Roughly a year ago I write an article in the Guardian criticising Jeremy Corbyn and his leadership of the Labour Party.
I was deeply disappointed by his team's Brexit campaign.
What I had seen was, I thought, shambolic from press relations onwards.
Policy was not forthcoming.
I had lost confidence. I was far from alone.
What I could not have anticipated was a speech as good as this:
Jeremy Corbyn has grown into the role of Labour leader in ways I could not have anticipated. I owe him an apology. It turns out I was wrong. He can do the job. That's why I signed a letter to the Observer yesterday.
I make it clear that this does not mean I think Labour have everything right. The manifesto has weaknesses. The tax policy is not all I would want, for a start. The economic policy still pays too much regard to neoliberal thinking. But it's better than the anything the Tories are offering. And it's ample enough to persuade me that voting Labour will be the right thing to do in many cases.
That said, if a vote for another party would help stop a Tory get elected and so prevent the harm to the well being of so many people in this country I would vote tactically, even if I am not greatly persuaded by the LibDems. If, however, a Green candidate had a hope I would vote for them. My attitude north of the birder is well known. I understand why people vote SNP.
By saying so I make clear my politics is not tribal and I wish Labour's was not. That, in my opinion, is its greatest weakness.
But let me be clear: it has a plausible leader. I did not expect Jeremy to become that. I was wrong. And I apologise. I underestimated him.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Now you want him to tell the daft Scottish Labour party to stop cuddling up to the Tories – better more SNP MPs than Tories, FFS.
Best if Scottish Labour were supported and SNP stood aside and supported Labour, as this GE is not about them.
That is, respectfully, nonsense
Richard, Have you read this critique of labour corporation tax problem. It may explain why more progressive economist are refusing to support labour.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2017/05/31/corporate-income-taxation-is-not-a-free-lunch/#75eadbb83894
Frances, who is no tax expert, gets this one badly wrong.
She blindly follows incidence arguments that I think discredited.
And she sees no value to business from arts students.
Am I meant to comment further? Frances when in her comfort zone is goo. Here she’s so off beam she’s missed by miles, but most especially on arts education where she has some expertise. On tax I am not aware she has any.
Richard, when the IFS that she quotes says:
‘When businesses pay tax, they are handing over money that would otherwise have ended up with people, and not only rich ones.’
Surely that is too much of a one-to-one analysis and doesn’t take into account multiplier effects of spending in the economy as a whole -I’m I correct in thinking that that sort of ‘analysis’ is massively oversimplifying things.?
Precisely
I wonder what Frances’s comfort zone is. It’s certainly NOT healthcare : https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2017/05/06/affordable-healthcare-a-view-from-across-the-atlantic/2/#30924e075689 , in which she calls the NHS, which delivers good healthcare statistics compared to many of the G20 at a lower GDP fraction, “prohibitively expensive”.
Which is bizarre as the NHS is phenomenally efficient, and cheap
As a humble foot soldier in the Corbynist Labour Party, I welcome your change of heart and mind in your assessment of the role of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party Leader. The critical points you raise above are valid and relevant to the further development of a viable and credible political-economic Labour vision for Britain in the 21st Century. I would like to thank you for all you do yourself towards the creation of a more just and fair society.
Hear Hear
I agree with you.
But please proofread your work before putting it out there.
It makes your thoughts and comments appear as twitter splat on a page.
Thanks.
I do proof read before I put stuff out there
And I don’t see the errors
I do not leave them in for fun
So I have a choice: publish with the odd error
Or lose impact
I long ago resolved which was th right way to go
[…] sleep. Whilst I was drinking it I watched the video of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech in Sunday night that I linked to here. I was […]
I’ve made a similar mea culpa in the last couple of days on my twitter account.
I’ve written on here criticising Mr Corbyn. Not going to duck that either.
🙂
Richard,
I enjoy your blog very much, especially the posts about the magic money tree and the real story about which party has been the biggest borrowers.
So glad you made this post, but if I may be as bold as to suggest an addendum. I am seeing a lot of blogs/articles/comment pieces on the web at the moment which have the same flavour ie ” I was wrong about Corbyn, he has finally shown xxxx” or “Initially I was against Corbyn, but in the last few weeks xxxx”. I am glad that people have recognized what Corbyn has to offer, but to frame it as a sudden change of direction by him is to miss the most important lesson of this whole election.
Corbyn has not changed, actually he has being pretty consistent the whole way, he has argued vociferously for a change to business as usual, he has argued consistently against not only the moral effrontery of austerity, but the economic illiteracy of it too.
What has changed is that in the last couple of weeks, he has been granted equal press exposure (I think due to a legal requirement). For the first time people have been actually allowed to hear what he says without the message being distorted through the prism of a right wing media and indeed even the BBC has censured some of it’s own people (Kuennsberg) for distorting interviews.
The big conclusion to draw from this I believe, is to recognize just how much of what we see is being manipulated by vested interests and how easily we can be taken in by it. Whether you support left or right wing parties, it is a threat to democracy for all of us when vested interests prevent one side or another from being heard.
What really upsets me is the large negative impact these people must have had on the minds of others before the change of mind.
Totally agree with john mcgeehan. By accident, I hit on a YouTube video the other day. Less than 5 minutes long, it was taken from Corbyn’s first leadership campaign and a debate with Yvette Cooper. The title of the video extract is: “Labour Debate: Where’s the money coming from Jeremy?” Yvette was challenging Jeremy’s spending plans. The punch line of this highly significant exchange about austerity and arriving at a Labour alternative came from Jeremy. In response to Yvettes question – which came as near as dammit to “There is no Magic Money Tree” Corbyn responded: “I say invest to grow. ..You can’t cut your way out of recession. You can only grow your way out to it.” The audience got it. I don’t think, on the evidence of the video, Yvette or the other two leadership candidates did. And can I say here, I’m glad I got the education I did in post-austerity economics from the John McDonnell organised learning conferences on the New Labour Economics, before they were, seemingly brought to a premature by internal Labour Party squabbles. I don’t know for sure what happened being only a foot soldier. But I could see their role in developing the Party into a Party of government,
Richard,
Thank you for this.
Jim Lowe
We had a man like this once before his name was Clement Atlee . He travelled to the House of Commons on the bus . He was not in politics for self glorification . Neither is Jeremy Corbyn. Let’s hope his hour has come.
Yes ! thanks for the reminder …looking forward to to seeing Jeremy into Number 10 !
Frances Coppola isn’t an economist at all, she’s only an MBA, and boy does it show!
BTW, my information is that median per actual (not nominal contractual) hour real wages haven’t risen at all. Median household incomes may have risen but only because of 2 or more people working and perhaps longer hours.
Chapter nine of “The Joy of Tax” has got to be the speech of the next Chancellor. I agreed with all apart from you slipping into old ways of thinking when you talk about economic growth. Run your speech by the Green Party’s Molly Scott Cato for a few ammendments and there would be many that would cheer from the roof tops.
I would be happy to see Molly in parliament
Earlier, I posted: “Best if Scottish Labour were supported and SNP stood aside and supported Labour, as this GE is not about them.” And you, Richard, replied that this is nonsense. So let me explain.
This General Election is about do we want a continuation of vicious, ultra-right wing Toryism or do we want socialism. A very simple, binary choice. A quite separate, though also important issue is, do the Scots want independence or not. A quite different question, requiring a referendum, to be taken when it best suits the party created for that question, and that question alone, namely the SNP. To mix the two subjects together wrecks the GE. The SNP have a duty to stand aside and ask all its supporters to vote Labour, a party with very similar policies, except, of course, in the area of independence. Not many years ago, those people did vote Labour, which is of course, why Scotland has traditionally been dominated by Labour. Nobody wants the hated Tories, but as things currently stand, a misguided minority will vote for them rather than the SNP, since they also hate independence. This pollution by people voting voting tory devastates the whole country and endangers the future of socialism. Do you want me to explain further?
I disagree
The duty is to work together wherever appropriate