TIL "Long Corbyn" is a real unironic term used by UK media
I thought it was some stupid meme akin to "thanks Obama"
So I dunno a lot about UK parties but why are Labour voters shifting to vote for the Torys and not the Greens or Libdem? I figured there would be more overlap between disillusioned Labour voters and those parties than the Cons
There have been shifts to green and Lib Dems. But conservatives are the party currently in charge during a pandemic, and Labour have been saying and doing jack shit except "we're under new management!!!!", or only commiting to 2.5% increase to nurses wages and they'll "negotiate up" (????), our media is very right wing...
Conservatives have also been using a bunch of rhetoric that encroaches on Labour territory, even if the actual policy/implementation doesn't match. "Levelling up", "Green revolution", recent announcement of Great British Rail, and they've done stuff like furlough (80% of wages paid during lockdown as you keep your job). No opposition to call these things out, little serious criticism in media, and vaguely popular economic rhetoric half cribbed from Labour in the first place.
In addition to these two excellent posts, Labour has been tacking right to a centre that literally doesn't exist and in doing so, are explicitly attacking the Tories from the right. Starmer argued against raising taxes on the wealthy and large corporations . Labour were quickly called out on wanting to do austerity--an extremely unpopular policy with most Brits and especially unpopular within Labour's base.
It's all about Brexit. Labour, LibDems, and Greens all oppose Brexit. Conservatives just want to get it over with.
That's why Corbyn lost, he caved to the center and called for a second referendum. And that's why Starmer is doing even worse.
Yeah I'm just pointing out that the party put the guy heavily involved in the last failure in charge
It's almost never a case of people 'shifting to vote for the Tories' and always a case of people just not voting, i.e. the numbers don't go up but the percentage in their favour does.
The Tories have always had a maximum vote of about 13-14m, but they've had that even on occasions where Labour has had about the same - there's not really any overlap.
What's interesting when you study the numbers is that there's about 5m Tory voters that consistently vote Tory simply because the papers tell them to - those people voted Labour in '97 when the Sun endorsed Blair, for instance.
Look, this sucks, but as you can see from this image it’s clearly do to Corbyn scaring them off!
