Other than the verdict passed by the public?
He made some dreadful appointments to his inner cadre, Seamus Milne and co. These people had a first and foremost agenda of reversing Kinnock’s ousting of the far left from the party. Kinnock’s actions made the party electable. Reversing them is likely to have the reverse.
Now, I’m not against left wing policies, but you have to get elected first and then bring some in by a combination of stealth and consensus. Ultimately though, they have to be acceptable to a majority of the population. Studies have shown that about 75% of people agree on 3/4 of the issues. What doesn’t work is imposing the extreme 12.5% of the far left or far right. You might sneak them in, but they won’t work for long because people just don’t want them. Moreover, it is democratically wrong to try and do it. We are in a situation now where the Tories are made up of extremists, but they will ultimately bend to the public in order to retain power, or they will break.
Milne & co were putting ideology above pragmatism and what’s more they knew Jeremy wasn’t a leader, didn’t want to be leader and disrespected him by implementing their own strategies, some out of ideology, some out of spite and retribution. Jeremy wasn’t a leader. A leader would have nipped that in the bud.
There are many qualities required of a leader. One is bringing people together. In that I think he was not given a chance. Another is understanding optics, appearance and presentation. Not appreciating the Jewish issue, not reacting, not appearing to react, was a catastrophic failure of leadership. He abdicated his duty. Not forcefully condemning terrorists in interviews, just saying what some people wanted to hear was a dreadful error. He was concerned about condemning all violence. Laudable, but condemn each one at a time, when asked about them, one at a time, when each type is in the news and of concern. Don’t attempt to be consistent and equate all violence, even if that is true. This is politics.
Which brings me to the last failure. He is just not a politician. He couldn’t manoeuvre, manipulate.
Whatever you think of Blair and Iraq, he sold it to Parliament and to the country at the time to get what he wanted through Parliament. Unfortunately Corbyn was not Machiavellian enough while Milne & co were poundshop bolsheviks.
What most of us don’t realise until we infiltrate Conservative political circles, is that they see Politics as a game. For us on the left it is not a game, it is much more than that. It has real life consequences for people at the lower end of society, people we know and mix with. It is life or death sometimes, literally.
For Conservative politicians, they just don’t mix in such circles. It is about who you know, doing things for your people, each helping the others who are ‘our type of people’, but if they lose the game, they are still not in a life or death, misery and desperation situation. It is just time for another round of the game with new pieces. Meanwhile, there is nothing wrong with making a bit of money for oneself and ones friends.
To beat them, we have to play the game better. I actually think we should play it nasty.
