Jeremy Corbyn: Keir Starmer will win on an anti-Tory vote, not a pro-Labour one

>Leaving Labour has been a wrench. “It’s been my life,” he says. He’d wanted to stand for the party but couldn’t, having been blocked for saying that antisemitism during his time as Labour leader was exaggerated. After he announced he would run alone, he was told he’s lost his party membership too. That put an end to a more than five-decade journey, as he joined Labour before England won the 1966 World Cup. Old habits die hard: he refers to Nargund as the “official” Labour candidate (you get the sense he feels like the unofficial but real one), and still sometimes says “we” and “us” about the party. Corbyn says a recent door-knocking outing became a therapy session for a group who feel Labour has changed. “Many people around the country whose whole lives have revolved around aspects of the party now find themselves suspended, removed and so on, and they feel quite sad about it,” he says.

>For Corbyn, Sir Keir’s Labour is less of a “broad church” even than Sir Tony Blair’s in 1997. He points out that the first Blair cabinet included Robin Cook, Chris Mullin and others, all of the Left wing. “Blair wasn’t as authoritarian,” he says. “I remember arguments with the whips office many times during New Labour… but they didn’t approach the whole thing as a threat.”

I don’t particularly like Corbyn or the hard-left cult of personality that surrounds him, but I agree with his point about the need for further left-wing voices to have some representation in Labour.

Maybe when this campaign is behind us, cooler heads can prevail and he can be quietly let back in his a Labour member, or even granted a peerage.

>A lot has happened since 2019 — the implosions of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have made the Tories much weaker. Last week, Corbyn said he’d “absolutely” beat Rishi Sunak if he were still Labour leader today. “Be honest about it: it’s much more to do with an anti-Tory vote than a pro-Labour vote,” he says. “People are fed up with poverty.” Of course, that doesn’t fully explain why Corbyn lost less than five years ago.

>It’s hard to get Corbyn to admit to mistakes as leader. “What I regret most was trusting in people who clearly were not going to be supportive or loyal,” he says. “I wish now I’d removed far more people from offices within the party… not so much Parliament, I can’t control that so easily — but within the party.”

Starmer may not quite have succeeded in building a strong “pro-Labour vote” but at the least he didn’t turn the situation into an “anti-Labour vote” for the Tories, which is what Corbyn ended up doing during his time as leader.

Labour is a broad church of centre left to left wing groups. This is unfair analysis and smacks of bitterness.

Ideology without the means to express it through power is pointless. Blair knew it and Starmer does too. Elections are won in the centre

To be fair that’s what this vote is for me. It’s not for a party, but against the conservatives.

They’ve been in power too long, and have their own set of rules, and are only interested in making themselves richer, rather than doing anything actually useful for the country.

Not to mention with them we’ve had Brexit forced on us, and had costs sky rocket, putting the country in possibly the worst condition it’s possibly ever been in.

Where has he been for the last 10 years? Corbyn was running on an anti-Tory vote too. Half of politicking here is “We’re not the other guys”

Corbyn’s domestic policies were fairly well liked, iirc, but they weren’t liked coming from *him*.

He was a *very* easy target for the Tories. Likewise, his foreign policies were absolutely awful. Viewing him through the lense of the years that followed 2017/2019, I don’t want to imagine how he might have handled Ukraine.

And given the massive failure Corbyn and his supporters led the party to, is Starmer horrible for wanting them gone? I don’t think so, for all I agree there *should* be a left-wing (moderate, at least) arm to the party.

True. But labour lost under Corbyn because of Corbyn.

I dont often agree with Corbyn but he’s right on this one.

Let’s hope that Starmer can keep his freely given A star badge over the next election

You mean thean that hasn’t actually said anything of Amy substance a week out from the election isn’t getting votes for his policies?

He’s not wrong and Keir has lost a lot of traditional Labour supporters which could be an issue later on. But a win is still a win and now we wait

And to think, if only we had Corbyn we could be getting another Tory win on an anti-Labour vote.

Gotta an agree, just done my postal vote and it was a few days of thought about the current situation. I couldn’t vote Tories.

Corbyn would have been a brilliant PM. Just imagine the policies he would have got enacted. Britain would be rich and prosperous instead of now being the sickman of Europe.

Well said! And it’s very risky.

As soon as the disappointments start to pile up, because the Tories fucked the country forever with Brexit, those voters will migrate to the far right.

I’d be more concerned about keeping your own seat, jez.

Kind of like how Tories won on an anti Corbyn Labour vote