This video says about itself:
UK Election: Big Setback for British PM – Big Gains for Corbyn
8 June 2017
After an extraordinary campaign, Britain’s ruling Conservative Party limps to victory. Jeremy Corbyn‘s Labour Party makes unexpected gains.
Theresa May did not even ‘limp to victory’. This is a defeat. She should quit right now. The only theoretical chance she has of forming a wafer-thin coalition is with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party, founded by the late ‘Reverend’ Ian Paisley. The DUP are hardly democrats, in spite of their name. They are sectarian Protestants with links to paramilitary killers. Probably, not all Conservative MPs would agree with that coalition; so, there would not be any majority.
This video from Britain says about itself:
This video from Britain says about itself:
“Brits voted for hope” – Corbyn after winning seat
8 June 2017
After Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn held his Islington seat, he spoke of Brits voting for hope rather than austerity.
THIS year’s general election has been historic in marking both the rebirth of Labour as a radical voice for working people and farewell to a cross-party parliamentary neoliberal consensus. Jeremy Corbyn’s ability to stand up to an unremitting tidal wave of dog’s abuse from the entirety of the electronic and written media — with the sole consistent exception of the Morning Star — belies his detractors’ attempts to portray him as weak: here.
Labour’s Owen Smith: ‘I was wrong about Jeremy Corbyn‘. Labour MP Owen Smith has congratulated his former leadership opponent Jeremy Corbyn on an “excellent performance” at the general election: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
she can’t quite either
and can’t not quit
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YAY!
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Thursday 8th June 2017
posted by Conrad Landin in Britain
Pundits were wrong, the Labour right was wrong. The left does have a popular alternative. Now fight for it!
SENIOR Labour figures warned there must be “no turning back” on the party’s transformation under Jeremy Corbyn as polls closed last night.
Huge disparities between opinion polls in the final 24 hours had prompted a feeling among activists of all parties that voter turnout and the election day ground game would be more important than ever.
Several Labour MPs continued to criticise and distance themselves from Mr Corbyn during the campaign.
Sedgefield candidate Phil Wilson and Enfield North candidate Joan Ryan used their election addresses to snipe at the Labour leader — while Barrow and Furness candidate John Woodcock said he “will not countenance ever voting to make Jeremy Corbyn Britain’s prime minister.”
But prominent parliamentary backers and union leaders have warned that the party’s leftward shift cannot be undone.
Labour shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett told the Star: “These have been electrifying moments in the most remarkable election of my lifetime.
“Jeremy Corbyn, his message and the Labour manifesto have offered a sharp contrast to the dead hand of Mrs May.
“Millions of people across Britain have responded to our campaign and revitalised our politics. We must not lose the dynamic and energy unleashed in the last few weeks.”
With Labour’s manifesto incorporating more trade union policies than in a generation — including beefed-up workers’ rights, the repeal of anti-union laws and mass investment in industry — reps were pounding the streets last night in the hope of a Corbyn victory.
Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union leader Ronnie Draper said: “There’s definitely no turning back. What Corbyn has done has changed Labour, and changed it for good.
“Even if Theresa May gets in, she’s going to fall on her arse. We know the stuff she’s saying is going to be lies.
“Whereas Labour’s manifesto is not just as a gimmick — it’s a real lust for change in the country and the party.”
Labour’s campaign was also boosted by a surge in support among young voters, and new mobilising tools developed by left faction Momentum, such as a website to direct activists to their nearest marginal constituency.
Momentum chairman Jon Lansman said: “The mood among younger voters is enormously encouraging in the long term — the future is with us.
“Politics is shifting. The manifesto won outstanding popular support way beyond the left. Our members have shown their value in the way they’ve been mobilised in this election.
“Over the past two years Labour has built a movement to transform Britain, and it is vital that is maintained as we move forward.”
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-4688-THERE-IS-NO-TURNING-BACK#.WTqtE9ykIdU
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Friday 9th June 2017
posted by Morning Star in Features
PETER FROST salutes the first-ever socialist, working-class, black woman MP
WRITING a column for today’s Morning Star presents some real timing difficulties. By now you will know who won the election, but when I sat down to write this the polls hadn’t even closed.
I’m not going to write about who won but who — or rather what was lost. What was trampled into the dust in this election and more than in any election I can remember was honesty, decency, truth and respect.
What did triumph in this election was bullying, lying, deceit and most of all total Tory media bias.
Nothing has demonstrated that better than the outrageous personal hounding and persecution of Diane Abbott.
I’ll look at just one example, although there are dozens to pick from. Theresa May was so desperate on TV, she claimed that Diane Abbott wants to wipe the records of criminals and terrorists from the DNA database. It was an outright lie.
Diane has never advocated the removal of DNA records of criminals and terrorists, only those of innocent people.
Tories routinely lie, we know, but May lied on national television about an opposition candidate. That is a criminal offence under the 1918 Representation of the People Act. May can and must be brought to justice.
I’m not going to speculate about Diane’s health and her political future. The gutter press will be doing enough of that, no doubt digging through the dustbins and medical files both metaphorical and real.
Even as I write and research this article, I see the BBC and other TV channels are joining the newspapers in gleefully putting the boot in.
If the official media attacks were not enough then take a look at social media.
I refuse to reprint any of the numerous obscene, racist and sexist personal attacks that this woman has had to endure. Just a quick peek made it clear that these could have come direct from the great wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
So who is this woman the media and her Tory opponents have tried to destroy and come dangerously near to succeeding?
Amazingly, Diane Abbott first became an MP in 1987. That is no less than 30 years of political service. Rabid media attacks started very early in her political career.
For the 1987 election The Sun listed her as one of the 10 looniest Labour candidates in Britain. “We were all there,” she recalls. “Jeremy Corbyn, the rest of us, and I was number eight.”
Despite the best efforts of the Tory tabloids, she did become the first black woman ever to win a seat in the House of Commons. Sadly, some of the most deeply racist sections of our nation can never forgive her for that single act.
She came from a working-class Jamaican background. Born in Notting Hill, then a far less posh place than it is today, her dad was a welder, her mum a nurse, one of the wave of postwar West Indian immigrants who were the backbone of our National Health Service.
When she was five, her home was surrounded by one of the most shameful events in Britain’s political history — the Notting Hill race riots.
Her parents eventually moved and Diane won a place at Harrow County School for Girls, where she was the only black girl in her class. She still remembers a racist teacher asking where she had copied an essay from.
The story that she acted in the school play with Michael Portillo, who attended the affiliated boys’ grammar school is true. But the media couldn’t resist making the play Romeo and Juliet. It wasn’t.
Then it was to Cambridge to read history. A black woman at Cambridge was rare indeed. It still is — even in 2015, the most recent year for which figures are available, Cambridge accepted less than two dozen black female students.
From Cambridge, in 1976, she went to the Home Office. She was race relations officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties from 1978 to 1980 and a TV researcher and reporter from 1978 to 1985.
Even the Tory media have sometimes had something good to say about her. In 2008, her speech on civil liberties in the counter-terrorism debate won the Spectator’s Parliamentary Speech of the Year. In 2011, the Telegraph called her “one of Labours best frontbench performers.”
My wife Ann and I were lucky enough to work with Diane Abbott in the 2012 Corby by-election. Diane travelled up from London most days to help Labour’s Andy Sawford win with 48 per cent of the vote.
Diane and Ann hit it off and made a powerful canvassing team. We enjoyed her company and down to earth attitudes and humour.
The two of them shared a love of stylish and distinctive shoes. Diane tweeted a picture of Ann’s latest pair with a note saying she had enjoyed working with her but she might have to kill her for her shoes!. Who knows what today’s media might have made of that.
Over the last 50 days of this election campaign, I watched as the gloves came off and Diane was harassed, abused, mocked and insulted.
Sadly it seems, these Machiavellian actions had exactly the effect they had been planned to.
On the eve of Polling Day she tweeted: “Touched by all the messages of support. Still standing! Will rejoin the fray soon. Vote Labour!”
That day she is back in the fray can’t come soon enough for me and thousands of Labour supporters.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-12bb-Trailblazer-Diane-Abbott-stands-tall#.WTqup9ykIdU
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Friday 29th September 2017
The ‘pathologists’ investigating why the Tory campaign went so disastrously wrong have uncovered a key weakness at the party’s grassroots, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
There are as many autopsies into Theresa May’s disastrous election campaign as there are autopsy-based crime shows available to a determined TV channel-hopper.
There is an official review by Eric Pickles. Tory chief executive Mick Davis is doing his own review. Lord Ashcroft’s “grassroots” Tory website, ConservativeHome did a huge three-part “audit” of the vote-losing campaign. Tim Ross and Tom
McTague’s why-it-went-wrong book Betting the House is being excerpted and reviewed in the papers. It’s like we have a CSI Westminster, a Tory Waking the Dead and, given the age profile of the Tory membership, a double episode by 1970s autopsy show Quincy all prodding the corpse of May’s campaign, trying to understand who killed it.
The pathologists investigating the Strange Death of Theresa May’s Election Campaign agree that some of the common wisdom of politicians and pundits during the election was wrong.
During the election commentators almost uniformly said Jeremy Corbyn rallies were “preaching to the converted” — feel-good for supporters. No good for reaching broader voters. It didn’t matter if Corbyn’s rallies were huge, or in areas where there hadn’t been a big political meeting for decades. The political class agreed they didn’t build the vote.
It turns out they made May jealous. From Betting the House we learn that as the election went on TV pictures of Corbyn addressing big crowds “rattled” Team May so much they wanted the party to organise a rally for the PM but “the idea was dropped after it was realised she would be unlikely to draw the same crowds and would look pathetic by comparison.”
The forensic examiners peering into the entrails of May’s campaign also found grassroots groups like Momentum, far from being the poison denounced by Tory MPs, are a good thing.
Tory MPs said Momentum was “just hateful,” wielding “heavy weapons” of abuse in its “class war” madness. But during the election, according to the ConservativeHome investigation, “a senior parliamentarian” made “an unflattering comparison with the enthusiasm of the Corbynite grassroots,” saying: “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that creating an actual mass movement in which people have some control has a potential benefit.”
By contrast the Conservative Party is “almost a structure set up to discourage participation. It’s not something you can love anymore — it’s something you fear because it’s a totalitarian state.”
Tory pathologists have one possible answer to the near-lethal lack of a grassroots base. According to the Sunday Times, they intend to buy one.
It reported that, following his review into the campaign, Davis is trying to raise an extra £6 million from Conservative donors so the party can employ “scores” of new campaign managers in marginals to “target young voters.”
However, trying to use cash to substitute for people has failed the Tories before. The various autopsy reports all point to Tory lack of ground troops.
Pre-2017 schemes to cover up this gap by bussing younger members around constituencies hit against a bullying scandal and an expenses scandal.
In 2017 the party also tried using money from high-value donors to substitute for people. But this didn’t always work, either online or on the ground.
ConservativeHome’s audit shows that because it lacked members, the party also lacked up-to-date doorstep canvas returns.
The Tories tried filling this gap by buying expensive polling and consumer data and “mapping” this onto predicted voting behaviour. But this costly process didn’t work in the volatile election.
They also used big money to buy lots of advertisements on Facebook. But Labour had actual supporters who shared home-made political comment. And the latter was more effective.
As ConservativeHome put it: “While advertising can do a lot, Labour benefited from a ‘red tide’ of support from third-party groups who provided massive extra organic and paid-for reach for Corbyn’s messages online.”
The “organic” home-grown comment by real people online beat the paid-for, mass-produced version.
The fringe timetable for the upcoming Tory conference shows this issue deeply worries the party, with meetings on “Conservative campaigning: what’s gone wrong and how to put it right,” “Can the Conservatives inspire the young?” and “The millennial manifesto: policies to win over young voters.”
But the party is wrestling with a contradiction, shown by recent attempts to launch Conservative “Momentum” copies: young Tories who could who could form a grassroots movement to put feet on the street — or memes on social media — are likely to be from the right of the party.
Policies that appeal to younger voters are likely to be from the liberal wing. The party is in danger of having too much money, not enough friends.
In analysing the Tories’ disastrous campaign, I think it is worth starting with their grassroots weakness, but there was also an ideological split at the top: was it “reform Theresa” who stands up for the just-about-managing?
This was associated with Nick Timothy. According to the Spectator, it meant May would “confront vested interests in the credit industry, banks and big business to the role government should play in directing businesses.”
The press always took May’s lukewarm imitation of Ed Miliband’s policies too seriously.
And unsurprisingly, since the election, May — whose campaign is funded by zero-hours employers and financiers — has abandoned any real reform of big business or the labour market.
On the other side was the “strong and stable” non-reform campaign, associated with Lynton Crosby. Which also didn’t work.
Labour benefited from a very bad Tory campaign in the 2017 election. And obviously we absolutely can’t count on that for the next one.
But that bad campaign didn’t happen by accident. It reflected structural and ideological problems within the Conservatives. The problem of membership. The ideological split between a pale “reform capitalism” and a fuller “free marketeer” approach.
The Tories are still wrestling with these problems as much as with Brexit. These are weaknesses we can aim at in the next election.
Follow Solomon Hughes on Twitter @SolHughesWriter.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-e389-The-Strange-Death-of-Theresa-Mays-Election-Campaign#.Wc7Jd8ZpEdU
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