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Comment by Asdfbla | Hacker News Reader

Yet Corbyn's somewhat populist rhetoric seems to have made Labour competitive again, or were their good election results just a coincidence and had nothing to do with Corbyn?

Just curious, since I'm not British and probably only have a very superficial understanding of the politics.

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The election result was likely considerably more influenced by the government unwisely deciding to base their entire election campaign around empty slogans about a Brexit nearly half the population had voted against including most of the typical swing voters, allowing Corbyn to position himself more as the reasonable candidate whose manifesto actually offered tangible promises. The populist rhetoric came before the manifesto, and - along with widespread opposition to it from within his own party - appeared to have the opposite net effect on voters. Besides which, gaining some seats and weakening the government was far better than expected, but not an especially wonderful achievement for a party that had been in power for more of the previous couple of decades than it had been out of it.

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.

>Corbyn to position himself more as the reasonable candidate whose manifesto actually offered tangible promises.

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.

Not convinced that HN is really the venue for detailed tangential discussion of UK politics, but no intellectually honest assessment of Labour's internal debate starts from the assumption that what the "Blairite wing", headed up by the individual that actually deposed Tony Blair(!), really objected to was Corbyn 2017 manifesto innovations like universal free school meals and tuition fee abolution and er.. matching Tory tax cuts for those on £55-70k per annum and dropping Miliband's much-trumpeted "Mansion Tax".

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.

Tony Blair stepped down under pressure from Gordon Brown with whom he'd already pre-arranged an exit and poor poll performance. Gordon Brown, who is his ideological brother, replaced him. Trying to characterize that as a deposal of Blair and everything he stood for is... oh, what's an appropriate phrase?

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?

Blair stepped down after Tom Watson, the soft-left hardman mentioned upthread, organised an open letter demanding Blair's resignation, and loudly and publicly quit his own position when he didn't get a response. But it's amazing how those unfamiliar with party their history have reinvented him as an ardent Blairite for orchestrating the same sort of attempted coup the next time he thought the party needed a change of leader.

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...

It was almost entirely to do with Corbyn (and the energy brought to the party by his leadership campaigns, in the form of new members and new organisations).

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