Yes, yes, I know I was predicting that Labour would do much worse than they actually did. And it seems Corbyn did enthuse the young and get them to the polling station.
But it’s not so simple as that. And since they are not forming a government, any sense of achievement is relative; relative to the terrible expectations most people – including myself – had.
Thing is this: they still lost, despite having the biggest upswing in voteshare since Clem Attlee in 1945. How?
Simple. They didn’t target seats where they needed to convert Tory voters. They got people (such as young people) to vote who normally stayed at home, but in areas which were mostly already Labour.
Pointless.
I am sure that if we graphed changes in no. of seats to changes in voteshare for the last n elections, this would be an outlier. It’s really hard to have such a poor campaign strategy that you end up pissing away a massive increase in votes, one that could have put you in power.
UPDATE 13JUN: Tomorrow I will post that graph at Labour Uncut. It is an outlier, the biggest of the post-war period.
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In one sense however Corbyn has helped break through the Conservative / Austerity hegemony. He has raised in the Gramscian sense that dual consciousness where people also see the socialist alternatives and he did that in both working class seats in Wales etc but also in Canterbury and Kensington and other London seats. He did reach out to the urban young, public sector , women ( we await the voter analysis) . Of course losing seats like Mansfield and Stoke and Copeland is worrying and the strategy will need revising towards a more inclusive one.