Serenity, on 13 December 2019 - 11:56 AM, said:
I can't help feeling, rightly or wrongly, that a lot that's happened in the past five years or so could've been avoided if Labour had elected David Milliband as their leader rather than his brother. Everything seems to have gone down the toilet since then.
I had a brief chat with my mum this morning. She's 81. She voted remain in the referendum, as did I, but voted Tory yesterday. I pointed that out to her, for the umpteenth time. She went very quiet.
The very fact that David Miliband immediately quit politics and effectively left the country tells you all you need to know about what kind of leader he would have been.
Nah, Labour DID ignore their heartlands, but that stretches back to the Blair years. The referendum gave them an opportunity to speak out without necessarily switching to voting Conservative, but when Labour then didn’t fully back the result that left them with what happened yesterday. What is interesting is that some of the policies in the Labour manifesto were directly about addressing the needs of these communities, but it was buried by the noise of a potential second referendum and the suspicion surrounding Corbyn personally. Obviously, the ideological battle within the party further hampered them, especially contrasted with how viciously effective Johnson’s government was in kicking out malcontents.