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Battling for the soul of my party

On July 16, 2016

At 5:31 am

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So, in my inimitable way, I went out last night and got happily drunk. Said drunk excursion commenced with chatting with several of my MA students. It turns out that one is a member of the Labour Party, and voted for Jeremy Corbyn last summer. He’s not now. Nor am I, even though I voted for him with some questionable eloquence last summer.

Over the course of the evening, which involved a lot of music and alcohol, and a free ride home courtesy of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, I spoke to five members of the party, none of whom I knew were members before chatting with them (hence they’re not very active in said party). In this non scientific sample, they all will not vote for Jeremy. Their reasons vary. Two didn’t in the first place, yet three did. Ultimately it came down to rationality. As the (second, I was there for the shift change) bartender at my local said, “I joined the party so we could win and make a difference. We can’t win with this guy.”

Yesterday morning, the results of the council by-elections were filtering down, and the Corbyn faithful focussed on one result in particular:

One of the comments read “There were other wonderful results too.”

To which I replied on social media

“Imagine if the result had gone the other way, the kind of analysis we would see” . . . well, the result overall *did* go the other way, pal, and it’s a bloody good thing this isn’t in the news. There were ten by-elections on Thursday. Of those, the Lib Dems gained four, and the Tories gained one (at our expense). Of the seven where there was a Labour candidate in the previous election, we lost share in five elections (-11.3, -7.4, -5.0, -4.4, -4.1) and only gained in two (+10.6, +8.9). The winners on the night were the Liberals by far. We didn’t do so well, outside of the election in Bradford and the one in Islington, and if we can’t win in those two we have much larger problems than a leadership struggle.

Anecdotally, and now, vaguely empirically, Jeremy is not the way forward.

Labourshambles, UK politics, when will this all end?

Born in San Jose, grew up in Seattle, received a Ph.D. in poli sci from University of Washington in 2000. I worked for three years at Universiteit Twente in Enschede, Netherlands, and have worked at the University of Plymouth for 16 academic years now in Plymouth, United Kingdom. I also currently serve as joint campaign coordinator for the Plymouth Sutton & Devonport Constituency Labour Party.

By Dave Brockington