One of the worst things after a general election is having to listen to everyone's verdict on the outcome, and why it happened. Everyone is suddenly an expert on politics, all joining in the blame game, the recriminations, and stating their opinion as fact. (The actual worst thing by far this time will be the suffering, the vilifying, and the dying, of many more people across the UK. This of course will continue until this government is booted out, but in theory not for another five long years.)
Maybe it helps others to do this, but it certainly doesn't help me! So let me redress the balance ...
In my opinion there are loads of reasons why we are still having to deal with a Tory led UK government hell bent on ruining the country so they, the very few, can carry on living the high life at the expense of the very many.
- Let's start with the constant betrayal of Corbyn by many of Labour's own MPs. I cannot condone this but I think a possible reason is that they are no longer solely responsible for electing the leader. It's likely that non MP Labour members have a different take as to what we need in our leader, but at the end of the day it's the MPs who have to have to work with the leader, respect them, be able to follow them, and be expected to do so even when they don't agree with them. After all would councillors like myself want the people of Swansea electing our council leader?
- Then there's Anti-Semitism v Islamaphobia. Very easy to highlight the former as being both bad, and rife with high profile defections of Labour MPs to other parties, and so blame the Labour leadership for not dealing with it. And equally the Tories are able to get away with the latter when terrorist & similar incidents keep happening most recently the knife atrocity in London, resulting in two dead, in the very last stages of the campaign.
- And of course we have the right wing media which control the majority of what goes out in the press, over the internet, and on TV. Even supposed Labour papers have not clearly been supporting Labour, and/or with too little, too late. And it certainly suited the Tories that the media called it the Brexit Election right from the start. One comment repeated over and over is that Labour did not have a clear enough message on Brexit, and I reckon people believed it regardless whether true or not simply because the media kept on doing this. And so they were also able to get away with ridiculing Corbyn as being 'on the fence' yet look what the remain stance did for the Lib Dems, as they haven't even got a leader now!
- Another aspect I believe has come into play is the fact that there are some who need to be guided by who they think are the people in the know ie the government. Tories had a snappy mantra 'Get Brexit Done' - almost didn't matter what it said just so long as it was short! This I suspect appealed both to those who voted leave, and to those in neglected communities who have been told that being in the EU is to blame, and end up grateful for the few crumbs that the Tories have promised, even though it's them who took away the whole loaf in the first place!
- And so we get to the Manifestos. We have found election after election that these aren't worth the paper they are written on, so why on earth should anyone believe the truly inspirational honest & costed manifesto of Labour. Compare this with the much more cynical one of the Tories. You can just hear them now when they cooked this one up, saying 'we'll con the electorate into voting us back in by fooling them into thinking that austerity has ended. We'll give just enough back to high profile public concerns like the NHS & Police and they won't notice that it only restores things to 2010, and in many other cases not even that'. All couched not so much in outright lies as in underhand distortion & manipulation of the truth.
I've probably only just touched the surface - I haven't even started on how come Labour came back from the dead in 2017 yet disappeared into hell this time? And why didn't all the opposition parties work together more when most clearly had no time for Johnson et al?
I'm sure there are many more aspects to why we have the result we have. But my real point here is we have to go forward somehow, ignore the crap, the negativity - and boy is there a lot being spoken right now! The Labour Party is NOT finished, and we KNOW we have right on our side. We've just got to find out a way of getting this across.
Les
