Excuses, Excuses!
Jonathan Freedland has an excellent article in the Labour-friendly Guardian in which he argues that Jeremy Corbyn has to accept responsibility for the latest disaster at the polls.
If you ask me, Corbyn's image problem stems from the fact that he has 'zero' leadership qualities which is not surprising when you consider that he spent 32 years as a rebellious backbench MP who undermined every Labour leader from Neil Kinnock to Ed Miliband.
So Team Corbyn's demand for 'loyalty and discipline' from Labour MPs now the boot is on the other foot, smacks of rank hypocrisy and a refusal to face up to their own failings - a point which Jonathan Freedland rams home in the following paragraphs.
"Blaming others won’t do. Instead, how refreshing it would be, just this once, if Corbyn and McDonnell put their hands up and took even a small measure of responsibility for this calamitous result. Instead of always playing the besieged victim, they could accept that, as Enoch Powell once observed, a politician complaining about the press is as absurd as a sailor complaining about the sea. Navigating a way through is simply what they have to do.
"It would mean admitting that they have failed to deliver what they promised. They said they would win back Scotland, energise the Labour base, galvanise non-voters, lure back Ukip defectors and pull in Greens – and not one of those things has happened. Yet in the face of all this, they dig in and cling on, refusing to budge."
Read the full piece in the link to The Guardian below.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/05/jeremy-corbyn-blame-meltdown-labour-leader
No more excuses: Jeremy Corbyn is to blame for this meltdown
By Jonathan Freedland - The Guardian
Labour should be winning, but even its supporters say they can’t vote for a party with Corbyn as leader
What more evidence do they need? What more proof do the Labour leadership and its supporters require? This was not an opinion poll. This was not a judgment delivered by the hated mainstream media. This was the verdict of the electorate, expressed through the ballot box, and it could scarcely have been clearer – or more damning.
The headline figure is a projected national share of 27%, the worst recorded by an opposition since the BBC started making such calculations in 1981. The Tory lead of 11 percentage points is larger than the one Margaret Thatcher enjoyed as she headed into the elections of 1983 or 1987, when she won triple-figure landslides.
The one-time Labour citadels that fell are jaw-dropping. Labour lost control of Glasgow, which it had ruled for most of the past 70 years. It lost the new mayoralty of Tees Valley – which covers Darlington, Hartlepool, Stockton, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland – to the Conservatives. Just imagine those towns preferring the Tories over Labour: even two years ago the very idea would have been unthinkable. Labour lost in Merthyr, Derbyshire and the West Midlands – the last a region that in 2015 voted Labour over the Tories by 42% to 33%. Tories picked up seats in some of the most deprived parts of the country, including Shettleston in Glasgow and Ferguslie Park in Paisley.
Sure, Labour won mayoral races in Doncaster, North Tyneside, the Liverpool metro region and Greater Manchester. But those should be givens for a Labour opposition facing a Tory party seven years in office. This is when the party should be expanding, not clinging to its foundations. When the best that shadow chancellor John McDonnell can offer is that the party has not been completely wiped out, you glimpse the scale of the disaster.
Labour should be winning, but even its supporters say they can’t vote for a party with Corbyn as leader
What more evidence do they need? What more proof do the Labour leadership and its supporters require? This was not an opinion poll. This was not a judgment delivered by the hated mainstream media. This was the verdict of the electorate, expressed through the ballot box, and it could scarcely have been clearer – or more damning.
The headline figure is a projected national share of 27%, the worst recorded by an opposition since the BBC started making such calculations in 1981. The Tory lead of 11 percentage points is larger than the one Margaret Thatcher enjoyed as she headed into the elections of 1983 or 1987, when she won triple-figure landslides.
The one-time Labour citadels that fell are jaw-dropping. Labour lost control of Glasgow, which it had ruled for most of the past 70 years. It lost the new mayoralty of Tees Valley – which covers Darlington, Hartlepool, Stockton, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland – to the Conservatives. Just imagine those towns preferring the Tories over Labour: even two years ago the very idea would have been unthinkable. Labour lost in Merthyr, Derbyshire and the West Midlands – the last a region that in 2015 voted Labour over the Tories by 42% to 33%. Tories picked up seats in some of the most deprived parts of the country, including Shettleston in Glasgow and Ferguslie Park in Paisley.
Sure, Labour won mayoral races in Doncaster, North Tyneside, the Liverpool metro region and Greater Manchester. But those should be givens for a Labour opposition facing a Tory party seven years in office. This is when the party should be expanding, not clinging to its foundations. When the best that shadow chancellor John McDonnell can offer is that the party has not been completely wiped out, you glimpse the scale of the disaster.
