Originally Posted by
KerrAvon
I'm not sure that either you or animal have spotted the real problem for Labour.
I don't go to the ball ache of referring to Corbyn as The Great Leader without cause; I do it to caricature the position of most Labour supporting posters on here and at my mission on Tyke's Mad. At the risk of sounding like Zilzal, I have mentioned before that Labour has been reduced to a personality cult, where paying tribute to Great leader seems to have become more important than policy. That people chant his name in grime clubs, that the Labour Party has the largest membership of any party on Europe or that he is 'cool' are meaningless given that none of those things will win elections.
You can get away with having an element of personality cult in politics if you have an engaging personality that is attractive to a large swathe of the electorate. Whether you like their politics or not, Blair and Farage pulled it off. May didn't with the ridiculous 'strong and stable’ campaign last year, and Corbyn doesn't beyond a group of people for whom he appears to have achieved the status of a minor deity.
In other words, Labour has been reduced to the Corbyn brand. Unfortunately for the party, it's a brand on a par with Marmite, where, I suspect, the people who really don't like him outnumber those who act like they want his love child.
A large part of the electorate would not vote for a Corbyn if he were the only candidate on the ballot paper (a historically popular electoral strategy in Socialist states). His historic support for Irish terror groups is hugely damaging with the generation that recall the endless bombing campaigns for the 70s and 80s. His at best ambiguous and ineffectual position on anti-Semitism within Labour calls into question his ability to actually tackle issues rather than mouth platitudes about them. And irrespective of whether you agree with the UK’s response to them, his desire to once again mouth platitudes whilst kicking issues such as chemical attacks in Salisbury and Syria into the ineffectual long grass at the UN suggest that he is someone whose views on foreign policy are determined by whether the country accused of wrong doing is pro-West or not.
A cult based upon the Somewhat Tarnished Leader was always limited by his real lack of appeal to many voters and his lack of any attempt to engage with anyone beyond his core support. I’m a floating voter, but he has never sought to engage with me.
I don’t think you can under estimate the risk posed to Labour by a resurgent Lib Dem party either; their support seems to be getting over the coalition with the Tories and I suspect that it will be seen as an attractive home for the votes of people with Left leaning views who can’t bring themselves to vote for the current Labour set up.