Right, so now that Jeremy has won by the flipping great margin we all thought he would, what does the first year of his reign look like? I’m going to try and stick to things I’m pretty sure will happen as opposed to engaging in wild speculation (as tempting as that may be).
Like I’ve said before, Corbyn will have a honeymoon period. His straight talker routine will get extra mileage after he becomes leader of the opposition and people outside of Westminster pay attention to what he’s saying for the first time. His more populist stuff, like re-nationalising the railways, will get some positive airtime. Cameron will struggle at first with PMQs because the shtick that worked so well with Miliband will bounce right off of Corbyn.
Cameron: the last Labour government was a disaster!
Corbyn: I couldn’t agree more!
Cameron: Right….
Cameron and the rest of the Tories will try to paint Corbyn as a rabid socialist, which will be met with Corbyn saying that, yes, he is in fact a rabid socialist, thank you very much. There may even be a slight panic in Conservative ranks that Corbyn really is moving the debate in the country to the left. Labour will get a slight poll boost, leading Owen Jones to declare the coming socialist utopia as having arrived at its early stages.
But this period won’t last very long. More crazy things Jeremy has said in the past will come to light, none of them particularly interesting on their own, but collectively they will trouble the nation. His straight talking idiom will get him into real trouble – it always does, which is the actual reason most politicians sound like robots.
But the big moment of truth will be next May. It’s now not only looking possible but very likely that all these four things will happen on the very same day: Labour fail to win back the London mayoralty, they lose control of the Welsh Assembly, lose a large number of English seats in the local elections, and get utterly crushed in the Scottish parliament elections. May 5, 2016 will be the day any pretence that Jeremy Corbyn could be prime minister will die for good amongst anyone but the hardcore Corbynistas.
But I think he’ll remain leader after that bloodbath anyway. There will be talks in the media of a coup, and who would be leader if that were to happen. But it will come to nothing – in terms of forcibly removing leaders, the Labour Party may well be the worst organisation in the history of the human race. The only way Jeremy stops being leader after May of next year is if he steps down of his own accord.
I don’t think he will. He will probably hunker down harder in fact, the retributions doled out by Watson for any whiff of insubordination going up in both number and harshness. Labour could well drift on like this to the next election, the polls remaining bad but not dire, until May 2020. Then comes the general election.
One thing that hasn’t been commented on enough is the new boundaries. At the next election, there will be 600 constituencies as opposed to the 650 we have now. So 50 less MPs. When the Tories announced they wanted to do this at the start of the last government in 2010, they billed this as being powered by a “cutting down the cost of politics” measure. But in actuality, the cut in the number of MPs does something you’d expect when you think about it at all: it makes a whole bunch of constituencies more Tory friendly. Each one gets bigger, you see, and so that means a lot of them take in more rural areas than they would under the 650 model we have now.
So the combination of Corbyn and the new boundaries could result in a Conservative majority of epic proportions. I was tempted to predict just how large that majority might be, but I’ll refrain – I’ve probably depressed a lot of people enough already for one day.
Where do the LIb Dems figure in all of this or are we completely irrelevant now?
Do you actually think he’ll last a year? Especially with how many of his own MPs despise him
“Where do the LIb Dems figure in all of this or are we completely irrelevant now?”
Presumably they drift on with the polls remaining dire.
This article is all assumption. I think we should give JC a chance. Wait and see, not assume that we know that 5th May will be a disaster. If Corbyn is going to be as inclusive as he espouses and is really willing to listen and to take account of a range of views rather than pushing forward his own personal views, then the negatives that this article supposes may not come to pass. The worst possible thing is that Party Members don’t even give him this chance, which is happening already and is massively disappointing. Within hours of the announcement yesterday, while certain MPs began to refuse to participate, party members were asked what they wanted discussed at PMQs. I’ve never seen the like before. A gimmick, if you follow the nicktyrone.com line of thought. Or the start of something different, perhaps, if you choose to give it a chance.
The response from Cameron was typical of someone certainly as low, but obviously so confident in himself that he looks like, and is a total puppet, for which, when I listen to him, becomes less convincing than the positive effects of a marzipan dildo.
” the Labour Party is now a threat to national security”
What a wanker!!!
I know JC means well, but so did Micheal Foot and although people have said this won’t be a repeat of the 80s, I’m definitely having a strong sense of déjà vu about all of this. And if JC wants to win, he’ll have to unite Blairites and defectors to UKIP… Just don’t see how he’s going to do it. Suspect moderate Labour supporters will defect to the Lib Dems this time, rather than form a new party as they did last time, though…
The Scottish result you predict is a given, and the Welsh result seems very likely, but let’s see what comes to pass in England. You don’t mention the EU referendum – even if it has not been held within the first year JC will have to define his position more clearly, which will surely be a key development. And while it’s true that the Labour party never knifes its leader I wonder if the internal pressure within the party for him to go might just keep building. While some JC voters seem to be happy that the party might never win power again, a large number of JC voters seem to be convinced that their man will actually bring large numbers of extra votes to Labour. Who knows, they might be right. But if it turns out that they are clearly wrong, then these voters might start to decide that they have made a mistake.
I think the honeymoon period has expired already. It started when he attacked the media in his acceptance speech. He does not realise that the media (in all its forms) is going to be needed if he’s any chance of any sort of success. Since then he’s pulled out of an appearance on Marr, R4 Today show and refuses to answer Qs from journalists. To cap it off he’s appointed an IRA sympathiser as Shadow Chancellor and relegated the women to the lesser jobs.
All in 24 hours.
Cameron doesn’t really have to do anything. JC will kill the Labour Party on his own aided and assisted by the alienated hacks for whom this is like Christmas Day, every day. I think he’s got 3 months tops before the sane wing of what’s left of the Labour PLP (i.e. 80% of it) commit regicide.
It was a good read, but set in the Tory way of how things will happen.
I personally only agree strongly on one of his major points, the need to scrap trident altogether. But the election of JC has even awoken those for many years have given up on politics, which in itself isn’t a bad thing.
The one thing UK did wrong in the last few years, to snub their noses up at PR. As the first past the post is just too old fashioned, and is still used in 3rd world countries to guarantee the ruling parties get in every time; oh and did I mention Milliband leading the ‘Yes’ campaign.
Let’s see how his ‘honeymoon’ period pans out, and also look across the pond at what the man with a shredded wheat on his head (Trump) is fairing all through his disasterous gaffes at women, Mexicans and notice the polls still give him a trailnblazing lead.