as there is first past the post in the UK, and currently at least the left of the party dominates the membership. Any challenger to Corbyn at this point would depend on the support of the left of the party even more than during the last challenge.
And of course Corbyn is completely out of whack with his membership, being pro-Brexit while the party is heavily for Remain. Remain effectively doesn't have democratic representation, and nor does the business-focused middle ground.
By historical standards Corbyn is pretty soft left. It's the establishment and London media bubble that have moved into crazy town.
No one is calling Merkel a Marxist yet Germany has free higher education and nationalised rail, and Germany is just one example.
> And of course Corbyn is completely out of whack with his membership, being pro-Brexit while the party is heavily for Remain.
He voted Remain, campaigned for Remain, and made it clear he'd vote Remain again (unlike May who "refuses to answer hypothetical questions" for fear of angering people). On what basis do you claim he is pro-Brexit?
Brexit, however is official party policy that he does not have authority to alter on his own and is obliged by party rules to follow, for the simple reason that it'd be political suicide for Labour to oppose is as long as the majority of those Labour seats that are at risk are in Leave heavy areas. Labour has the choice between continuing down that route and try to moderate the Tories and hopefully get more room to maneuver and a shot at government, or start pushing a Remain line and lose rather than gain seats next election - Labours Remain-heavy constituencies are mostly seats that are safe.
> Remain effectively doesn't have democratic representation, and nor does the business-focused middle ground.
We agree on that, but that is the cost we pay for an undemocratic electoral system - if Labour where to go Remain, it would not make a difference - Labour would simply lose a ton of seats.
(Yes, this is a bit of a trick question. It's a test of whether you understand second order effects or not; whether you support policies to address problems, vs policies that change outcomes.)
> On what basis do you claim he is pro-Brexit?
Primarily because he has not attacked any pro-Brexit policies and he is not opposing the main political goal of the opposition. The country effectively doesn't have an opposition.
Homelessness in the UK is not a problem of lack of housing, but of lack of suitable council controlled housing with facilities suitable for caring for homeless people - the vast majority of homeless people are not homeless because they couldn't find a house, but because they have been unable to deal with a life situation that often include mental illness.
But to your concern over changing outcomes: To bring people back out of homelessness on an ongoing basis, then yes, putting a roof over their head is on one hand treating symptoms, on the other hand it is also typically an essential first step:
Getting people back into work and getting people mentally back on track is generally far easier once they have a stable living situation and a fixed address - a lot of homeless people get into a cycle where they become homeless and as a result of becoming homeless find it hard to hold down jobs and near impossible to get new ones, because finding a job without having a fixed address and without having somewhere to clean yourself and clean your clothes and so on is far harder.
So my impression from the way you raised that question is that you don't understand the problem. Having a housing provision to offer is essential.
> Primarily because he has not attacked any pro-Brexit policies and he is not opposing the main political goal of the opposition. The country effectively doesn't have an opposition.
The Labour manifesto makes it clear carrying out Brexit is official policy. If he were to go against the manifesto, he'd be violating his duties. He's not a dictator, and his job is to push for the policies set by the party conference and the national policy forum., not to be a loose cannon pushing his own agenda. It's beyond ironic how many people want Corbyn to act like a dictator, especially after how much effort he spent on arguing for increasing party democracy.
It sucks that it's official policy, but the political reality is that both the Tories and Labour would be guaranteed a loss if pushing Remain at this point given the number of marginals that are Leave heavy.
Just curious, since I'm not British and probably only have a very superficial understanding of the politics.
Corbyn has an adoring fanbase and a massively increased party membership but he also still often finishes behind or level with a PM virtually nobody has a good word to say about in "who would make the best Prime Minister" polls.
This position is largely what the Blairite wing of the party were rebelling against. They wanted to run on a strongly anti-Brexit platform with slightly watered down tory policies. The Lib Dems conveniently demonstrated how deeply unpopular that platform was outside of the London remainer bubble.
Getting the largest increase in voting share since the 40s while the whole media savages you (even the independent and guardian were attacking him 6 weeks before the election) and your own MPs try to undermine you at every turn is an impressive achievement. The next election wont have either of those things and will likely feature a landslide.
There's a reason why they had a lot of negative stuff to say about Corbyn's long track record of opposing Labour leaders, his gaffe-prone communication style in the media and lack of communication internally, his "anti-imperialist" foreign policy, him applying considerably more caveats to his "endorsements" of the EU than those of Hamas and Latin American dictatorships, his fondness for surrounding himself with obscure Marxists from outside the party and the party's poor performance in polls and yet even those who'd walked out on the party had few objections to the manifesto.
Ah yes. Intellectually dishonest.
Yes, it's true that not every policy Corbyn's 2017 manifesto had was unpopular with the PLP and it is possible to cherry pick many which they had no problem with. Their fundamental problem with it was not admitted to by the PLP but Blair did state "I wouldn't want Labour to win on his platform even if it was popular", maybe because he hates free school dinners. Or not. You tell me why he said it.
The rest of the stuff is more of an excuse to dig in to him. I don't think it's realistic to believe that members of the PLP who, on the one hand praise the success of the Chinese dictatorship at bringing people out of poverty, and simultaneously condemn Corbyn for saying the same of a Latin American democracy actually care about Venezuelans. They're grandstanding on a particular issue to try in order to try and open ideological rifts in the party. Ditto all that rubbish about Marxists and rabbles of trots.
>the party's poor performance in polls
The poor polling coincided with the PLP's constant attempts to undermine him and Labour's unpopularity peaked during the coup when they did everything they could to destroy him. The polling was entirely a self fulfilling prophecy on the part of the PLP.
They created the poor polling of the Labour party with the coup and he dragged them out of it with an unexpected strong performance in the election. It's amazing how well he can perform when knives are removed from his back isn't it?
I don't think it's realistic to believe that a man whose only column inches for most of his thirty five year political career have been attacking every aspect of his party's foreign policy (from the justified to the ridiculous), speaking out with none of his usual caveats against the West at solidarity campaigns for the Cuban government and attending memorial ceremonies for terrorists isn't the initiator of all the foreign policy grandstanding. Or that having the odd good word to say about better relations with China (who, even?) is quite the level of blind spot as insisting the real problem with Hamas is that the British government doesn't understand its dedication to "bringing about long-term peace and social justice" at a Meet the Resistance fringe meeting. Or that the likes of Andrew Murray don't exist or have any influence, or spent 40 years in the CPGB because they were natural bedfellows of the soft left.
I'm not really sure that arguing that people might actually object to the stuff they complain about and not the stuff they don't is likely to fall on anything other than deaf ears though...