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by viivaux 2588 days ago
Are you talking about Corbyn? The guy with broad support despite an unremitting smear campaign from every single corner of the media from The Grauniad to the Beeb, never mind the tabloids? The guy who has been astonishingly effective standing up to the Maybots and revitalised Labour?

I'm very curious what poll you're referring to there that has him after "don't know".

3 comments

YouGov survey for the Times: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/polling-shows-voters...

I used to like him. I wish he was all that you call him.

An online poll. Huh.

What did I 'call him' that you disagree with?

That he has “broad support“, that he has “been astonishingly effective”, and that he has “revitalised Labour”. I wish all those things were true.

Unrelated: while YouGov is indeed online, it chooses which people to send the surveys to and has long-term profiles on each of them, so unlike a silly Twitter poll it has decent statistical relevance and the biases seem to be persistent, well quantified, and generally accounted for — you shouldn’t dismiss it just because you don’t like what it’s saying.

Getting tankies to crawl out of the woodwork isn't quite the same as revitalizing a democratic socialist party. You can get a certain number of people immediately on your side in left politics just by saying something to the left of all previous electoral candidates for high office -- see, Bernie Sanders in the United States.

Now, I support Sanders and quite like Corbyn minus the Brexit and the antisemitism issues, but they both face a similar challenge: their core support bases aren't actually ideologically coherent, let alone aligned entirely behind the candidates' programs. Lots of leftists basically treat Sanders or Corbyn as beloved old conservative uncles, while insisting that nobody with Sanders' or Corbyn's actual (social democratic to democratic socialist) politics should encouraged within Left politics.

He could stop Brexit but won't, which makes him at least as evil as May in my book.
Could he, though? In most of the surveys I’ve seen, all options are only supported by a minority, including stopping it. Only a few surveys report that any particular outcome has >50% support, and most of those only just.