(09 May 2021, 1:39 am)mb134 wrote In terms of capturing the youth, Corbyn was fine. In terms of capturing the general population, many of whom read the Daily Heil and the Scum on a regular basis, he was never going to have the platform to win. I don't believe the general public would vote for a very left wing set of policies straight from a hard right Tory regime, I think that would only work if you had a more centre-left government in place first (i.e I think it could have worked straight after Brown, if the financial crash hadn't happened, but it's a field day for the right-wing press when under a Tory government).
I'm not blaming them, simply stating that they need to have perspective. The Corbyn experiment, which may I add I supported for a few years, is over and the party needed to unite and move forward. On the 2005 point, the party had been in power for 7 years and had taken us to a war which many opposed - vote share was bound to drop. Ditto 2010 and the financial crash (not Labour's fault as we know, but the press will be the press).
The party as a whole need to figure out what they are, and actually convey that to the general public. This Tory government are a bunch of charlatans, I'd take Thatcher in a heartbeat over this lot, and I find it astounding that there's no clear strategy to combat it - just jumping from one thing to the next without any real structure which makes sense to anyone who doesn't religiously follow politics.
I don't think Corbyn's policies were 'very left wing' by any stretch of the imagination, but it'd be a reasonable statement to make that he/his own politics were seen as very left wing to the electorate - and of course it was too easy for the media to smear him as a person.
I don't disagree that the Party needs to figure out what they are and what message they're sending to the electorate, but they need to start doing that quickly. In my opinion, Starmer has had a disastrous first year as a leader. His leadership has spent more time attacking hard-working party activists than it has being an effective opposition in Government. His position is untenable now. There's a lot of caution about now not being the time to change leader, but when do you do it? There's a general election in 3 years.