to ask if you would vote for Corbyn and what area of the country you are in?

[WillyW8nker]

Just curious as to whether Corbyn's re-election means his popularity is better than the polls suggest and also if there is a divide in the geographical location of his supporters.

So, would you vote for Corbyn if there was a GE tomorrow and what part of the country are you in?

Me: I would vote for him. I am in London.

I think the current MPs are hoping he'll just disappear and things will just get back to how they were. I can't see any of them forming a breakaway party.

Corbyn had a lot to learn about the "ignore them, they'll go away" principle and that it doesn't actually work with the kinds of vicious trolls that attacked Smeeth and others. This new campaign to expel people from the party if they are involved in online abuse seems to indicate the leadership is starting to learn about this issue.

Living in the area I do, and I've had to maintain cordial relations with people - UKIP supporters and right wing Tories - who I would rather didn't know about my own partly foreign ancestry (which I have the luxury of being able to hide), and who might think my grandparents should be sent "back home" if they were still alive. This is something I wouldn't have had to do living in a big city. Although you do always get the odd colleague...
Perhaps that has altered my standards slightly, but I see Corbyn in this instance as like one of those teachers who needs to learn how to be stricter about bullying and who has a hard time believing his charges aren't all nice - but he seems like a person who might be willing to learn, and at least he doesn't say hostile things himself.

no I don't think they will

I think they just have to keep their heads down for a while until Corbyn's support loses its momentum and Momentum's support becomes less fanatical and it will

watching Corbyn about to give his speech cant deny his appeal to some I would understand it if he had done well in the elections of the last year but he hasn't

West Yorkshire and no.

I was heavily involved in hard left circles in my 20s and I recognise quite a few of the faces surrounding Corbyn and a lot of the ideas and attitudes. The nicest way to describe it all is "bonkers-on-toast"; the worst would be "the devil wrapped up in sanctimony." They don't give a fucking shit about ordinary people of any race or creed, which was the reason I stopped associating and working with them. A lot of them are also so uninformed that it is impossible to have a reasonable debate with them because they just spout anti-knowledge.

The two people that really worry me though are Seamus Milne and John McDonnell. I view those two in their currently powerful positions as highly dangerous.

He's the only reason I would vote labour.
London

Under JC Labour has become two parties the hard left, 'Momentum' and the traditional center left voters who are 'New Labour' and get abusively labeled Blairites or red Tories. You could say center left voters aren't leaving Labour, they are leaving Momentum, who have usurped Labour.

Perhaps it astonishes the hard core cobynistas that center left voters would rather a conservative government than vote for Momentum. It doesn't follow they agree with all conservative policies but its far more important to most people to have someone competent running the country, someone intelligent running the economy, reducing immigration and a strong defence policy. Better the devil you know.

Buck3t why?

Yes and it would be the only wholehearted vote I have ever given.

South East.

if you don't win over people who voted conservative or libdem or ukip in the last election then the result wont be any different from last time.

They don't care, mummy. The hard left have been waiting decades for the opportunity that Miliband's change to the voting policy gave them, and now they've got a grip over the Labour party.

That's who you are seeing here; those are the people sending death threats and hate mail to MPs; those are the new people screaming at long-standing Labour members in meetings ... it's classic hard left entryism and tactics.

They don't care about winning an election; what they care about is fomenting civil unrest and trying to destablise established political and governmental structures in order to usher in the fucking revolution. And Ed Miliband handed them the keys to one of the major political parties in Britain, and now they are running riot.

Labour is toast unless there's a split.

Even if hell froze over no. I would have voted for David Milliband. I won't vote for that communist bully and his bunch of henchmen. He is deluded and so out of touch with reality (as you may guess I cannot abide him)

Er, I think I might be one of the 'hard left entryists' and I've never screamed at an MP, sent a death threat, or started a riot. I don't think I'm an 'extremist', though I recognise that, as a socialist, my views are a bit to the left of the average.

I don't think politics starts and ends with Westminster: yes, of course elections are important, but a lot of the fights of the last 200 years that have really mattered have initially happened in the grassroots largely outside of parliamentary structures (civil rights, for example). Parliaments tend to be on the lag of the changes that matter, reflecting them after the event rather than bringing them into being. I have the utmost respect for people working in that system for progressive change, but I also think activism outside of it is every bit as important.

shovetheholly I don't think politics starts and ends in Westminster either.

activism is important but activism without the power to change things - whats the point?

its all a bit "power to the people" isn't it. lots of campaigning and lobbying but no real power to change things.

labour has to get into power to enact any of its ideas and if it is so overwhelmingly inattractive to the majority then it just will not get in and get the power to change things.

why do you think being a socialist puts you to the left of the average. maybe in the general population but not in the labour party surely.

Corbyn can basically say what he likes. promise the earth, promise £10 an hour wages, promise more money for disabled, hospitals etc, promise to end poverty. but he can do none of these things, he can do NOTHING if isn't in government.

why are people whitewashing over his anti Semitism and his lack of action on the death threats? why are you happy as labour supporter to feel that this is OK - because you must do if you are going to vote for him.

I guess I just think sometimes the big, important change happens slowly and gradually, mummy. That it can take many years to achieve something - far beyond the 4 year term granted to a government by an election. (Things like basic gay rights, womens' rights, for instance, took decades to achieve and are still very much a work in progress). I also think that this kind of change goes far outside politics into society.

I wrote a PhD on early radicals. These guys had the idea that all adult men should have the vote, whatever class they were in - at a time when large sections of middle class males couldn't vote! They were campaigning in the early 1800s, and they were called Jacobins, radicals, rioters, and accused of sedition and of trying to bring society to its knees. Nowadays, what they were demanding seems like common sense, doesn't it? But back then, it was very subversive. It took a hundred years to actually achieve what they were demanding. However, by the side of it, the miniscule things that the Parliament of the time did achieve scarcely seem relevant today.

I also think that, in some ways, the very nature of social change means that it is rarely 'credited' to the people who first demanded it. Ideas that seem 'extreme' become 'mainstream' in 100 years and are taken up by popular parties more widely. To me, this doesn't matter - I don't care if Tories or Labour or the Greens take credit for a move that genuinely improves workers' rights - it matters to create the conditions where it is seen as political 'common sense' to do so. And that takes many, many outriders gradually hefting the gigantic juggernaut that is public opinion in the right kind of direction.

I would never vote for him. I'm in the South East.

Corbyn is the political equivalent of hemorrhoids because they just can't seem to get rid of him, no matter how much poo he comes out with.

They were campaigning in the early 1800s, and they were called Jacobins, radicals, rioters, and accused of sedition and of trying to bring society to its knees.

They weren't the parliamentary opposition party. Labour is.

If momentum want to campaign gif change through activism and civil disobedience all power to them but by diverting the Labour Party from their fundamental objective of being a credible and effective opposition to the Government is not only bad for the Labour Party but bad for the country.
We NEED an effective opposition in Parliament - and right now, Labour seem to have decided that's not important and they want to go off and do something else instead.

NO WAY- Surrey

I do take your point. My counter-argument would be that the Tories and Whigs weren't really all that different - they represented a pretty narrow range of aristocratic opinion and really 'opposition' tended to mean a bit of tinkering with some of the decorative twiddly bits of legislation, rather than really presenting a very, very different kind of alternative.

As I'm sure you know, it was down to the extra-parliamentary movement, which gradually became more and more active and influential in both wider society and parliamentary circles, to insist on an alternative - a real opposition. The Labour party owes its existence to the need to represent workers excluded from the vote- as an extra-parliamentary force - via unions and socialist propaganda societies first.

So you could argue that the lesson from all this is that an 'effective' opposition - in the long term - is one that must oppose broadly, not simply adopt roughly the same policies, ringing slight changes on them.

This is all just my opinion, obviously! But I do think one of the huge problems with modern politics is short-termism and the tribal nature of it. A lot of the big challenges we have - climate change perhaps first among them - require a deeper and longer term commitment to change that won't be easy or popular.

Words by Denis Healey from 1959 :
^Hugh Gaitskell was absolutely right when he said yesterday that what gets cheers at this conference does not necessarily get votes at elections. If it did we would have won Devonport [the seat which Michael Foot had just lost]. There are far too many people who… want to luxuriate complacently in moral righteousness in Opposition. But who is going to pay the price for their complacency?
You can take the view that it it better to give up half a loaf if you cannot get the whole loaf, but the point is that it is not we who are giving up the half loaf. In Britain it is the unemployed and old aged pensioners, and outside Britain there are millions of people in Asia and Africa who desperately need a Labour Government in this country to help them. If you take the view that it is all right to stay in Opposition so long as your Socialist heart is pure, you will be ‘all right, Jack’. You will have your TV set, your motor car and your summer holidays on the Continent and still keep your Socialist soul intact. The people who pay the price for your sense of moral satisfaction are the Africans, millions of them, being slowly forced into racial slavery; the Indians and the Indonesians dying of starvation.^

We are not just a debating society. We are not just a Socialist Sunday School. We are a great movement that wants to help real people living on this earth at the present time. We shall never be able to help them unless we get power. We shall never get their power unless we close the gap between our active workers and the average voter in the country.

How many of these new labour members will be doing the hard slog and knocking on the doors. Guessing very few.

Labour dead for a while just like after foot. May will go on and on like Thatcher.

Just heard the ridiculous Emily Thornbury telling us that they understand the working people. FFS hilarious.

Life long socialist (therefore naturally labour) so won't be voting for Corbyn as he's a communist pretending to be a socialist just to get his voice heard. Will actively vote for labour's only competition for their seat in my constituency (and we're a marginal seat) until labour gets a decent leader.

I'm in Cardiff.

Corbyn is definitely not a communist. My friends in communist social media groups spend literally hours a day slagging him off for precisely that reason (and telling Momentum supporters to sod off as well).

I think it's interesting the way the difference of definition between a "social democrat" and a "socialist" has opened up in Labour. This is the really active opposition - between the capitalist centre-left and the redistributive socialists who want something economically different. The communists largely aren't interested or involved.

I find it sad that the left is so divided. On the other hand, I do think there is a fundamental question here about economics, and how compatible Labour and capitalism really are at a deep ideological level. It's often been the case that, at times of economic crisis, this gap opens up inside the "broad church" and a big chasm between the socialists and the social democrats becomes evident.

I've never not voted Labour in a GE but am currently leaning towards LibDem.

As it happens, voting LibDem in my constituency is a tactical vote against the Tories. But I think it is really hypocritical for people who supported the election of a politician as divisive as JC to be leader of the Labour Party to be lecturing others on the consequences of another Tory government.

West Yorkshire - never in a million years.

Anti-Semitic, anti-women and anti-anyone-who-dares-have-a-different-opinion. All supported by a thuggish mob element who have infiltrated a serious political party and turned it into a radical idealist hard left pressure group.

If there is a general election before 2020, then there could be the situation of Corbyn being responsible for guiding the country through Brexit. A man who is utterly unwilling to compromise, in charge of negotiating the biggest change in our political landscape that any of us have seen.

Does anyone seriously think that in that situation Corbyn would listen to advisers and experienced negotiators? He would do exactly what HE wanted. The implications are terrifying. We get one chance at Brexit. It can't be redone by the next incumbent government.

Theresa May is certainly very right wing, and may bring in some appalling domestic policies, but the difference is that these policies could be changed by the next government.

So as a Labour Party member, if the next election is during Brexit, I'll be voting Tory if Corbyn is still labour leader.

Yes, if he is still leading Labour come next election.

I read about an intriguing study recently where a sample of people were asked how they voted and then asked to what extent they agreed with a series of real policy proposals (party not stated). There was a huge mismatch between the actual policies they chose and the parties they voted for. Thought that was quite interesting - wouldn't mind voting on that basis, if the party who won was then required to follow through on their pledges! Partisanship eh...

North West.