Corbyn is wrong but not that wrong
There are many reasons why Labour failed in this election. Or indeed why the ‘remain alliance’ did. And yes, the media is partly to blame for is, the bias, the editors of major papers being owned by people with a Conservative profile. Influential broadcasters such as Piers Morgan, Nick Ferrari or Ian Dale having prime time on TV and radio and being, perhaps subjectively, less challenging to Conservative friends than to those on the Liberal side.
And there was, of course, the proportional representation problem. There is some meme somewhere claiming 75 seats materialising for the Lib Dems had the PR system been used in this election.
But my take on this result is this:
If there is, or was a problem with the media bias or the PR system, they should have capitalised from it. Yes, the First-past-the-post system isn’t fair. Without it, not even the Conservative Party would have won a majority. But this unfairness applies to the party in power too. When we go to the polls, nobody is ahead: all votes start counting at zero.
The Labour party and the Lib Dems refused to work together. I can understand why they don’t want to be blamed for each other’s blunders. But portraying the Lib Dems as the next party in government wasn’t an appropriate message. Instead, they could have shown themselves as the deal-breaker. Remember the 1 million march in London? Those weren’t single party movements, those emotions could have been channelled to this election and there weren’t. But no, we divided what we had in common and fought against each other.
There are two ways to read what Jeremy Corbyn wrote about the media in the Observer. You can read that he is in cloud cuckoo land and he can’t accept the result of this election and thus blaming the media. Or you can read that his deep philosophical inner voice took over. And that he left himself to rile a little too much against the only people who can put Labour back in the agenda.
Underneath it all, he is right. When listening to the radio last night and this morning. At two separate points, people who tried to back this ‘media is hurting me’ feeling was immediately dismissed, and the next caller was allowed to speak against Labour failures again.
Remember David Cameron’s tweet?
No matter who is going to be the next leader of the Labour party. Jeremy Corbyn isn’t too lefty, too socialist or too scary to run the country. Every single future leader of the Labour party will be portrayed this way.
But blaming ‘the media’ or ‘the voters’ is not going to solve the problem. Instead, the opposition needs to make the message resonate with them. Make it simpler and understandable. Just like ‘Get Brexit Done’. Honestly, I hate the slogan, even writing it is giving me a shiver. But I must accept that it worked.
This election result has a collateral effect of many issues being left behind. Despite the claim that Boris Johnson will govern as a ‘One nation conservative’, I am concerned about how we treat each other. Our PM hasn’t got the best record of how he refers to some groups of people. Yes, our PM, the one that should lead by example.
How our leaders appear on TV and other forms of media broadcasting has direct repercussions of how society treats the most vulnerable or those with fewer rights. I worry that a strong opposition should have legitimately capitalised on these questions and chose not to do it. Make your own mind of why.
I blogged about this here: Will the new government be held to account?
Attacking the ‘free’ media in a free (or should I say ‘privatised’) market society won’t work. Instead, it needs to be used as an advantage.
