A huge thank you to James Stuart who submitted this Artcile to Unity News Network (UNN) on the 15th of December 2019, it was approved for publication by Carl D. Pearson, Editor-in-Chief of UNN on the same day.
Please NOTE: This is an opinion piece and not the opinion of the editorial team at Unity News Network (UNN). We are a forum for free speech and ideas and are always open to publishing different ways of thinking from others.
Bubbles both hold the attention for the time of their brief appearance and soon burst, leaving no discernible trace except a small trace on the surface. Such is the sudden and total disintegration of Corbynism. The Labour party ha suffered its heaviest defeat since the 1930s. Worse even than the ‘longest suicide note in history’ election of 1983. There are two readings of the bursting of the Corbyn bubble. The first, furiously pumped out to the media by the Corbynistas, is that the election was rigged from the start by a conspiratorial and hostile media who did the great man a disservice by distracting attention away from policy and towards controversy and smears. The second is that Corbynism was doomed from the start, an unattainable laundry list of policies that offered radical change to an electorate that had already heard search policies and rhetoric in 2017.
This time, the electorate was not so kind to McDonnel and Corbyn’s project. To be sure, the media does need to accept some apportionment of the responsibility for the cesspool of controversy and suspicion that has surrounded Corbyn since he was first elected leader of the opposition over four years ago. But apportioning blame solely to the media or Brexit would be doing a disservice to the legions of voters who, whilst historically and personally aligned with Labour, chose to cast their ballot for the least principled Prime Minister in modern times. Brexit dominated this ballot, be in no doubt of that. But, the needless ambiguity of the Labour position on the EU combined with a widespread dislike of Corbyn combined to send Labour into the abyss for the fourth time since 2010.
As has been extensively commented upon already by other journalists, the campaign aficionados knew that the Labour leader was electoral cyanide on the door, and bafflingly chose to make the campaign a one-man bus tour regardless. There are some who will argue, not bereft of merit, that Corbyn dragged the Labour party away from the blue tinge of Blairism and toward its historical place as a builder of socialism. There is, however, one problem with such an analysis: it takes absolutely no account of the methods with which power must be achieved. It seems to an external observer that over the past four years, the focus of Corbyn, Abbott and McDonnel have been on dragging the party to the left and maintaining rigid ideological purity within the party structure.
The cost of such wrangling is the heaviest defeat Labour party has suffered in decades. The leadership of the party bare full political and moral responsibility for condemning the country to five more years of grinding austerity. The sooner Labour voters and activists realise this, the sooner the long slog back to respectability and power can begin.
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