{"id":2656,"date":"2017-06-09T13:29:44","date_gmt":"2017-06-09T11:29:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=2656"},"modified":"2017-06-09T15:13:08","modified_gmt":"2017-06-09T13:13:08","slug":"here-are-the-facts-proving-corbyns-triumph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2017-06-09\/here-are-the-facts-proving-corbyns-triumph\/","title":{"rendered":"The facts proving Corbyn’s election triumph"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watching the BBC’s coverage of the election, you could be excused for taking away two main impressions of last night’s results. First, that Theresa May had a terrible, self-sabotaging campaign; and second that, while Jeremy Corbyn may be\u00a0celebrating, he decisively lost the election.<\/p>\n

Those are the conclusions we would expect a pundit class to draw that has spent two years slandering Corbyn, calling him\u00a0“unelectable”, warning that he\u00a0appealed to little more than a niche group of radical leftists, and claiming that Labour was about to face the worst electoral defeat\u00a0in living memory \u2013 if not\u00a0ever. Corbyn’s social justice message was supposedly alienating the heartlands of the UK.<\/p>\n

So let’s stand back, look at the voting figures and see how a Corbyn-led Labour party actually did.<\/p>\n

Corbyn received 41 per cent of the vote, against May’s 44 per cent. Given the UK’s inherently flawed, first-past-the-post electoral system, he won some 50 fewer\u00a0seats than\u00a0the Conservatives, but that was still a big improvement on Labour’s share\u00a0of seats in the last election, under Ed Miliband. There is now a hung parliament, and to survive May will need to depend on the MPs\u00a0of a small group of Northern Irish extremist Loyalists, creating a deeply unstable government.<\/p>\n

But how did Corbyn do in terms of the Labour vote compared to his recent predecessors? He won\u00a0many more votes than Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock, who were\u00a0among those that, sometimes noisily,\u00a0opposed his leadership of the party.<\/p>\n

They lost their elections. But what about Corbyn’s share of the vote compared to Tony Blair, his most high-profile critic, whose many allies in the parliamentary Labour party sought\u00a0relentlessly to subvert Corbyn’s leadership over the past\u00a0two years and tried\u00a0to bring him down, including by staging a leadership challenge last year?<\/p>\n

Here are the figures for Blair’s three wins. He got a 36 per cent share of the vote in 2005 \u2013 much less than Corbyn. He received a 41 per cent of the vote – about the same as Corbyn \u2013 in 2001. And Blair’s\u00a0landslide victory in 1997 was secured on 43 per cent of the vote, just two percentage points ahead of Corbyn last night.<\/p>\n

In short, Corbyn has proved himself the most popular Labour leader with the electorate in more than 40 years, apart from Blair’s landslide victory in 1997. But\u00a0let’s recall\u00a0the price Blair\u00a0paid for that very small margin of improvement over Corbyn’s vote. Behind the scenes, he\u00a0sold Labour’s\u00a0soul to the City, the corporations and their lobbyists. That Faustian pact secured Blair the backing of most of the media, including Rupert Murdoch’s stable of papers and TV channel. The corporations mobilised their entire propaganda machine to get Blair into power. And yet\u00a0he managed it with only 2 percentage points more than Corbyn, who had that same propaganda machine railing\u00a0against him.<\/p>\n

Also, unlike Corbyn, Blair did not have to endure a large section of his own party trying to destroy him from within.<\/p>\n

That is the true mark of Corbyn’s achievement.<\/p>\n

Another point. Blair’s 1997 landslide was the peak of his success. As Labour members realised what he had done to achieve victory, support ebbed away relentlessly until he was forced to step down\u00a0and hand over a profoundly damaged party\u00a0to Gordon Brown.<\/p>\n

With Corbyn, the election campaign proved\u00a0that there is\u00a0a huge appetite for his honesty, his passion, his commitment to social justice – at least when audiences\u00a0got a chance to hear from him directly, rather than having his policies and personality mediated and distorted by a biased and self-serving corporate media. Unlike Blair, who destroyed Labour to turn it into a Thatcher-lite party, Corbyn is rebuilding Labour\u00a0into a social movement for progressive politics.<\/p>\n

Here is a\u00a0graph that offers another measure of the extent of Corbyn’s achievement last night.<\/p>\n\"\"<\/a>\n

It shows that he has just won the largest increase in the share of the Labour vote over the party’s previous general election performance since Clement Attlee in 1945. In short, he’s turned around the electoral fortunes of the Labour party more than any other party leader in 70 years.<\/p>\n

And unlike Blair, he’s done it without making back-room deals with big business to eviscerate his party’s economic and social programmes.<\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/h3>\n

A reader has made an excellent additional point. Blair was able to rely on a strong Scottish vote for Labour that no longer existed by the time Corbyn became leader. Most of that vote now goes\u00a0to the Scottish National Party (SNP) over the issue of independence for Scotland. If one factors that in too, one can see quite how much more popular\u00a0Corbyn is with voters than\u00a0decades of\u00a0his triangulating, neoliberal-friendly predecessors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching the BBC’s coverage of the election, you could be excused for taking away two main impressions of last night’s results. First, that Theresa May had a terrible, self-sabotaging campaign; and second that, while Jeremy Corbyn may be\u00a0celebrating, he decisively lost the election. Those are the conclusions we would expect a pundit class to draw […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[59],"class_list":{"0":"post-2656","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-jeremy-corbyn"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}