The ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn just won another election
Despite allegations of being ‘unelectable’, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party achieved another election victory overnight – adding to a string of positive results in the last year.
On 18 August, Labour held onto the Tooting Wandsworth contituency, increasing its share of the vote by more than 13%. Considering this vote took place at a time when the Parliamentary Labour Party has launched a coup against its leader, this is a shocking result.
Tooting (Wandsworth) result:
LAB: 58.5% (+13.7)
CON: 25.7% (-2.7)
LDEM: 10.6% (+4.2)
GRN: 4.6% (-6.5)
SDP: 0.6% (+0.6)— Britain Elects (@britainelects) August 18, 2016
Since Corbyn became leader, Labour has performed well in every election it has faced. As he stated in the speech that launched his leadership campaign in July:
Read on...
Labour is stronger. We’ve won every parliamentary by-election we’ve faced, three of them with very significantly increased majorities. We overtook the Tories in the May elections, and we won all four mayoral contests. In Liverpool and Salford, in London (for the first time since 2004), and Bristol for the first time ever.
Despite all claims to the contrary, the evidence to hand supports the view that Labour is a powerful political force with its current leader in place. It is certainly delivering vastly improved results on the general, local and mayoral election defeats suffered under Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband – which included losing all but one of the party’s 41 seats in Scotland overnight in 2015.
Yet the two men behind this obliteration in Scotland, Jim Murphy and John McTernan, are now being wheeled out to heap criticism on Jeremy Corbyn. While such characters are hailed as political experts and Labour loyalists in much of the mainstream media, you’ll rarely, if ever, find a pundit asking them the question:
What qualifies you to pass judgement on a Labour leader who has, objectively, achieved more in a year than you have in the last eight?
Instead, McTernan and Murphy are allowed to preach down to the Labour party membership, the public, the Labour MPs and Constituency Labour Parties that support Corbyn, Momentum, and even Jeremy Corbyn himself – as if they were some sort of election-winning dream team. When in fact, the Blairite wing of the party can’t claim a significant political victory since 2005 – over 11 years ago.
If Corbyn’s team are going to be taking lessons from anybody, it’s definitely not these guys.
Featured image via Twitter
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