Jeremy Corbyn is hugely popular. Why are people even trying to deny it any more?
People are still trying to deny the popularity of the Labour leader.
They point at opinion polls that suggest he’s a bigger flop than Ed Miliband – despite knowing that these polls are engineered to support the views of their funders and that the polls were all wrong in the run-up to the 2015 general election.
They point at media stories that have – increasingly desperately – claimed his election to the top job is going to cause a split in the party, despite the fact that his rise was supported by a clear majority of party members and the only opposition seems to come from a few disgruntled Blairites.
And then you read this:
Jeremy Corbyn is late, but he has a pretty good excuse. A one-man selfie-magnet these days, the leader of the Labour Party can’t get more than a yard down the road without someone stopping to shake his hand, request a phone photo or just have a chat.
That’s rock star popularity.
Anecdotal, sure – and some people will never accept the evidence before their eyes – but taken for what it is, it should at least give his sternest critics pause for thought.
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because they are terrified of democracy
How convenient that you’ve found a way to ignore all polls that you disagree with. As if a pollster would agree to risk their reputation by slanting a political poll. Those polls are mostly marketing for them and make them little money, so they’ve no incentive at all to distort them.
Is that right?
Then perhaps you can explain why so many either support the views of their sponsor or have their results reinterpreted to reflect those views when they don’t (like YouTube on Corbyn)?
You don’t even need polls, you naive fellow; all you have to do is spend a moment observing his popularity amongst voters and the overwhelmingly positive treatment he receives from the public when he walks down the street.
As for the polls, someone like you will find this hard to believe but the few DO control the many — and their power is maintained by manipulating poll results [amongst other despicable tactics].
By doing so, the 1% influence the outcome of future events by planting a corrupting seed in the consciousness of the masses. [This tactic is known as PREDICTIVE PROGRAMMING; look it up!]
These tactics are, unfortunately for the unsuspecting sheep, seriously effective!
When we watch movies, WHY do we constantly see our future painted as a dystopia where humans have no hope or the government is a totalitarian dictatorship??
Predictive Programming.
By constantly infecting our mass consciousness with the idea that some day soon, we will be living in a dystopia; it allows that scenario to play out with less resistance from the populace.
Yes, the polls were wrong in 2015. They OVER-estimated Labour support, as I’m sure they’re doing now when they put the party on a miserable 28/29 per cent. I give Jez and Chairman Mao six months tops.
Wow, we’re getting a lot of pointless insults in response to this post! What a shame you don’t have any substance with which to support your claim.
I hope you will have the good grace to came back in 6 months and admit that you were wrong, as you surely will be…
There is a really appreciative piece about him in the Spectator this week. Those ghastly
Blairites just wanted to “be loved” which is why they kept up their inane and hypocritical Blairite “smiles” while their policies were all about chatting up the capitalists. Beastly people.
Can I have some if what you’re smoking?
I don’t smoke. Perhaps you should consider giving up; it seems to be affecting your perception.
You’re joking, surely?
He is a laughing stock. He is 6th form politics.
He is the self flagellating, self loathing branch of the far left that would drag down our country by its ears to appease their own imagined guilt from some long forgotten by gone era, granting free passes to contemporary allies guilty of far worse.
The group that hates this country and everything about it.
So we’ve established that you have a problem with Mr Corbyn – some sort of inferiority issue, perhaps. There’s nothing material about his policies here, though, and nothing to suggest that Corbyn isn’t popular.
“and nothing to suggest that Corbyn isn’t popular”
And there’s nothing to suggest Corbyn IS popular among people that are not die hard Corbyn supporters, and those are the people that count
Other than the result of every election in which he has stood?
Comspiraloons R Us
40 years on a housing estate in Yorkshire has lived a woman, Shirley. She and Roy her late husband raised their 2 kids there. At one point she happily knew all her neighbours there, all much like her, getting by, getting on, not rich and not privileged, borrowing milk, sweeping each other doorsteps.
She is a typical example of most people’s nana.
Now she knows hardly any of her neighbours, they don’t speak to her because there is nothing in common. They don’t speak her language, or know yorkshire colloquialisms she used to speak with the people around her that knew life as she knew it. When her granddaughters cone round to visit the neighbours children call them gori and white slag.
She sees Gillian Duffy question Gordon brown on the wisdom of mass immigration that has ruined any sense of community on her estate, that has turned it into half ghetto in which she is not welcome and fragmented social experiment that has lost all of its social cohesion, neighbourliness and community. Shirley sees how Gillian is insulted and how her legitimate fears are completely ignored by the party supposedly most likely to represent her. You ruined her home and bully her into keeping quiet about it.
That was Brown, you think anyone could possibly think that Corbyn wouldn’t be 50 times worse.
There are a hell of a lot of people all over England who feel like this and you don’t see them. London isn’t England and you don’t understand us at all if you look at us through London eyes.
England isn’t the UK either. Vox Political is based in Wales. Your own words put your attitude in perspective for the rest of us.
That would be the same Wales that has got so fed up with Labour’s incompetance that the Gower voted Conservative at the general election…
Gosh. One constituency out of 40 voted Conservative.
“Apres moi le deluge”?
I don’t think so!
Truth falls on deaf ears. Harris Tweed jacket trumps Armani suits. Lol:-)
Yeah, I think the problem Corbyn has to contend with is that the public, and the comfortable middle classes in particular (i.e me), have been conditioned by the political classes to accept the axiom that parties must move towards the people. I believe the point of a party is to plant a flag in the ground, and win people over to it.
How can a party “stand” for anything, when it is constantly scuttling behind public opinion, which is itself notoriously fickle, and more easily led than ever in the digital age. Led, of course, by the people that pay for the headlines, video feeds, viral memes, speeches and adverts.
There’s an old maxim that says power should be denied to those that seek it the most. Out of all the party leaders, who desires and relishes power the most?
Unless Corbyn is the most calculating, cunning, long playing political player of them all, and he has engineered his reluctant, hesitant nomination nomination for and election as leader, he’s nowhere near the top of that list.
Fact of the matter is, polls consistently say Corbyn has no chance. . . but actual results of real elections consistently see him winning by large margins! (Islington North ever election for 33 years, Labour Leadership election, Oldham West and Royton by-election, Euxton North (Chorley) councillors election)
“Corbyn is unelectable. . . except he keeps getting elected”!. . . This is 1984 style double-think, people, and its funny to watch some of you lot practicing it!
Every media commentator was saying Labour would only just hold, or even lose, Oldham West and Royton – pointing to both anecdotal evidence and these apparently impartial polls.
When Labour, in fact, dramatically increased their vote share, trouncing all the other parties, these same ‘media sources’ suddenly went very quiet!
Commentators, spectators, kippers, media ‘insiders’, internet ‘experts’, etc etc etc all say he is unelectable. . . problem is, VOTERS keep proving them wrong!
Name a time – despite a cross-the-board media bias against him – when Corbyn, or someone under his banner, has lost an election. . . go on, give it a go!
You should have a look at council by-election results in the past few months. Labour has been consistently been down. You talk about Oldham which was certainly a victory but the whole by-election was based around Labour vs UKIP. Other parties got squeezed as their votes went to Labour or UKIP. Labour just happened to be more popular.
Wait until there’s a by-election in a marginal Labour seat against Conservative or Lib Dems. Not sure Labour will do as well.
Changes in the council by-election results have been negligible.
Many commentators thought Oldham was going to be a marginal until Labour showed them the error of their ways.
There’s quite a few trolls in this comment section. Corbyn is HUGELY popular. In the space of 100 days he has DOUBLED Labour party membership, now standing at over double that of the next largest party membership the Conservatives. Labour now has as many members as when it won the landslide election in 1997. I live in a Tory stronghold in Sussex, and I’ve noticed 8 of my Tory FB friends have defected to Labour, I have 300 friends on FB and if that 5 out of roughly 200 Tory voting friends is indicative of a nationwide swing then that’s a 4 % swing and that should be extremely worrying for the corrupt Tories.
As a side note a month ago I wanted to order a Corbyn mug as a Christmas present, I liked it so much that I decided to order 3 more, but the website was sold out and I left my email address in a link to be notified when back in stock. Each time, 3 times in a row I received the email, always within 2 hours if receiving it, the website had sold out again. I emailed the online store suggesting that they order many more! The lady emailed me back and said that she’d never seen anything like it, that as soon as she’d ordered 200 more mugs they’d be sold out within 2 hours.
I think the Tories shoukd be afraid….and are very afraid judging by their media Baron besties virulent anti Corbyn agenda. The more they attack, the more popular he becomes. I back Jeremy 1000%, he is the lady hope for true Democracy in this country.
I’m not sure I can quite believe what I’m reading on this thread. We should ignore the opinion polls which historically UNDER estimate Labour support and now show the party languishing on 28 or 29 per cent of the vote. Instead, we should judge Jez’s popularity on the sales of merchandise among his fan base. Mugs certainly feature in this debate, but not in the way that some people seem to imagine.
I would laugh at this, but I fear you may think I was laughing with your comment, rather than at it.
I’m sure the Tories are quaking at the prospect of branded merchandise going like hotcakes, Mike! In my cupboard at home, I have a curio from John Major’s campaign in 1997. It is a mug which bears the legend, ‘Fighting for the fifth term: the winner’.
Corbyn, if he’s allowed to continue in his role, will lead Labour to the most catastrophic defeat since its foundation at the start of the twentieth century. A defeat from which it will never recover. The fact that you are untroubled by the polling evidence suggests that Corbynism is some kind of religion for you rather than a political allegiance.
The polling evidence is all in Corbyn’s favour.
The fact that you are untroubled by the misinformation you broadcast doesn’t surprise me in the least – Tories and their supporters have been doing it for decades.
Spot on Phil – the level of delusion here is frightening. Apparently the polls are fixed, and mug sales and polls of facebook friends are the best way to judge what’s happening in the wider electorate.
And silly comments from Tories are a great way to judge the amount of fear amongst right-wingers.
Far-left? You mean centre-left surely? Labour have occupied the centre-right ground for far too long.
Sorry, I’ve lost track. Where did you read “far-left”?
There are two problems with this argument. (1) The polls were wrong in May 2015, but were wrong by over-estimating Labour’s support. So if you think the polls are still wrong now, that’s not a reason to think Labour is really doing better than the polls, it’s the exact opposite. (2) ‘Ignore the polls, look at the crowds’ is an argument used before, and without happy results. Most notably in this context, it was why Michael Foot thought he and Labour were doing well in 1983. They weren’t. Labour crashed to a catastrophic defeat.
Different times, different circumstances.
If you’re discounting opinion polls then what’s your evidence that he is popular?
How do you know the polls are rigged? It is a business after all. If they were caught fiddling their numbers then they’d lose business.
Also, the polls were wrong in May but that doesn’t mean these current polls are wrong in a way that suits Corbyn. If polls are wrong then they could be even worse for Corbyn.
What’s your evidence that he’s Unpopular, then?
I think some of you are taking this far too much to heart.
Opinion polls are in a hell of their own making – even the polling companies admit this; they are working on new methodologies in an attempt to regain some credibility.
You’re correct that the current polls may not be wrong in a way that suits Corbyn – hence the anecdotal evidence that he’s treated like a rock star.
How is David Cameron treated, wherever he goes?
Apparently, if his junket around Europe is any indicator, everyone tells him: “Not today, thank you!”
Both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair face public derision and hatred, and yet they both achieved 3 terms of office. The British Premiership has never been a popularity contest in the X-Factor sense, it has always been about the usually silent majority stating what they want. At the last general election they stated that they did not want a Labour SNP coalition. The curious thing about that is that mathematically it was never possible. as all the SNP could ever do was replace Liberal Democrat and Labour MP’s making a three party coalition rather than a two party coalition.
Labour’s best chance of Government was that the Lib Dems held their Tory facing seats, and that Labour made enough gains against the Tories in England and Wales (and lets face it that predominantly means in England) to for, that three way coalition.
We now face boundary reviews that will cut the number of Labour seats significantly (something the Lib Dems prevented in the last Parliament) together with a a change to the electoral registration system that will have greatest impact in Labour seats.
Whilst the Tories only need the support of a quarter of eligible voters to form a Government Labour will need the support of around 38% of the eligible voters due to voter distribution in the new seats.
A Labour-SNP coalition was never likely, and that was made absolutely clear from the outset.
This time around, the Tories will have no shield behind which to hide – they can’t blame anybody else for their cock-ups and the flaws in their ideological policies.
Of course, the intelligence of the voter is a hard thing to quantify – look at the comments from some of the die-hard Tories who’ve turned up here for their Christmas holidays – but try to keep positive, eh?
I don’t think you understand the game. You make a claim (Crbyn is popular); you provide evidence (none).
Claims made without evidence can be rejected without evidence.
You’re wrong. You don’t understand the game. Read the article and stop to think before posting.
It’s hard to believe that you’re using unquantifiable, subjective and hearsay evidence about Corbynista rather than actual data and figures.
Miliband was treated like a rock star at times during the 2015 election and it got him nowhere – in fact it may well have cost him support among the bulk if the electorate.
A highly selective mention if recent by-elections is no evidence either, particularly the one in Oldham, Corbyn didn’t set foot in the seat between an internal launch event and the victory party. The Labour team there even told him to stay away as his name was toxic on the doorstep.
If his name is toxic on the doorstep, how come he’s treated like a rock star everywhere he goes?
That’s really the point of the article, you see.
There’s all this so-called evidence against Corbyn’s popularity, but it’s all manufactured.
Your evidence is selective but you simply can’t – or won’t – see it.
Do you ever want Labour to be a party of Government again (I do)? Do you really believe Corbyn can deliver that? The realistic view is for a Centre Left leader to lead a left leaning government. Anything else is impossible.
So you should be very happy.
Perhaps you’ve been misled by the right-wing media. The clue there, of course, is in the fact that they are RIGHT-wing. Their centre is a lot further to the right than the actual centre. Read up on the Overton Window.