UK Labour Party might still have a chance

When I posted this essay last week it looked like Jeremy Corbyn and Labour were headed to a pretty bad beating.
Since then, the polls have begun turning up for Labour.

Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservatives' lead over the opposition Labour Party halved to 9 percent in a Survation telephone poll published on Monday, adding to signs that the election race is tightening ahead of the June 8 vote.

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What changed? The Tories announced what they actually stood for, and it was awful.

Theresa May is under ­growing pressure as Tory policies that attack the elderly started to unravel.
Critics believe social care reforms, dubbed the “dementia tax”, and the axing of winter fuel payments will cost the PM dearly on June 8.
Minister Damian Green struggled to justify why anyone needing long-term home care should pay for it if they have assets worth £100,000 or more.
The Work and Pensions Secretary also refused to say how many pensioners would lose help with their heating bills – worth up to £300 a year – under means-testing outlined in the Tory manifesto .

And if that wasn't symbolically cruel enough, the Tories decided to lift the ban on the ivory trade.
In contrast, a majority of UK voters support Labour's manifesto.
Needless to say, when the news media started covering actual issues instead of personalities, Labour surged.

A separate Survation survey, conducted entirely after Thursday’s Tory manifesto launch, found 28 per cent of voters said they were less likely to vote Conservative because of the social care package, branded a “dementia tax” by opponents.
Mary Creagh, who is defending Wakefield for Labour, said on Twitter: “Lots of Tory voters switching to Labour in Wakefield today because of arrogant, complacent Tory attack on pensioners.”

The neoliberal Blairites have worked tirelessly to undermine Jeremy Corbyn since he unexpectedly won Labour's leadership role. Tony Blair led the charge himself.

Labour is in "mortal danger" and faces "annihilation" if Jeremy Corbyn is elected leader, Tony Blair has said as candidates warned that the contest is now "invalid" and could be challenged in court.
The battle to succeed Ed Miliband was mired in chaos amid claims that the contest will be decided by so-called 'infiltrators' who will decide the contest in Mr Corbyn's favour.

In defiance of the Blairites, Labour membership surged after Corbyn took over.

More than 500,000 people are now members of the Labour Party, according to latest figures confirmed today.
This is the highest membership has been at in decades, and includes an astonishing rise of around 128,000 in the fortnight since the EU referendum, bring the total number of members to 515,000 as of today. That’s more than double the 200,000 members the party had on general election day last year, and dwarfs the 20,000 membership boost it had in the days following the election defeat.

The primary enemy of Corbyn has been the openly biased news media, a bias so blatant that many British voters have noticed.

As for Blair's prediction of absolute disaster for Labour, several polls show Corbyn doing better than Ed Miliband did in 2015. Which still isn't nearly good enough, but is a far cry better than what the neoliberals predicted.
Let's hope the trend continues to favor Labour. There is still time.

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ggersh's picture

The same playbook by the global elites is at play here.

The English get it and May is hellery on roids for the worse

but then the Tories have the they count the vote factor in their favour.

https://www.facebook.com/TheIndependentOnline/videos/10154789755151636/

https://www.thecanary.co/2017/05/21/ignore-corbyn-supporting-ira-media-f...

https://www.facebook.com/185180654855189/videos/1555135254526382/

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

lotlizard's picture

by the hundreds of thousands, all for a lie.

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@lotlizard

In 1998, with First Lady Hillary Clinton, From began a dialogue with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other world leaders, and the DLC brand – known as The Third Way – became a model for resurgent liberal governments around the globe.[18]

In April 1999, he hosted an historic Third Way forum in Washington with President Clinton, Prime Minister Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Prime Ministers Wim Kok of the Netherlands and Massimo D'Alema of Italy.[19]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_From

All awful political roads seem to lead to one or both Clintons.

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fear we saw this film last year.

Fighting mass media, the propaganda arm of the center right, is hard.

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Alligator Ed's picture

Theresa's U-turn.

Just when you thought you knew her, flip and flop!

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ggersh's picture

@Alligator Ed @Alligator Ed to deal with

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-40007886

my prayers and thoughts go out to the families

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

lotlizard's picture

@ggersh
Edited to add: On German news now. Horrible.

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@ggersh
It'll allow May to look presidential, even if the policies she endorsed helped cause this.

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ggersh's picture

@gjohnsit equivalent of cruise missiles.

What a travesty.

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

Manifesto changes everything

For the past two years, the incantation among mainstream pundits and the majority of the parliamentary Labour party has been that under Jeremy Corbyn Labour offers no opposition to the Tories, and he will eventually destroy the party. Increasingly, though, it seems he could be the party’s best hope for survival and renewal, precisely because he has articulated what opposition to austerity might look like.
...
The predictive currency of polls has been severely devalued of late. But for what they’re worth, Labour is poised to get a slightly larger share of the vote under Corbyn than it did under Ed Miliband. True, there’s not a single one that suggests Labour will win; nobody should pretend that that doesn’t matter. But it’s a far cry from the disaster many were predicting at this stage. And, crucially, there’s no evidence that the party would be in a better position under anybody else.

A recent GfK poll showed that more people would consider voting Labour under Corbyn than they would if the party were led by Miliband, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, the former premier Tony Blair or one of Corbyn’s rivals for the first leadership race, Yvette Cooper. Herein lies one of the two key problems with the “anybody but Corbyn” brigade.

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is akin to what the Dem Party missed by crapping on Sanders and the people he spoke for.

These people running the Dem show, I've just realized, are actually stupid people. Yeah, they can think in the abstract and manipulate symbols, but it never occurs to them that they could stand to examine their assumptions about the real world.

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Orwell: Where's the omelette?

Not Henry Kissinger's picture

a mysterious ISIS bombing (and immediate suspect capture) in the very city where Corbyn launched his popular manifesto and which is also swing district where Labour and the Conservatives are fighting for the leftovers from the collapse of UKIP - leftovers which had been trending Labour before the bombing.

All politics is local.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?