“I had my first speech outside Number 10 as prime minister all planned out,” Jeremy Corbyn tells me. “I was going to announce homelessness in Britain ends now, next week no-one will be sleeping rough.” He is sitting on a sofa at the offices of his Peace & Justice Project in Finsbury Park, deep in his north London constituency. “Not bad for a first policy, huh?” he asks, flashing his trademark wry grin. As it happened, the 2019 general election led to a landslide victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. More than 2,000 people still sleep rough across the UK every night.
I just read this earlier this morning. While he's right on most things and accepts a certain naivety I suppose, it really highlights what was always my issue with Jeremy - that he fundamentally does not think it's right, acceptable, or proper to fight dirty or really put up much of a fight at all.
It's all very well repeatedly saying, yes we knew the media would be unfair and hostile, yes we knew the intelligence services were leaking stories and false info etc and we 'protested' that, but you didn't, not really. He filled his cabinets with wreckers as an olive branch, let them compromise policy, treated the hostile assets of genocidial state actors with complete kid gloves instead of standing up against them, and played by the media's rules and just hoped people would notice how unfair they were to him. It was pathetic frankly and by not standing up to those narratives he didn't just let himself or the party be tarnished, but everyone in those broader movements and that remains pretty inexcusable to me.
yeah I love Corbyn's policies but if he had a more Trump approach he might have been able to leverage his popular support to club the party into submission. And the fact that throughout it all lots of the public trusted him more than the media is something else that Trump successfully leveraged where Corbyn was too civil
Absolutely, although it's not even a case of being Trumplike, just steadfastly not playing the usual media game and not compromising your own strong positions. He had personal credability with people, spoke to material facts that working people overwhelmingly felt, and despite how enslaved by it this country is nearly everyone fucking hates the media and these sanctimonious establishment figures. I knew boomer-gen, life-long, one-nation Tories that voted for Corbyn in that first election because of that.
But the Corbyn movement took all the wrong lessons from that first near-win. They patted themselves on the back, looked at a temperorily shocked status quo for whom the reality hadn't fully sunken in yet and assumed they were the new normal. They spent time reaching out to their enemies and giving wreckers positions of power as though they were consolation prizes, all while the establishment was getting its ducks in a row for the most co-ordinated and far reaching attack I've ever seen in British politics.
What I meant is I think he was trying to appease a media that would never be satisfied with anything less than his head by showing that he was civil.
but these people believe in nothing but safeguarding their own power he was a nice man and he tried to show them that but they see mercy and compassion as weakness and only respect shows of political strength.
I think I get what you mean, if the media is going to demonize you no matter what then you may as well play the role of a villain and attack the media back
"more than 2000" rough sleepers? Surely that's too little. I've seen more on a single walk through central London.
It is. Local councils manage their own rough sleeper counts and there are incentives to report as low a number as they can. Therefore they all run their counts in the middle of November when temp is so low rough sleeping on the streets is practically a death sentence and they really, really do not bother to count properly even then.
He would have been couped and possibly killed within his first few months in office and all the corporate and government affiliated media in the west would have cheered it as a victory for democracy.
And demonstrated just how dead democracy was in the UK in the process. I'm not big on electoralism, but it obviously would have been better than the alternative regardless.
Just 2,000!?
I wouldn't be surprised if there were 2,000 just in one moderate sized American city
