Sunday 12 August 2018

Back to Corbyn and Referendum - What Happened?

Current phase of tweets etc around Corbyn and racism is taking up too much time to check out facts. Still important but I think I will go back to the referendum time and try to work out more about what happened. It may turn out to be one continuing story.

Stephen Bush in the Sunday Times speculates that some centrist Labour MPs have changed their point of view. Just after Corbyn was elected leader they thought there was enough time to wait for him to fail. But recently there are more Corbyn supporters joining as members. So some sort of new party is possible.

I am trying to find out more about "United For Change" . I am following them on Twitter. No clues yet on who is connected.

But what about "Saving Labour" ? This was a massive social media presence during the second leadership election. Still not much info on who was organising it. The main decisions about how Labour was organised for the referendum were taken before Corbyn became leader. It appears he did not have complete influence on the statements being made. the "blame Corbyn" trope came in a press release very rapidly after the result. Mandelson was quite keen to follow the Cameron lead even though upset by a lack of defence against misinformation. When the latter polls looked dodgy Cameron made space for Labour which turned out to include Lord Darling sharing a platform with Osborne. My guess is this was less convincing than had Corbyn been better reported for arguments based on worker rights and environment.

So I hope to go back to some of this. There may be clues on which MPs and journalists were concerned with different outcomes.

Continuing queries

Channel 4 blocked Corbyn from using complete clips from Last Resort. why? Anyone got a copy?

Thing is, for those worried about Brexit, and Corbyn "Fudge" as claimed by @BBCnews paper review yesterday evening, what he said in referendum is worth quoting. He did campaign for Remain, whatever version of history suits the people who need an issue to contest around him.

Two heckles reported by BBC seem to be not from upset Labour supporters but from Lib Dems and Portland. Has this been checked out? Where is Newsnight getting info or leads?

The Shadow Cabinet resignations started with reports in Observer and Sunday Times that Hilary Benn had no confidence in Corbyn. No way he could continue though this was later reported as "sacked in the middle of the night". What was the source of the story?

new one

Gavin Esler recently writing about the poor reporting on Brexit so far. He probably cannot go into detail about the BBC but maybe info will emerge around how things worked out. I got the impression that there was pressure from both sides in government. So reports tended to be a collection of conflicting statements with no way to judge any assessment. Left little space for Corbyn or other views.

Seems much the same at the moment. Reading the Observer today you would think that this week Corbyn has no way to exist. But probably something continues.

No comments:

Post a Comment