Labour’s path toward election day goes higher than in 2017, before Parliament dissolved to begin formal election period. Grassroots – and MP – discipline is key
Largely unmentioned by the media – like Boris Johnson’s disasters of his campaign so far – Labour’s polling has begun climbing – even before the official general election period begins and so-called ‘mainstream’ media have to follow balanced reporting rules.
‘Uptick’
The Times’ Matt Chorley did notice, at least partially, and tweeted a chart of the parties’ trajectories – pointing out that Labour is rising while the Tories are ‘well short of [the] same point’ in 2017:
The missing link
However, Chorley had not included the latest ICM poll – and if he had done so, it would have shown Labour not only ‘enjoying an uptick’, but ahead of where they were at the equivalent point in the 2017 campaign:
Déjà vu
In the ICM poll, Labour has hit 31% – and has closed to within just 7% of the Tories, after weeks of media pundits and pollsters talking about huge double-digit Tory leads.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is – the same scenario was repeated in 2017, but this time around the media know Labour surged in 2017 but have almost entirely omitted to mention it, in their search for a ‘no hope’ narrative.
But now the pattern is being repeated – and early signs are that it will go even further than it did two years ago.
All this has taken place even before the official election period has begun. In 2017, Labour’s surge began as soon as election rules forced broadcasters to achieve some semblance of balance in their reporting. But in 2019, it has started earlier.
Discipline vs desperation
The key to this has been message discipline among the grassroots – and to a more patchy degree among MPs. Activists are focusing on policies and on the issue of what kind of country people want to live in. Many MPs have done the same, although a few front-benchers have been slow to bring themselves in line.
Even so, the discipline has worked – and will work better if it is continued.
The message from Labour’s senior campaigners is essentially this: policies, policies, policies.”
Of course, the trend will not have gone unnoticed by the Tories and their media allies – even though they have refused to mention it. As the Establishment reacts to try to halt and reverse Labour’s trajectory more, bigger and more desperate smears will be thrown at Labour in an attempt to bait grassroots campaigners into no-win arguments, or to bog down MPs in damaging, defensive tactics.
The right response
Because Labour’s positive, policies- and vision-based approach is working, it’s even more essential to maintain it – and to refuse any distraction.
If we succeed in that, the surge will continue – and once reporting rules kick in and the broadcast-watching public starts to hear real Labour and not just media-filtered versions, it will even accelerate.
The SKWAWKBOX needs your support. This blog is provided free of charge but depends on the generosity of its readers to be viable. If you can afford to, please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here for a monthly donation via GoCardless. Thanks for your solidarity so this blog can keep bringing you information the Establishment would prefer you not to know about.
If you wish to reblog this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
Here’s a few quotes from an article in the Guardian.
Brexit: Jeremy Corbyn warns shadow cabinet dissenters to fall in line
Exclusive: Labour leader says debate is over as he seeks to shift focus to social justice and climate
[Corbyn] “I just said, ‘look, this debate is now over. We’ve done it, the party has now made its decision, and that’s it; and that’s what we’re going to campaign on’,” he said, describing last week’s shadow cabinet meeting.
“I just said, ‘look, this debate is now over. We’ve done it, the party has now made its decision, and that’s it; and that’s what we’re going to campaign on’,” he said, describing last week’s shadow cabinet meeting.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/03/obey-brexit-jeremy-corbyn-warns-cabinet-dissenters
Ooops, sorry about the repeated papagraph. It should have read
[Corbyn] “I put it to them quite clearly: I said, our objections are now gone. We are now supporting a general election – and everybody gulped. I didn’t alert anybody in advance – it was my decision. On my own. I made that decision. And they gulped, and said, Yes Jeremy.”
Great quote in the Guardian today “McDonnell thinks he’s in the driving seat, but actually he’s in a flight simulator”.
We would shoot higher, faster if the penny dropped with recalcitrant MPs such as Ian Lavery.
They should tell their constituents the truth, that they were sold a pup by Farage and Cummmings to get their votes and as a result of UKIP’s lies and deceptions, many of them will lose their jobs if we leave the EU. It’s not as though there was any doubt about it, it’s a cast iron certainty.
It’s nauseating to see Farage strutting the stage again, being given massive publicity by the BBC once more and with his snake oil salestalk, trying to convince people to vote against their own best interests. Then to cap it all see some Labour MPs fall in behind him, it beggars belief.
Even if Farage splits the Brexit vote, we still need to campaign hard to show voters how they were conned by him. My worry is, to appease the Lexiters, we may have gone too far down the ‘let’s have a bit of Brexit’ path to change course.
I don’t really trust the polls whether they are favourable to us or not . The only one that got it right last time was Survation.
Pollsters can manipulate questions to get the answers they want and use the skewed results to demoralise us and our supporters thereby creating a self fulfilling prophesy.
Like hundreds of thousands of others I knew we were not going to be wiped out in the 2017 election despite the polls. We could see it in the rallies, the numbers who turned out, the chants of “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” . This is happening again now and the MSM , the Tories and others will go into over drive to smear, sneer and mock Jeremy just like last time. It didn’t work then it won’t work now.
Jeremy is often compared with the late Michael Foot , another good and decent man who was very popular with the grass roots and who was slaughtered by the MSM. In the end they succeeded in defeating him and we had another 15 years or so of Tory rule.
Jeremy has the advantage over Michael of social media and also people are generally a lot more savvy now in the post Blair years than they were in the 80s.
I genuinely believe we will have a Socialist government in place before Christmas if we make sure we get the vote out including the postal vote and use social media to counter the disgusting MSM attacks on our leader and our party.
Regards Survation, the last two Survation polls – conducted on the 17th/18th and the 29th/30th of October – did in fact have the LP eight points behind the Tories, as did the ComRes poll and the ORB poll both conducted on the 30th/31st of October, which are all in line with the latest ICM poll.
As for countering the smears AND, perhaps even more importantly, exposing the smearers – ie JLM and CAA and LAA etc, and Yes!, the likes of Margaret Hodge (and the traitors who left the party on the false grounds that the LP is institutionally anti-semitic so as to damage Jeremy), and of course the corporate and corrupt MSM and BBC, along with the abhorrent Jewish black propaganda rags – we should also be putting leaflets together (anonymously and as individuals), and running off a hundred or two hundred copies or more. And assuming the leaflet is more than one page – and obviously A4 size is the most convenient size to work with – it should be held together with a pin-clip (as opposed to stapled) so that people who want to can print off their own copies (and do so simply), and at the end of the leaflet of course say: Please copy and/or scan and circulate to friends and family and work colleagues etc.
AND Jewish Voice for Labour has put material together specifically for this purpose (and many, many thanks to them for doing so!):
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/statement/rebuttals/
Whilst scrolling through the CAA’s list(s) of articles, I came across the following abhorrent and vile piece of black propaganda (as the vast majority of their so-called articles ARE) about Jewish Voice for Labour, posted on 26/04/2018, with the headline: ‘Why the So-Called Jewish Voice for Labour is a Sham’. The following are a couple of excerpts from it:
Despite its name, the real purpose of JVL is not to provide Jews with a voice in the Labour Party: a voice that already exists via the Jewish Labour Movement. Its purpose is, rather, to provide an ostensibly ‘Jewish’ voice in support of the most extreme elements on the Labour left, which camouflage themselves as ‘anti-Zionists’.
And the ‘article’ finishes by saying that:
Campaign Against Antisemitism’s focus is on antisemitism, pure and simple. We don’t care whether Jew-hate comes from the right, the left, or the centre – we oppose it in every form. But JVL exists in order to persuade the world that the Labour Party doesn’t need to do anything about its antisemitism problem because Jews have said so.
It’s time for the mainstream media to stop giving JVL an audience.
(Ends)
Needless to say – and the CAA know it of course – Jewish Voice for Labour are not – and HAVE not – been given an ‘audience’ by the MSM, and what little coverage they DO get is mostly dissmissive and negative. The main difference between the two groups – to put it in a nutshell – is that ONE is a fascist organisation set up and run by fascists, and the other is NOT!
https://antisemitism.uk/why-the-so-called-jewish-voice-for-labour-is-a-sham/
Correction: The main difference between the THREE groups is that TWO are fascist organisations set up and run by fascists and one is NOT!
I also came across the following two ‘articles’ whilst scrolling through the CAA’s list(s) of articles, the first one posted on 26.01.2017, and with the following headline:
CAA files complaint with Ofcom over Al Jazeera’s so-called investigation entitled “The Lobby”
https://antisemitism.uk/caa-files-complaint-with-ofcom-over-al-jazeeras-so-called-investigation-entitled-the-lobby/
Continued below
The second article, posted on 09.10.2017, is headlined:
Ofcom dismisses CAA complaint over Al Jazeera’s so-called documentary “The Lobby”, which alleged a conspiracy at the heart of British politics run by Israel
https://antisemitism.uk/ofcom-dismisses-complaints-over-al-jazeeras-so-called-documentary-the-lobby-which-alleged-a-conspiracy-at-the-heart-of-british-politics-run-by-israel/
The following is a clip from a Times of Israel article (re the US version of the documentary):
The complaints raised by the Jewish leaders about Al Jazeera’s portrayal of Israel intensified after the network announced its intention in October to run the series about the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. The leaders accused Al Jazeera of anti-Semitism and of running a secret spy operation on American soil.
Yeah, everything’s ‘anti-semitic’!
And the following is the headline and sub-headline of a Jewish Chronicle article:
If you’re using Al Jazeera’s ‘The Lobby’ to defend Labour, you’re another conspiracy theorist
The documentary is constantly held up to ‘prove’ there is an Israeli plot to interfere in British politics. It doesn’t
Brilliant. Leave em at stations, surgeries wherever people gather. Low teck could pop up everywhere. We must utilize everything. Let’s slay the beasts then we can clean the stables.
“I don’t really trust the polls”
The conspiracy theory of polls is a comfort blanket, not an analysis.
Polls are simply what they are – snapshots in time, dependent on samples that can be representative – or not – and with quite large margins of error that are rarely taken into account.
The mistake is in interpreting them simplistically. I’m sceptical of YouGov, not because of some brain fever conspiracy, but because their polls have a methodology based on telephone polling and results that are consistent outliers in the same direction.
There is a myth about the polls before the last election. The problem was not that they failed to accurately predict the result, but that they always operate – by definition – in hindsight. The actuality was that a judicious examination of polls, using a moving average, did indeed show a consistent and rapid Labour gain (both absolute and relative) as polling day approached – it’s there for anybody who cares to look :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2017_United_Kingdom_general_election#2017_2
Yes to all of that but I won a lot of money thanks to Mr Cs wins against the polls. And they were wins. 3 pms and that Welsh bloke a few others. He’s still standing and in with a shout.
Corbyn will be giving a speech in Harlow Essex tomorrow (Tue). A preview of his speech can be found here
Labour will “get Brexit sorted within six months” – and give the British public the final say, Jeremy Corbyn is set to declare in a major campaign speech on Tuesday.
Just a word of caution in predicting the behaviour of the Great British Public : currently more (if marginally) *approve* of Mr Toad than disapprove. Doh! Stockhom Syndrome?
I have faith in the British working class to come out in droves to eject the Torys…I have no idea on opinion polls,other than they are not a barometer of the Labour voters intentions.The country is in a mess and the incumbent government rarely survives if the people suffer,Old fashioned I realise but if you ignore history you ignore the future.!
Including the 50% that have consistently voted Tory, even during the Labour surge at the last election?
“The key to this has been message discipline among the grassroots ”
Lack of message discipline is the biggest reason for Labour’s disastrous performance at the 1983 general election. A much closer result was possible.
Oh if only blowhard had a son to carry on his message. Orrlright, boyo. Oh he has a son. Don’t know what he’s doing now though.