Corbyn is in an extremely difficult position, trying to keep all Labour voters onside.
I might be wrong but I think there were one heck of a lot of areas, that are traditionally Labour, that voted to leave.
Now he has to contend with pretty much all Labour held seats wanting a second referendum, with there being more than a hint that many would switch to remain, depending on what you read.
He has openly said that he would respect the referendum result, but would, for one, renegotiate a customs union deal - Turkey I believe, have access to the customs union but aren’t part of the EU, so that part should be possible and would help maintain trade and movement of goods. You would think that the Tories, being the self proclaimed party for business, would have considered that option.
Corbyn’s biggest obstacle, with regards to being elected, IMO, isn’t his stance on the EU, it’s the media and it’s unrelenting attack on someone who wants more equality and fairness in this country.
We always get the Government that gets the best media support, which is primarily Conservative.
In the 90s, when Murdoch switched camps, and used his papers to support Blair, Labour had a landslide victory. In the noughties he switched back, iirc, and the Cons got back in, based on their lies about Labour causing the global recession, or such like.
The Murdoch thing is spin. He didn't win those elections. He switched to whoever he thought would win the election. They just sailed with the wind.
And the government of the day is obviously going to get more media "support." No such thing as bad publicity etc. The government is the one that sets the agenda, makes policy. Of course they will dominate the news.
Corbyn's biggest obstacle is that he is far left. He might be the leader of the opposition but the Blairites get favourable coverage, he gets similar coverage to the Tory right wing. The TV media especially hate old school left or right wing politics and love centrism.
He is attacked because of what he represents, not personally, as the figurehead of far left politics then he is the one that is seen as the figurehead for the momentum yobs, the overly PC hard left (nothign wrong with PC in general but this lot want offence made illegal for anyone but themselves.) So it is more the position he heads up in the spectrum that he takes the flak for. In a similar way (although Farage himself gets a lot of hammer) Farage/UKIP pre Batton took most of the flak for the far right space in the spectrum. Now that has virtually gone they have had to move inward attacking the right wing of the Tories, that while definitely right wing are not fascists nor extremists but now treated as such and labelled as such willingly by those on the left.
These are the top10 in Vuelio's political influencer list. People might try and point out that some of these are newspapers however I would suggest the reason they are on there is because of the volume of content the TV shows from them. Most people only know what the Mail is saying because there is such a fuss made of it and the TV making us aware of it. Even Guido (Paul Staines) gets his stuff commented on the BBC. George Osborne's tweets and Headlines are constantly shown on TV news. Tom Newton Dunn is constantly on TV as are his headlines. Geordie Grieg (and his predecessor Dacre) are constantly getting their headlines on TV. Everyone in that top 10 gets a significant amount of airtime beemed into every home all day long. The top 3 are BBC, The 4th is ITV.
The whole of the top 50 is littered by people that might indicate that new media or print media or radio are mixing it up but when you look into it all of those other media influencers are actually go to commentariat or favourite content for screen media. For example Owen Jones is just outside the top 10. He is busy on twitter, he has lots of followers, He writes for the Guardian but he is constantly on TV which is where he gets his mass audience. John Humphreys might head up the Today program but who listens to it? However the Today program is very often in the screen media news segments and thus a large audience suddenly knows what happens there. Polly Toynbee - always on the TV. Iain Dale - always on the TV. Fraser Nelson - always on the TV. Everybody in the top 50 is either on the TV, guests on the TV or has their content constantly used by the TV. It has a huge reach. Newspapers on their own no longer do directly. If TV and social media stopped showing us what nasty thing is in the daily mail then not many would even know these days.
- Laura Kuenssberg
- Andrew Marr
- Andrew Neil
- Robert Peston
- George Osborne
- Tom Newton-Dunn
- Faisal Islam
- Paul Staines
- Geordie Greig
- Boris Johnson