Theresa May’s team can be congratulated on achieving one thing in particular.

 

That is, her team have produced an incredibly boring campaign.

 

The campaign can best be summarised as, ‘Vote for me because I’m not Jeremy Corbyn’. And – given the historic state of the opinion polls, and the past behaviour of the rebellious Labour MPs, this might have seemed like a bullet-proof strategy.

 

I’ve voted Labour all of my adult life. I am aged 43. I have indeed voted for Tony Blair’s national government three times. I’ll be voting for Jeremy Corbyn.

 

I apologise. I can’t write very well.

 

The Head of English at my school once wrote on my term’s report: “Shibley sometimes has very interesting things to say, but his approach is very vernacular.”

 

I was so disappointed, I looked up what ‘vernacular’ means.

 

It means ‘wooden’.

 

And that’s exactly how I feel when I see Theresa’s team campaigning – it feels ‘wooden’.

 

When I hear the phrase ‘strong and stable’ robotically activated, I despair.

 

I know people are on the whole uninterested in politics, but even a cursory glance at Theresa May’s record identifies her lack of strength and stability as a political force.

 

One is reminded of Groucho Marx’s famous saying, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

 

And May has done U turns which are too many to mention: like the funding of school dinners, whether to hold an election at all, whether to leave the European Union, and so on.

 

Whatever is the truth, I am in no doubt it is the public perception that matters.

 

When Gordon Brown ‘dithered’ about whether to hold an election or not, the media were flooded with complementary similar stories about how he cannot make his mind up about ‘dunking’ Hob Nobs.

 

And when you would have expected Theresa May to be ‘strong’ in defending an ideological stance, which indeed some in her own party will support, there’s not a “sausage”.

 

I am no clearer now than when the Conservative manifesto was published about why it is not a good idea to socialise the risk of getting a long term disability such as dementia – and we should make people with lots of money pay with their houses albeit after their death.

 

Theresa May has made it all about her.

 

You may dislike Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘style’ . Indeed, you don’t know how many times I have come to close to throwing rotten tomatoes at my TV set when he gets ‘angry’ when on his rallies.

 

But the content of Jeremy Corbyn is clear enough – whether you find it agreeable or not.

 

There are, however, reasons to be not so cheerful at Theresa May’s ‘strong’ style of communication.

 

Do you remember how she talked around the subject of whether a Trident missile had been misfired in the sea?

 

Or do you remember how she refused to explain, several times, how new money would be made available to the NHS?

 

To all intents and purposes, Theresa May seems to be ‘just about managing’ to keep her show on the road.

 

There can be no doubt that, even if one has grave reservations about the messenger, Jeremy Corbyn has sufficient patriotism and pride in his country not to see the NHS, social care, housing or schools go to pot in the next five years.

 

The narrative had been in 2010: “Give us a chance, and we’ll fix the economy. And you’ll live happily ever after.”

 

And despite valiant efforts from the BBC and Sky, and some judicious use of ‘smears’, this has clearly been outed to be a complete lie.

 

We have ‘paid’ through the roof for austerity – some more than others, ask any families of disabled citizens who have committed suicide because of the welfare reforms.

 

And national debt has gone through the roof.

 

Margaret Thatcher always used to talk of her ‘strong foundations’, but it is crystal clear that George Osborne’s legacy, apart from a personal knighthood, has been a gig economy kept alive through poor workers’ rights.

 

And look at the state of A&E departments nationally.

 

Whilst the opinion polls were so bad for Jeremy Corbyn, in no small part due to the monstering Corbyn has had from all parts of the mainstream media, it has been easy to maintain the ‘Corbyn is incompetent’ narrative.

 

But the ‘Theresa May is incompetent’ narrative is much more damaging for the Conservatives.

 

If the Conservatives’ campaign is indeed all about her, it does matter if her answers to Andrew Neil as a whole are catastrophic.

 

I have racked my brains about how people who dislike Jeremy Corbyn feel.

 

I think their last throw of the dice was ‘unleash Corbyn’ in the hope that once the public truly saw what he was made of they would instantly find him repulsive.

 

People who dislike Corbyn genuinely find themselves between a ‘rock’ and a ‘hard place’.

 

The argument has long been: “He is unelectable” and “We can’t get rid of him.”

 

The “He is unelectable” mantra has been thrust at every opportunity – whether in the Manchester mayoralty race or the Stoke by-election.

 

And while Corbyn does seem to tap into something, it might indeed be difficult to get rid of him.

 

And that’s ironically where it all started.

 

Angela Eagle MP said it was all about ‘real leadership’, but few people can criticise Jeremy Corbyn for putting a good effort in a resilient performance despite having to re-invent his shadow cabinet several times.

 

And the leadership is authentic – and now we know it has a vision (whether you agree with it or not).

 

The wheels of the alternative vision are rapidly falling off – Nigel Farage is increasingly looking like a used cars salesman off ‘Only fools and horses’ and Katie Hopkins has ‘left’ her LBC show by ‘mutual agreement’.

 

With two weeks to go – there is all to play for. The disadvantage of the poll lead narrowing for Theresa May is that Tory voters will know that they cannot necessarily take victory for granted.

 

I must thank my friends and colleagues at this point, finally – including Paul Mason, “chunkymark”, Steve Topple, Dr Éoin Clarke, to name but a few.

 

Barry Gardiner, Angela Rayner, John McDonnell and Rebecca Long Bailey have tireless in interviews.

 

And also Liam Young – who has, even when Corbyn’s made was truly ‘mud’ – has heroically put the case forward for Jeremy Corbyn for many months now on the Independent.

 

That is where Owen Smith and Angela Eagle got it so badly wrong.

 

The strength in the Labour leadership is its collective nature. If you look at Theresa May’s team, you’re hard pressed to identify the other strong players – such as Boris Johnson or Phil Hammond?

 

There is something we can all learn from the damp squib nature of the May campaign.

 

But if she happens to win, there’ll be a lot of soul searching by many.

 

 

@dr_shibley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

None of us know for certain what medical problems we’ll have, when or how they’ll be manifest.

Even precise genomics won’t be able to give us the full answer one day.

We all know there is a problem somewhere.

There’s been relentless messaging like ‘grey tsunami’ and ‘dementia timebomb’, reinforcing the notion that the ‘aged population’ (and immigrants) are the root causes of all that is wrong with Britain.

You know when things are bad for the Conservatives when they have to resort to “Google ads” to divert your Google search for the phrase “dementia tax”.

I’ve resisted from commenting on the ‘dementia tax’ as I have voted Labour all of my adult life. This means that I have voted for Tony Blair’s national government three times, and I intend to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in about twenty days’ time.

There are about 900,000 people living with dementia currently in the UK. I am united with them, not united against them.

I am also an academic physician in dementia and frailty. Nonetheless, I am loath to get involved in participating in participating in a highly emotive debate.

The issue which has caused the furore is essentially to do with elderly care. The media have not really helped by their conflation of ‘elderly care’ and ‘social care’. For example, social care is not just about ‘old people’. And the policy proposal conflated with ‘dementia tax’ is not entirely helpful either as not all people living with dementia need hugely excessive care costs and indeed dementia can affect young people.

But onto the actual heart of the issue.

I was left feeling that this policy announcement was either one of immense incompetence or sheer cunning from Theresa May, parliamentary candidate, and her inner circle reported to include Ben Gummer and Nick Timothy. The only reason at all we’re “taking a second look” is because the Tories themselves, and substantial parts of the Tory media, have complained about it.

The starting point is that the divide between ‘health’ and ‘social care’ is an untenable one.

It cannot be morally acceptable that cancer and dementia are viewed differently – cancer as a health issue will not cripple you financially like dementia as a social care issue. Also, many conditions, considered ‘health conditions’ such as emphysema, might have a formidable social care component, say if accompanied by physical disability.

Also – dementia very rarely ‘travels alone’. A person with dementia with substantial care needs is likely also to be living with various medical co-morbidities.

It can hardly be expected that good policy will come out of a general election announced at shotgun notice. After all, we’ve had countless and commissions looking at the same thing, all producing imperfect conclusions.

This new proposed policy on elderly care, conversely, does not appear to have come out of any policy commission. But ‘seemed like a good idea’.

And this contribution is not only disappointing in itself, but also in that it was signposted as a massive new contribution, so much so there was nothing substantial in the Budget.

As a society, the social contract between us individually and the State is that we all pool risk together.

We as a society decide not to punish financially those who get unwell through no fault of their own.

I can see exactly why this new policy is going down like a plate of cold sick on the doorsteps. It goes against a generation of people encouraged by Maggie Thatcher to buy their own houses.

Now the equivalent value of the house that people have saved for will now be surrendered to pay for the event of huge care costs.

In a way, these Conservatives are being disingenuous in that they would prefer to be bailed out by the State against excessive social care costs rather than using their money in an entirely individualistic way.

This is the policy as stated in the Conservative manifesto 2017.

“Under the current system, care costs deplete an individual’s assets, including in some cases the family home, down to £23,250 or even less. These costs can be catastrophic for those with modest or medium wealth. One purpose of long-term saving is to cover needs in old age; those who can should rightly contribute to their care from savings and accumulated wealth, rather than expecting current and future taxpayers to carry the cost on their behalf. Moreover, many older people have built considerable property assets due to rising property prices. Reconciling these competing pressures fairly and in a sustainable way has challenged many governments of the past. We intend to tackle this with three connected measures.

First, we will align the future basis for means-testing for domiciliary care with that for residential care, so that people are looked after in the place that is best for them. This will mean that the value of the family home will be taken into account along with other assets and income, whether care is provided at home, or in a residential or nursing care home.

Second, to ensure this is fair, we will introduce a single capital floor, set at £100,000, more than four times the current means test threshold. This will ensure that, no matter how large the cost of care turns out to be, people will always retain at least £100,000 of their savings and assets, including value in the family home.

Third, we will extend the current freedom to defer payments for residential care to those receiving care at home, so no-one will have to sell their home in their lifetime to pay for care.”

In other words, the ‘family home’ is vulnerable, even if it is not during the course of your lifetime.

As an academic physician dealing with dementia, I have been struck with the difference between global policy from the United Nations and World Health Organization and the cheereladers of English charity on ‘dementia friendly communities’. In global policy, the notion of enhanced care at home or supported living, as part of the United Nations sustainable development goals, is actively embraced. However, the model of dementia friendly communities is predominantly one large charity in England endorsing their model of what a dementia friendly community is, with symbolic recognition of how dementia might bring Nudge-eque competitive advantage (e.g. dementia friendly leisure, shopping, banking, tourism), to the point that the relentless cuts in social care and NHS (unmatched for demand) have become an eyesore in the PR that ‘the UK will the best place to have dementia”.

There are only 8 years until David Cameron reveals his cure for dementia as part of the 2012 Prime Minister’s Dementia Challenge. But I expect Cameron’s cheerleaders ought to be and will be held to account even this means through the academic version of pitchforks.

The English dementia policy is entirely in keeping with a Small state ideology, with contraction in the promotion of clinical specialist nurses, a cure ‘round the corner’, and the annihilation of social care.

It is tragic that the social care profession has had its wings clipped, when it could be given the resources to enable and protect people diagnosed with dementia and care partners.

But the Prime Minister Dementia Challenge also failed in the way it did not adequately recognise dementia advocacy services. This is ironic, given the proliferation of an added tier of rent-seeking middle men involved in the vague concept of ‘dementia awareness’.

This advocacy was, and is, essential for advising for people who lose legal mental capacity. At a time when global and international policy is overall preferring people with dementia to make their decisions known at a time when they retain capacity, as opposed to a third party making the decisions for them, it is shocking that England is in such a parlous state with dementia advocacy. Dementia advocacy, from regulated professionals, was and is essential for people with dementia upholding their legal rights, especially when the State might be interpreted as overzealous in taking these rights away – see, for example, the deprivation of liberty safeguards.

I fully agree with the desire to close the ‘diagnosis gap’. For people with dementia to live better after diagnosis for longer, they should be diagnosed at the last minute.

In my experience, in answer to the question ‘what do you want ideally?’ to a person with dementia, I receive the answers ‘hope’ and ‘time’.

If dementia services had properly matured after 2012, with the same ‘accelerator’ fervour so rampant from Pharma, medical advocacy through colleagues in palliative care might see advance care planning to be seen as routine and acceptable, rather than odd ball and luxury.

Advocacy would also have protected the human rights and democratic citizenship of people with dementia. The attack on the human rights legislation is one thing, but at the moment “contained” in as much as Theresa May does not wish us to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

But people with dementia, if/when they lose the ability to make decisions according to the Mental Capacity Act, need some degree of protection. Indeed, the Care Act (2014) contains useful statutory guidance on safeguarding.

Theresa May in her 2017 manifesto has introduced unfortunately another element requiring safeguarding. Her policy effectively is one of equity release, with delayed payment, until proven otherwise.

An example of current guidance, for example, on this is this:

“A deferred payment agreement is an agreement with us which could help you to use the value of your home to fund residential care costs. If you are eligible, subject to the council being able to obtain a first legal charge over the property, the county council will pay a sum agreed during your financial assessment towards your residential care home fees on your behalf. You can delay repaying the council until you choose to sell your home, or after your death. The amount you are assessed as having to pay for your care and support is delayed and not ‘written off’. The costs of your care and support will still have to be repaid by you or someone on your behalf at a later date either when you choose to sell your house or 90 days after your death.”

However, for the first time, this rule will now also apply to so-called domiciliary care – care at home – if the Tories win the election.

All of this is the end result of market failure from successive governments. There is no yearning for a private healthcare insurance market which is contracting rather than expanding.

This policy offering from the Conservatives is most dangerous because at first it had no upper cap. Now that, as of yesterday, there is a cap, but we don’t know what the cap might be even after questioning. And this cap is necessary to make sure there is some State intervention in excessive care costs.

Closing the ‘diagnosis gap’ is fine as long as people with dementia are given the proper care and support following diagnosis. It is clear that there is still much to be done, despite “Cameron’s cheerleaders”. To give you an example of how problematic English policy is at the moment, look at how the NHS Transformation Network “The well pathway for dementia” simply omits “caring well” from its structure.

With no upper cap, the State is in a position to repossess your house at some later stage if you need to pay for care costs.

The State will argue that it will guarantee you do not lose more than a modest sum in the process, but the devil is altogether in the detail.

Who for example is going to pay for the surveyors’ costs of your family home? Which lawyer, given the annihilation of legal aid following the Legal Aid and Sentencing of Offenders Act 2012, is going to help people with the legal paperwork which accompanies this?

The ideal of universal coverage is that we all put in and it’s luck of the draw what we pay out. Some people indeed hardly ever need to use the NHS or social care. But as a society we should worry, whatever political allegiance one is, about a policy which clearly acts to the detriment of a group of people because of their medical diagnosis, such as dementia?

But this is a policy which clearly benefits those involved in the private home equity release financial products, and where there are potential conflicts of interest from Government and “associated persons”, it would be helpful if these conflicts could be clearly identified if transparency is indeed the best disinfectant.

It happens that this is a policy which acts to the detriment of a protected characteristic under the Equality Act (2010), and is therefore potentially unlawful for indirect indiscrimination. The label “dementia tax” has somehow stuck, and is extremely effective during this general election period, but is not strictly speaking wholly accurate.

The Tory manifesto policy proposal does nothing to bring integration of health and social care closer (though this criticism by some was also made of the Dilnot recommendations). It also fundamentally does not address issues of quality of domiciliary care which could be affected by a number of disparate factors, such as implementation of the national living wage, lack of financial reimbursement for carers, ‘burnout’ of carers, abuse through zero hour contracts, poor financial sustainability of healthcare providers.

The Brexit induced by the Tory government 2015-7 has advantages and disadvantages as far as this policy is concerned. Firstly, if there were some delay in implementing this policy, the legislation might escape the EU gender directives (we know that more women on the whole are affected by dementia, so by escaping EU anti-discrimination law private insurance companies can ensure that women pay higher premiums to offset problems in paying out). Secondly, there might still be problems in getting enough people to be prepared to be paid carers if the UK stops free movement of workers.

The Tory manifesto proposal is sick as we don’t pool risk in the same way we do for the NHS, and yet the divide between health and social care is untenable. And definitely doesn’t address the problems so inherent in the lack of integration between health and social care, such as delayed transfers of care.

The sad thing is – I expect at the end of all this we won’t be much further forward. But at least some attention on social care, as opposed to the vast amount of attention normally given to the NHS, is welcome.

 

@dr_shibley

 

We now know that if Ed Miliband indeed had a million conversations at the time of the 2015 general election he was not very good at acting on the answer.

 

Before Jeremy Corbyn came along for the (two) leadership elections, the Labour Party was immersed in a smorsborg of banality.

 

Let me make a powerful confession.

 

I support Jeremy Corbyn.

 

This doesn’t make me a Corbynista or Corbynite. I am interested in winning elections. That would be totally counter-intuitive, IF I were interested in politics and I was disincentivised by success.

 

Please don’t hate me.

 

There has been a cruel, vindictive criticism that people who ‘follow’ Jeremy Corbyn are in a cult.

 

First thing to say is that it is not uncommon for leaders to have followers.

 

Second, Corbyn would not be the first person to want to be popular.

 

Look at Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson who were ‘intensely relaxed’ about being chummy with friends in the City or Republicans in the United States.

 

And talking of cults.

 

What is Mayism?  Journalists were so busy fawning over Theresa May at the launch of the 2017 manifesto document, they embarrassingly forgot to listen to the answer.

 

The answer, incidentally, began in a Thatcher-esque baritone, “There is no such thing as Mayism”.

 

Soon there’ll be no such thing as society – nor even the United Kingdom, if the Conservatives carry on with their direction of travel.

 

As it happens, I don’t think Corbyn likes rallies because he is ‘popular’. He is probably happy with ‘preaching to the converted’ as his narrative is genuinely what he believes in. His voting record shows that.

 

Corbyn recently made it clear he gets paid generously for what he does, but more or less implied he gave it away to good causes without saying so as much in a recent TV interview.

 

My late father used to warn me that bad dancers always blamed the floor – that is when I tended to blame anyone but me for my triumphant mistakes.

 

But it is true that the David Cameron and George Osborne era has largely escaped meaningful criticism.

 

That is even though the legislative reforms of Lansley on the NHS or Iain Duncan Smith on welfare reforms have been both costly and catastrophic.

 

All the people who spend everyday criticising Jeremy Corbyn in the Guardian should remind themselves of where Labour came from in 2015.

 

At the time, David Miliband’s reaction to the general election was “We need to own the future. We turned the page back when we should have turned the page forward.”

 

And meanwhile Tony Blair said, “We must own the future. We must make the future our comfort zone.”

 

To give Blair credit, there were some very important achievements too in his period of government.

 

John Cruddas’ post mortem was, “We should now go to some very dark places to find out what went wrong”.

 

And Liz Kendall MP’s pitch in the first Labour leadership made a pitch for leadership on the basis of the fact she went to school in Watford.

 

Tristram Hunt said, “We appeared irrelevant. Now we must appear relevant.”

 

I campaigned for Ed Miliband in the 2015 general election. I voted for Tony Blair three times as leader. I have voted Labour all my adult life, every general election since 1992.

 

Now that we have a twice democratically elected leader, I would suggest something to senior members of the Labour Party.

 

Please don’t be arseholes.

 

Your time with us is temporary.

 

The Labour Party collectively is more important than you.

 

I will be voting for Jeremy Corbyn. I have always supported the democratically elected leader of my party. I think it is simply unforgiveable and unprincipled for Kezia Dugdale, John Woodcock or Ben Bradshaw if they are going round their constituencies telling people to vote Tory.

 

Blair,  Brown and Ed Miliband all had one important thing in common.

 

They left the ideology of the Labour Party in a mess. I would go so far as to say they left it in a vacuum, which might explain why so many in the UK voted to leave the European Union.

 

But the Guardian, and senior political editors at the BBC, have made it into a passion criticising Jeremy Corbyn in an amazingly comprehensive hate campaign.

 

They are so keen on this hate campaign, they would not mind if this country went to the dogs.

 

That’s patriotism, the Tory way.

 

We are where we are with Brexit.

 

The Liberal Democrats insist that they are not ‘re-running Brexit’, but they do want to put to some sort of vote what our post Brexit existence could be or should be.

 

Indeed, whilst those who voted in the EU referendum in the most part wanted to vote out of the European Union, there is currently no clear mandate on leaving the single market.

 

If Labour or the Conservatives do not win the 2017 general election on their own, it is possible that the race becomes one of a race between (Tory and LibDem) or (Labour and SNP).

 

We can assume that the Conservatives have mentally written off the idea of ‘paying back the deficit’ on their third attempt (by 2025).

 

This incidentally is also the year David Cameron and his colleagues in big charity have promised to deliver a ‘cure for dementia’.

 

Labour  had become triangulated, up until and including the departure of Ed Miliband, to ‘paying off the deficit’.

 

But that led to annihilation of any enthusiasm and vision under the Labour membership.

 

With the ideology of ‘paying off the deficit’, everything else follows – including making the State totally underfunded. Cuts and austerity have been euphemistically dressed up as efficiency.

 

This current general election in 2017 is truly astonishing.

 

Theresa May wants to use the 2017 general election as a blank cheque for a ‘small state’. This explains why May does not consider it important to deliver a universal entitlement on winter fuel payments or to deliver an elderly care system where we pool risk equitably.

 

Is it ‘patriotic’ of May to put people with dementia on the financial breadline in this way?

 

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, on the other hand, have produced a brilliant vision for government – whether you agree with it or not. It is fully costed – none of the 60 promises in the Conservatives manifesto have been costed, and the overwhelmingly right wing media do not care.

 

This is tragic.

 

The double standards further extend to Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell allegedly being ‘terrorist sympathisers’. So why did Michael Fallon go to meet the dictator Assad in 2007?

 

Whatever you think of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, they have taken the level of debate much further on the risable twaddle from years ago.

 

The first question after George Osborne’s omnishambles budget from Nick Robinson was, “Prime Minister, have you ever eaten a Cornish pasty?”

 

Ed Miliband, and his shadow cabinet, were control freaks. None of them could ever go passionately off message. Take for example their tortured messages on the ‘cost of living crisis’.

 

The tragedy, however, was that Ed Miliband was also right in his way too.

 

This year, prices will far outstrip wages. There is definitely a phenomenon called ‘the cost of living crisis.

 

And we know that the energy market is broken. The inflated prices from large oligopolies demonstrating near monopolistic behaviour show that.

 

Ed Miliband recognised that too.

 

Even ‘Red Tory’ Theresa May recognises the housing market is ‘broken’.

 

However, we know that her superior, Mrs Thatcher, perhaps referred to as ‘selfishly individualistic’ in May’s manifesto, sold off the housing stock.

 

Now Maggie’s children are having to sell off their houses to pay for their own elderly care, because successful governments obsessed with a small state and free movement of capital have neglected to safeguard the infrastructure.

 

Let’s vote May out, and then we can discuss what ‘Mayism’ is at our leisure.

 

A few days ago, somebody aged above 70 said he would not be surprised if Labour actually defied the odds – like when Clem Attlee won in 1945 with an extraordinary vision, when good Mr Churchill was expected to win.

 

Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.

 

Strong and stable? My arse.

 

Just ask the junior doctors, nurses or teachers.

 

I think it is time to give the robotic ‘strong and stable’ Theresa May the boot, and send a giant rocket to her equally unappealing and unimpressive Cabinet.

 

This is not a once in a lifetime opportunity.

 

This is a once in many lifetime opportunities.

 

Even if the BBC and Guardian can’t be arsed to give you the facts about the manifestos (sic), seize the opportunity to divert the UK from being an offshore banana republic off the shores of the European Union.

 

Time to give Theresa May ‘nil points’.

 

 

dr_shibley

 

 

 

 

 

It is alleged that John McDonnell MP, in reviewing the fortunes of the Labour Party in the recent elections, joked that at least Labour had not been annihilated. Who says the Left doesn’t have a sense of humour?

Of course, the likes of Alastair Campbell aren’t laughing.

Was the reaction to the recent local elections expected? Should we have guessed that Laura Kuenssberg would be behaving as if she had just bagged an amazing Louis Vuitton bargain at the first day of the sales?

I feel that this difficulty in the local elections was entirely predictable – and indeed is all factored into by people who want to get rid of Corbyn, as well as those who massively support him.

This comment was made in May last year on a US website:

“Mid-term elections, in particular, are revealing as to how triangulation strengthens the right wing. Once incumbency relieves national Democratic leaders of the any need to lean toward their “base,” triangulation comes in full swing. In 2014 for example, triangulation led to electoral disaster for Democrats and the lowest voter turnout in 70 years despite the record $4 billion spent on the election.

With few exceptions, 2014 offered the choice between pseudo-Republicans on the Democratic ticket and real Republicans. Voters choose the real deal and/or the demoralized voters stay home.

Triangulation sharply curtailed Obama possibilities. This is not a new pattern.  Triangulation did its share to contribute to the rightwing resurgence and entrenchment in 1994, 1996, 2010 and 2014.”

Note – this is nothing to do with Jonathan Freedland, Stephen Kinnock or Richard Anstell. This comment is about how mid-term elections tend to reveal a low turnout, with a phenomenon that right wing parties tend to entrench their positions.

I’m not a professional political commentator. I think very few people are – apart from the magnificent Steve Richards. But I do have an interest in human psychology, and what I perceive to be fairness and justice. And the aftermath of the local elections and Mayoralty decisions have been very traumatic for ‘people like me’. But in a way which I think is entirely predictable.

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell claim they want to reach out to various members of the ‘broad church’ – but like all playgrounds, this approach will run into difficulty if certain infants simply don’t want to play. Corbyn and McDonnell give the impression of only being interested in their own, and this ironically is a departure from the criticism of the Blair years where Labour is considered to have ignored ‘its core vote’.

Corbyn and McDonnell are not running a 35% strategy. It is claimed by Lord Steve Wood that despite the popularisation of this selective marketing of the Ed Miliband pitch offer this was actually a figment of the imagination of certain personnel in the media. One cannot possibly imagine who Wood means, but if the names John Rentoul or Dan Hodges actually come up, so be it.

Corbyn is perfectly happy with this ‘comfort base’. The element of ‘Corbyn’s way or the high way’ is prone to over-interpretation, such as the issue of whether Andy Burnham’s success party on winning of the Manchester mayoralty avoided turning into yet another Corbyn mass movement rally.

In terms of human psychology, people who support Jeremy Corbyn are incredibly passionate about him. They claim to be equally interested in his politics and ‘pledges’, and to be fair people who criticise Corbyn tend to do so on personal terms rather than detailing objections on policy terms. But arguably their style of behaviour on Twitter tends to wind others up – a ‘force field’ around 20 second gifs of showing Corbyn invincible as he ‘meets the voters’, or some meme blaming some fiasco in Corbyn’s outreach on ‘fake news’ or misrepresentation in the ‘mainstream media’.

But here the Guardian have not played fair either. Jonathan Freedland was the first to pen a nasty article about Corbyn’s failure to reach the numbers required to win a majority in an election – and I dare say there’ll be others. But the fact remains that authors in the Guardian have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at rubbishing Jeremy Corbyn, his colleagues and his supporters, trying to produce a mood of demoralisation which is hard for anyone to battle against.

Instead of focusing on the issues, or producing constructive criticism (for example how technology might be utilised in bringing together the NHS and social care in a Blairite way, or thinking about how the gig economy might work for both you and the State in a Blairite way), the agenda of the Guardian is to assassinate Corbyn politically.

And this has been the mission of Lord Neil Kinnock and Richard Angell (chief honcho of Progress). But I have to say that they were both personally very nice to me on the single occasions they have met me, in a club in Manchester and in a pub near St James’ Park (for a Christmas quiz) respectively.

I ‘get’ their frustration. They see the failure of Corbyn to ‘break through’ with the same frustration as me, but my unfortunate perception of them has been, rightly or wrongly, is that they – like Freedland – want Corbyn to fail. I cannot sign up to this philosophy. It goes much deeper than a misplaced sense of solidarity in the guise of socialism. I think this has been to play politics with people’s hopes, tread on these hopes, and want to see them dead and buried.

When I see John Woodcock MP throw his toys out of the pram, I cannot countenance him wanting to be a Labour MP. To be a MP under the leadership of whoever in Labour is a privilege – that crumpet Wo0dcock is nibbling on his cake and eating it – wanting to act independent but be labelled Labour.

The years of relentless Corbyn attacks have been, in my view, been to drown out any legitimate criticism of him over the years. There is of course an issue about whether the Corbyn inner circle would’ve listened to and acted on feedback – the persons involved are adamant that they act on feedback.

The perception has been of people on the sidelines supposedly well meaning, but flinging mud and contributing to the sour atmosphere – like Owen Jones. These are people who are adamant they are life-long supporters of Labour. A greater difficulty comes with people who have no intention of voting Labour ever who are held up to be great bastions of protecting socialist philosophy.

It is clearly now impossible with 33 days to go for Labour to embark on a third leadership election for leader. The only thing that Labour can do is to try to make sure its policies can break through despite the embargo in the mainstream media who are obsessed with the robotic ‘strong and stable’ meme of Theresa May.

My gut feeling is that Labour is living in cloud cuckoo land if it aspires to the ‘man on the street’ who would like Labour’s policy if only he knew about them from alternative news channels. I think it runs much deeper than that – like a group of people aged 50s from the shires who ultimately have an axe to grind against the Blair years and who were waiting for UKIP come along, but now UKIP have ‘done their job’, their natural inclination is now to vote Tory. This vote for Tory is a vote, they perceive, for competence rather than idealism – but of course the left ‘protest’, even not in an organised rally, is entirely principled to prevent the funding of public services getting further worsened.

I think Lord Stewart Wood is right. I think Tom Baldwin is right.

I think Lord Spencer Livermore is right.

@JudithHaire @UKLabour Lord Spencer Livermore, Labour guru, believes that campaigns are irrelevant. The damage is indeed already done. @TomBaldwin66

— Dr Shibley Rahman ❄️ (@dr_shibley) May 6, 2017

The damage was done a long time ago, for example with 172 Labour MPs refusing to support their leader in public in any meaningful form (with the exceptions of a few, such as Grahame Morris, Debbie Abrahams, Barry Gardiner, Angela Rayner, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Richard Burgon). Voters rarely vote for divided parties – and the Labour Party thanks to the political hand grenade offered from David Cameron in the form of a EU referendum is now deeply divided.

Surprisingly, I therefore think it is too early to write off Jeremy Corbyn. I am not the ‘eternal optimist’ of Voltaire’s Candide. I am not completely deluded about this. Theresa May is clearly petrified of the Conservatives sending out the message the election is already ‘signed, sealed and delivered’ – but the dynamics are hard to predict, and the election result will come down to the exact arithmetic of where people place their votes in the privacy of the ballot boxes.

@dr_shibley

Given todays results, I hope someone, somewhere reappraises the strategy of triangulating our own Brexit posn based on Mays #KamikazeBrexit

— Clive Lewis (@labourlewis) May 5, 2017

So tweeted Clive Lewis MP today.

 

“Kamikaze” is a plausible sounding technique which has one major problem – it has a very low hit rate. Kamikaze (神風) were suicide attacks by military aviators from the Empire of Japan against Allied naval vessels in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II, designed to destroy warships more effectively than was possible with conventional attacks. During World War II, about 3,862 kamikaze pilots died, and about 19% of kamikaze attacks managed to hit a ship. Labour’s Brexit strategy suffers from one big problem – not many people, with the best will in the world, understand it. Like Labour’s previous electoral offering for the 2015 general election under Ed Miliband, it feels a bit too little far too late.

 

A major strategic flaw about Labour’s Brexit reaction is that, as Clive Lewis observes today, it is entirely a reaction to Theresa May’s Brexit strategy, rather than a reaction to the EU referendum itself. There are certain features of the current political situation which are more robust than others, but it appears that many UKIP voters are thinking “job done” as regards getting the Brexit case successfully argued. It is now up to someone – and it doesn’t particularly matter who – to execute the implementation of Brexit competently. This is reminiscent of the New Blair approach to running NHS services – it doesn’t matter who runs them, e.g. Virgin, NHS or Serco, as long as they’re run as well as possible. The issue then is that the emotional attachment to Labour doesn’t matter. This is borne out by Tees Valley and West Midlands voting for Tory mayors, despite the ‘past’. The perception of these UKIP turned Tory voters is that Jeremy Corbyn is not the most effective person to be on the other end of the negotiating table, whatever the negotiating strategy is.

 

Given that the central argument of Richard Angell in Progress, and that of some others, is that it is Jeremy Corbyn who is the central liability in Labour – for whatever reason, whether the inclination of his bow, his tie knot, his talk style, his past positions on foreign affairs, Jeremy Corbyn is part of Labour’s Brexit problem allegedly. So if you assume that Brexit is the forthcoming big issue, and you have a strong (even if irrational) dislike of Corbyn, the most logical conclusion would be for Corbyn to outsource this negotiating rôle to someone else who is well loved by the general public. But this is genuinely focus group stuff – more at home in the pages of the ‘Unfinished revolution’ by Blair guru Philip Gould. Who is the person within the current Labour parliamentary party who is best placed to represent the UK’s interests in Brexit?

 

It is no accident that Theresa May has whipped up emotions against Jean-Claude Juncker, as this plays very well on the front cover of the Daily Mail. Some time ago, Anna Soubry MP, a person with whom I don’t have much ideologically in agreement, suggested that the anti-EU rhetoric would get far stronger at around the time of the triggering of Article 50, citing that the ‘divorce bill’, now estimated at 100 Billion Euro, would become the centrsal figurehead for this hatred. So, it can be argued that, given Jeremy Corbyn is fully signed up to Brexit, he would be willing to pay the EU any pay cheque because he is a ‘soft touch’. Here, there is clearly a divergence between the position of hardline Conservative-UKIP voters and that of people who want the most pleasant relationship with the EU after the Brexit process – the latter group would happily leave the amount of the divorce bill up to an external court. The reason that this does not curry favour with hardline Conservative-UKIP voters is that this is not ‘taking back control’.

 

In the past few weeks, once touted as the future Prince across the water, Sir Keir Starmer is not the solution to all of Labour’s problems. He is responsible for producing an overly technocratic, though albeit perfectly logical, position on Brexit so that Labour can face ‘both directions’ at once. Today has revealed a nonsense that the Conservatives are pretending that they are not becoming too complacent whereas the main opposition parties, including the Liberal Democrats with their withering vote, are still ‘in the game’. The one decision of the EU referendum was settled, for better or for worse, on June 23^rd 2016 – that we will leave the EU. But the triangulation has no solution. It is unlikely that there will be a second referendum, even though some people may have changed their mind. And the second, more crucial, bit of the referendum was never asked – “Should we leave even if the alternative is worse?”. The answer, of course, for many Brexiteers will be ‘yes’ still.

 

All of this points at the other robust factoids about the Kamikaze Brexit.

 

One factoid is: the British voters have not actually been offered much meaningful choice about the style of Brexit. You can either vote for the Conservatives, with their ‘hard brexit’, leaving the membership of the single market, or Labour who appear to be ‘waiting and seeing’ having rubber stamped Article 50 through parliament. Or you can vote Liberal Democrat, Greens or UKIP, who are unlikely to have much negotiating power in the unlikely event of a coalition. Or, if in Scotland, you can vote SNP, but if the Conservatives become the largest power, this Scottish vote is in fact worthless. There is of course the huge disclaimer that local elections are different from the general election – there are more protest votes with a much lower turnout – but it looks unlikely that Jeremy Corbyn’s approach to Brexit is THE winning formula.

 

The second factoid goes back to the triangulation with the ‘May position’, so to speak. We know that left wing voters, despite their opinions of Jeremy Corbyn, find May entirely unpredictable rather than “strong and stable”. Theresa May saying “strong and stable” five million times doesn’t make it true. As one Tweep put it, Theresa May is not actually ‘the iron lady Mk. 2’ after all – more like a robotic Metal Mickey, or as John McDonnell referred to the situation today, a ‘dalek’. Triangulating to the May position takes no account of the changing dynamics in the European Union – for example, if the new French president is able to be more successful in reforming the EU than David Cameron ever was.

 

So a more logical position would be for a strong negotiator of Labour to deal with the Brexit situation as it evolved, but this would be to go against the approach of Brexit at any cost. But given the mood music from Juncker and Tusk (and Merkel), it is unlikely that the 28 EU states are thinking very much about the size of Theresa May’s mandate. So all this fundamentally goes to the root of the problem – whether other voters are logical and reasonable, or simply irrational or bigoted? Let’s assume that Jeremy Corbyn’s domestic policies are unobjectionable (a big IF) – the solution for Labour to resurrect lost voters would be to say the policies are there to stay even if Corbyn isn’t for the full three terms (he would be approaching 80 if Corbyn started three terms). And Labour would have to stop standing in the middle of the road where it is bound to get run over as Nye Bevan warned. That is, it makes a stance – that of a party which believes that immigration is necessary to meet the social and economic needs of the country, and that the UK is better off being signed up to the single market, but our position as a unified UK can only dealt with with any certain as the political and economic situation of the EU evolves. This might be totally incomprehensible – but so is the current position of Labour on Brexit.

 

It is however clear that Labour can still produce ‘hits’. Look at Steve Rotheram in Liverpool or Andy Burnham in Manchester. The immediate drastic solutions to the kamikaze Brexit would be to find a ‘bloody difficult’ negotiator on behalf of Labour, but who unlike ‘that bloody woman’ will want to negotiate some of the advantages of inclusion within the European Union. But the current public perception of both the Labour and Conservative Parties wanting the same outcome on Brexit, but with the Conservatives with the better negotiator, is untenable. Also, one needs to factor in that the mainstream press will not allow ‘other issues’ to take central stage, like the NHS, social care or schools, even if the infrastructure of the UK goes to hell and a handcart on June 9^th. And clearly – for such a big decision – the UK does need more time. It needs to ask the EU for an extended negotiating period to get the negotiations right.

 

And Labour needs to get personal with Theresa May, having made the entire debate so personal.

 

Can British voters entirely trust ‘strong and stable’ Theresa May to get back control of immigration figures, when she objectively failed as the Secretary of State for the Home Office?Can Labour extract out of May any ways for us to measure her performance on this? In other words, how can we hold Theresa May to account for her special ‘May Brexit’?

 

It’s a pity that Sir Keir Starmer spent so long working on something which has failed to address Labour’s central weaknesses on Brexit, but, given that Labour has now voted for political suicide (Clive Lewis MP was also against the triggering of the premature end of the ‘fixed term’ without invoking a vote of no confidence), Labour now has to produce some sort of eye-catching stunt on Brexit to allay voters’ fears. Or else it could be game, set and match – finished for Labour, with more loss than three hundred council seats.

 

We know that, if Labour had a free choice, it wouldn’t start from here – that is Lord Mandelson working ‘every day’ to undermine Labour (in his own words), or members of the parliamentary Labour Party continuing to rubbish Jeremy Corbyn – but it is too late to complete a third leadership election within the space of six weeks. Jeremy Corbyn needs to do something drastic and fast on Brexit, and also pin his nails to the Union flag, if he has any hope of standing up to the Tories or the SNP.

 

To this extent, the ‘moderates’ are right – there is little point in having principles without power? It is said that Kamikaze pilots who were unable to complete their mission (due to mechanical failure, interception, etc.) were stigmatised in the years. It is possible McDonnell and Corbyn are unable to ‘complete their mission’, but they would be the first to agree that if the current strategy is not working it is perhaps time for a re-think.

 

 

@dr_shibley

As a card-carrying socialist, I am having the time of my life.

You see – people like me have waited a very long time to see a socialist case being presented nationally at the ballot box. If Jeremy Corbyn MP is not your cuppa as the twice democratically elected leader of the Labour Party, I hope that you’re able to use your vote wisely.

 

On the night of the results presented by David Dimbleby, I would much rather a Conservative seat fall to the LibDems or Greens, than not at all. I feel the loathing of Tim Farron MP tapping me on my shoulder, but I have nothing against Tim or his party. Indeed, I follow Tim (@timfarron) on Twitter, and he follows me.  I think it’s true that many people will be going into this election feeling that the LibDem is fundamentally a good partner who’s had a period of ‘cheating on you’ – whether that was in welfare benefits cuts (introduced the outsourcing of benefits assessment in the first place), turboboosting privatisation through the Health and Social Care Act (2012) (rampant in the latter years of Tony Blair’s government, when Blair coincidentally was aiming to be President of the EU and competition law was a central plank of the free movement policy), or tuition fees (Labour are not innocent here either).

If you strongly believe in membership of the European Union, and you feel ‘left of centre’, then it’s not a bad thing if the Liberal Democrats can act as a brake for a Conservative administration anyway. I feel that this would be an ideal outcome for Tim Farron MP. Do it if you have no problems with Tim Farron MP becoming the new Nick Clegg, or the new Deputy Prime Minister. For all the bravura of the LibDems in parliament, causing the ‘strong opposition’ which Theresa May claimed caused her to trigger this snap election in the first place, unbelievably all 9 MPs have voted three ways on the EU.

 

 

And parliament has not in any way (nor the House of Lords) “obstructed” the progress of triggering of Art. 50, as claimed by Brexit dinosaurs such as Lord Michael Howard. In fact, many pro European Union voters, whether in the Labour Party or otherwise, feel that the opposition to triggering Article 50, knowing that Brexit is likely to be a cataclysmic disaster, could and should have been much stronger.

As a purely technocratic exercise —— I can understand why, with his constituency seats evenly divided between ‘remain’ and ‘Brexit’, why Jeremy Corbyn MP has led his party not to oppose Brexit. I can see why Jeremy Corbyn can see ‘positives’ to Brexit: i.e. it gives license to protection of important rights in law, such as in environment or employment, which otherwise get ‘grandfathered’ in a corrupted, Tory, way; it allows state aid to ailing and flailing industries not as easily possible as under EU membership (such as the steel industry). But that’s not to say that Brexit comes with it colossal problems – such as severely hampering skills mixes for certain sectors (not just Starbucks Baristas, as the stereotype goes, but for people in the NHS and social care), import inflation, lack of influence in EU policy, problems in not being in the single market (and under Theresa May voluntarily not being in the customs union). But it’s been Theresa May’s call on this – so the buck should stop there.

 

The timing of this election took everyone by surprise, not least the Cabinet who mostly heard of the idea for the first time after the Easter break. The news has gone down so well that Theresa May’s junior experts in comms have resigned. The prospect that the prices will outstrip wages, a phenomenon already known about by ‘hardworking’ nurses in the public sector, this year is already going down like a bucket of cold sick. So the election campaign already has the grubby fingerprints of Sir Lynton Crosby on it. And ironically, the ‘secret weapon’ in this war against Corbyn, proclaimed so emphatically by Lord Peter Mandelson who boasted how he was working daily to oust Corbyn, has gone kaphhhhhttt. That is, the sneering of the 172 Labour MPs. Crosby has clearly directed that attacks on Corbyn should not be too strong, as otherwise the perception is of victimisation, bullying and a hate crime.  As it happens, when I ask certain people why they dislike Corbyn so much, the answers are split down the middle in ‘He’s incompetent’ and ‘Others think he’s crap’ – the universal, consistent lack of reasoning why they dislike Corbyn, with the odd reference to his shirt or tie, unfortunately leads me to think this is at best snobbery at worst blatant age discrimination.

 

So when Theresa May trotted out the back story of 3 Labour MPs who had made disparaging remarks about Jeremy Corbyn, the impression of those in the Lobby was not ‘wahey!’, but a feeling that this particular attack from May and Corbyn was nasty and vindictive. In other words, May and Crosby had overplayed their hand. And when Jeremy Corbyn gave a strongly anti-Establishment speech in Church House shortly afterwards, Corbyn singled out ‘cartel’ (he meant ‘collusive’ strictly speaking) behaviour between powerful individuals, multinationals and the media, not giving him a fair hearing. And there is indeed ample evidence for this. So, it was very early on in the campaign that the mainstream media knew full well that they had blood on their hands. No sooner than Newnight had run a party political broadcast on behalf of the Mr Theresa May party was Twitter awash with the alleged financial activities of the firm which extravagantly wealthy Mr Theresa May has worked in and their tax affairs.

The line that if you do not support Theresa May’s version of Brexit, which is the most hard core version of Brexit you could have dreamt up, you’re somehow unpatriotic is a very unpleasant line for May and Crosby to sustain. This of course plugs a sentiment into the personal vilification of Corbyn, at best unable to nod correctly for the National Anthem or kneel and kiss properly for his induction for the Privy Council, at worst runs the meme that Corbyn’s ‘best friends are terrorists’, of being deeply unpatriotic. Of someone who HATES Britain. Of  course we have been down this route with the horrific attacks on Ed Miliband’s late father, Ralph Miliband. And talking of which – Rafael Behr has consistently attacked everything which Corbyn stands for, not laying a finger on the Conservatives, sneering that if Ed Miliband had been unable to make inroads it would be unlikely that Jeremy Corbyn could. This is of course to ignore completely that England is on its knees and is in crisis over NHS, schools and social care. And to remind Mr Behr – was it the case that an ‘effective opposition’, so beloved of him and his colleagues, were ABSTAINING on disability benefit welfare cuts which are the lifeline of disabled citizens? Even if Rachel Reeves didn’t get it or sympathetics in the Guardian, Debbie Abrahams MP certainly ‘gets it’, and is taking this fight at last full on much to the delight of people in the ‘WOW petition’. And John McDonnell MP, who is never reported as having successfully run London’s budget for years, has been instrumental in upholding the rights of people who are disabled – like me, and I know.

 

So we already know that the policy suggestions, e.g. on housing or the living wage, are popular with many people on the Left, not just a select group of Tony Benn supporters or CND hippies who are caught in a 1983 time warp. The 2017 Labour manifesto has not even been published yet, and yet Nick Robinson has already gone on record in making a highly biased prejudicial remark against Corbyn. We know that the policies themselves are popular, if not badged up with the descriptor ‘They’re Corbyn’s’ – but this is the effect that the media and the 172 Labour MPs have had in successfully rubbishing the Labour brand. Alastair Campbell, who is licking his lips at any demise of Corbyn, such that he felt the urge to pretend to be a psychiatrist measuring the affect and cognition of Owen Jones for GQ magazine, and Tony Blair have never been able to state with any clarity what they feel the legacy of New Labour could’ve been or should’ve been – and have openly said that they feel hostile to Ed Miliband and successors for being negative about aspects of Tony Blair’s government such as the highly controversial manner in which we went to war with Iraq, or creeping NHS privatisation through putting PFI on steroids, etc.

 

Whereas in 2015, Crosby was going round telling everyone ‘don’t vote for Ed Miliband as he secretly wants to get into bed with Nicola Sturgeon (politically)’, Crosby can’t quite pull off the same trick in 2017 – as his campaign relies on Corbyn being universally toxic. Even Sturgeon has said that Corbyn has no chance of becoming Prime Minister, which has just made her appear like an arrogant tinpot dictator worthy of Dr Strangelove. Scottish voters of course have the option of voting for SNP in the hope of another Scottish referendum, when quite frankly the economic case is unsustainable and Scotland has more pressing domestic issues of policy – and getting loads of SNP MPs in Westminster acting as barracking but ubiquitously ineffective MPs, or they can overcome their dislike of Kezia Dugdale and vote Labour despite the toxicity of the New Labour brand. The stranglehold of the SNP over Scottish politics is unlikely to last forever, and you can throw any accusation at Jeremy Corbyn – but the notion that ‘Jeremy Corbyn is more of the same’ is quite frankly ridiculous.

 

So – for a number of reasons, the Crosby May plan has already gone badly wrong. A major factor in that has clearly been that the months spent rubbishing Jeremy Corbyn has had the unintended effect of lowering expectations concerning Corbyn that anything he does is frankly quite amazing. And the cumulative effect of those MPs automatically getting reselected to defend Labour’s policy offering, i.e. no ‘trigger votes’, means that bitter people like John Woodcock MP cannot say with heavy heart he is being forced to be a MP under a Corbyn manifesto. My advice to him is – if he doesn’t like it, don’t do it. Nobody will allow Woodcock to behave to all intents and purposes like a spoilt brat ‘independent’. Woodcock is currently standing on the cliff edge, like several of his colleagues, of warranting disciplinary proceedings if they cannot be loyal to the Labour Party?

 

My viewpoint is that, even if you hate Corbyn, the next few weeks will be fun. He is coming at this as the ‘underdog’ – but an underdog with loads of experience, who would ‘wipe the floor’ with Theresa May in any TV hustings. May’s team might be able to force people to say ‘no comment’ to the media at her public events, but May is giving every appearance now of cutting and running. She looks and sounds wooden, and her record in being able to keep immigration levels down and not being able to resist a ‘snap election’ speak for themselves. This is May’s election to lose.  The only direction for this colossal poll lead, as everyone knows, is down.

 

 

“Strong leadership”? My arse.

Theresa May would like you to think her lying to you multiple times is ‘strong leadership’. Don’t be so gullible. pic.twitter.com/qCBZhGYG5Y

— Dr Shibley Rahman ❄️ (@dr_shibley) April 22, 2017

And while everyone has tried to make the Corbyn brand so toxic they have blatantly reared a generation of ‘shy Corbynistas’ who do not want to reach at the sight of May’s repackaged Thatcherite offering on May 8^th 2017.

 

Wretch maybe.

 

@dr_shibley