Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 on July 5, 2024, 8:49 pm
There are signs the establishment can be defeated
Jul 05, 2024
I did not want to check the news when I woke up this morning. I had visions of the 2019 election all over again and the disappointment that came with it. I was praying Corbyn would hold onto his seat, but convinced dejected voters would back Labour, feeling they had no other choice. I knew Corbyn was hugely popular in Islington North, and I knew the race was close, but I feared that at the last moment, those who did not want to vote Labour would do just that. That’s what would’ve happened during the Blair years.
You can imagine my delight when I checked the news and found that voters had done quite the opposite, that they’d said, “We’re voting for the guy we want this time!”
In a neck and neck race, Corbyn ended up surging into an 8,000 vote lead. Even better, he won over 5,000 more votes in Islington North than Starmer won in Holborn and St Pancras. While I was sad Andrew Feinstein couldn’t take Starmer’s seat, I knew that wasn’t going to happen, but Feinstein helped cut Labour’s vote share in half! In 2019, under Corbyn’s leadership, and even under Miliband’s, Starmer took far more votes in his constituency than he did last night. So much for changing Labour for the better, you unlikeable toad!
Votes received by Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras:
2015: 29,062
2017: 41,343
2019: 36,641
2024: 18,884
If I was with Andrew Feinstein right now, I would shake his hand. If I was with Jeremy Corbyn, I would hug him and high-five his team. You should never hero worship a politician, but Corbyn is one of the very few who is everything voters are supposed to want. The only reason more don’t see it is because of the relentless media smears. Corbyn’s constituents understand this, and that’s why 49% voted for him, despite him being up against the Labour machine. If Corbyn was the Labour candidate, he would’ve taken over 80% of the vote.
For evidence of who Corbyn is, you only need to look at the video of him greeting a woman he helped gain asylum seven years ago. Starmer runs away from such people and tells his far-right friends he would deport them. Corbyn had a heart-warming exchange with the woman and told her how proud he was that she’d built a life here and started her own business. You could see the love and respect between the two was mutual. Honestly, if you smear a man this nice, it says so much more about you than it does about him.
Corbyn holding onto his seat gave me a feeling I did not expect to feel today, it gave me a glimmer of hope I thought was gone. Corbyn was up against the Labour machine in Labour’s safest seat and Labour threw everything at that seat to get rid of him. Winning that seat mattered more to them than almost any other.
Even Labour’s bitter former deputy leader Tom Watson came to Islington North to help oust Corbyn. This is the man who spent years sabotaging his own party and left politics to work for a gambling firm. These new Labour types are such decent sorts, aren’t they? Always looking at how they can contribute to their bank balances when they leave politics.
Starmer ordered his candidate in Clacton to stop campaigning against Nigel Farage because he wanted all hands on deck to stop Corbyn, as well as the Greens in Bristol. Labour failed in both cases, with Carla Denyer defeating Labour by over 10,000 votes!
Embarrassingly, Labour were mad their Clacton candidate was getting more likes than Starmer on social media. Plus, they were worried that if their black candidate was too visible in his constituency and defeated Farage, the optics would be bad!
Starmer seemed genuinely concerned that racists would be upset if Labour defeated the far right with a black candidate. Labour staff harassed the poor guy non-stop to suspend his campaign, driving him to tears. This says so much about who and what Labour is now - a repugnant fascist party.
Labour was so driven by racism and spite it lost the chance to win Iain Duncan-Smith’s seat by deselecting Faiza Shaheen for liking a tweet by Jon Stewart. (Apparently, agreeing with something a Jewish comedian said is anti-Semitism now.) The combined vote of Labour and Shaheen was 51.5%, meaning she would have wiped the floor with Duncan-Smith if she was the Labour candidate. You would think this would give Labour pause for thought, but Ed Balls, the former Labour MP, said on ITV that it was worth losing the seat to stop Shaheen. That’s how disgusting this lot are.
Ironically, Starmer shifted all the way to the right in order to chase votes, and yet he never really gained votes, but gaining votes was never the main goal: appeasing his donors was. The few right-wing votes Labour picked up were offset by votes they lost to the Greens, who’ve quadrupled their representation to four seats, and independents, who’ve won eight seats. Labour lost five seats to pro-Palestinian candidates, despite telling us people don’t vote on foreign policy and calling those candidates “pro-Hamas”.
The only thing Labour has to gloat about is that our joke of an electoral system is set to give them 2/3 of the seats with 1/3 of the vote. A low voter turn out of 57% means only 1 in 5 members of the electorate voted Labour and this delivered a 170 seat landslide. Labour took the lowest vote share of an incoming government ever, and I believe I’m right in saying Starmer has the lowest approval rating for an incoming prime minister.
If you think pollsters are there to reflect public opinion, rather than manipulate it, consider they told us Labour would win 45% of the vote and it took just 33.8%. Corbyn’s Labour took 40% in 2017. In other words, Corbyn took a much larger vote share in 2017 and took far fewer seats, despite being evidently more popular. Corbyn is still more popular today, with a higher approval rating than Starmer who gets a much easier ride from the media.
Labour vote share:
2017 - 12,877,918
2019 - 10,269.051
2024 - 9,634,399
Labour has won the biggest landslide ever with fewer votes than in its most crushing defeat. Something is very wrong with this picture. The only reason we’re not looking at a decreased vote share for Labour is because it improved by 19% in Scotland. Elsewhere in the UK it performed worse or stayed the same. What were you thinking, Scotland?
That voters in Islington North chose Corbyn as an individual over Labour as an institution shows the establishment can be defeated. To highlight how impressive a feat this was, consider what would happen if every candidate stood as an independent. How many votes do you think Labour’s Praful Nargund would have won in Islington North? The man who made his millions from private healthcare would have won close to zero votes.
In other words, we’re only being lumbered with these awful candidates because our party system reduces the viability of alternatives. If we’re going to have a party system, the least we can do is change to a more representative system such as PV or AV. Under these systems, people are more likely to vote for candidates they like. Even better, if a party only gets 1/3 of the vote, they will get 1/3 of the seats. Our current system makes genuine representation impossible and this is why so many people feel disenfranchised.
The Tories keep telling us they’re representing the British people, by which they mean bigots and utter bastards. Labour keep telling us they’re a changed party as though their message resonates with anyone but bigots and utter bastards, but the majority of the public are rolling their eyes.
If our politicians really gave a shit about representing the public, they would change to a more representative system, but that’s the last thing they want because true representation makes corruption harder. The party that rigged its internal processes to ensure it can never have MPs like Corbyn again is not going to change our political system to make more Corbyns possible, unless its hand is forced. But its hand may well be forced…
Far from being in an amazing place, Starmer’s Labour is vulnerable. Not only did its vote share not improve, but many voted reluctantly, and next time around will be less inclined to do so. Odds are in 2029, Greens and independents will do even better than this time. Plus, there is still the possibility of a new party emerging - a left-wing equivalent of Reform (not that I want the left wing label or the Reform comparison). I would much rather frame it as a people’s party, as the 99% taking on the 1%, a process of the democratisation of society.
Consider the possibility that all the Tories have to do to regain power is merge with Reform. Those two parties combined would take around 40% of the vote. Labour would almost certainly take less than their current 34%. There is no possible way Labour could win unless it embraced the people and policies it has turned its back on.
When the penny drops, Labour might realise an alternative voting system is necessary for them too, regardless of what their donors want. It could save Labour from the humiliation of a landslide defeat just five years after their landslide victory.
If we got a new voting system, it would be the perfect opportunity for Corbyn to start a new party and just think what it could achieve. Not only did independents with no name recognition take seats, but others came extremely close. Jess Phillips was within 700 votes of defeat and Wes Streeting was within 550. Rajesh Agrawal, Jonathon Ashworth, Thangnam Debbonaire, Heather Iqbal, and Kate Hollern all lost their seats.
Just imagine what we could do if the mainstream media gave us a fair shot. The media showed every victory speech from Reform, but almost none from the left. I’m told the BBC refused to show the live speeches of the Green winners or Corbyn, but I was sleeping because I was not staying up all night watching this crap.
I know many people hate the idea of party politics, and I’m one of them, but with the name recognition of a party, more independents could have won. Imagine the scenes if we’d unseated Wes Streeting, the soon-to-be health secretary funded by private healthcare lobbyists. All the evidence shows there is massive room for a new party which, at the very least, could force Labour to improve its policies, and at best, could form part of a coalition government. That has to be better than a huge Labour majority, right?
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021