Fucking hell, is Stephen Kinnock trying to help the Tories win?

It is indeed a bad night for Labour, but if we look at the share of the vote, the Tories votes have come from UKIP, who have completely collapsed.



So this tells us a few things. Labour for the most part lost votes to the other progressive parties, and not to the Tories. UKIP are done for, and the Lib Dems have not had the recovery they were hoping for.

Obviously this could change later on in the day, but this result highlights the need for electoral alliances in certain seats. UKIP whether they stand aside or not will lose most of their votes to the Tories.

Problem is there are no other non-cunts to vote for

It's great that he's a nice guy, but being a nice guy doesn't mean he's a good leader, or good for the Labour Party, or even the country.

Backing brexit was the worst possible move he could have made. 48% of the country voted remain, general opinion is that more have joined in that view since.
He may have even converted Scotland from SNP if he promised to back out of article 50.

There would have been a lot of people who may not have liked him or indeed Labour but would have bitten the bullet and voted Labour to stay in the EU.

As it is now safe Labour voters are contemplating voting Lib Dem.

Being kind, I don't think he backed Brexit but backed the democratic process being followed through (advisory blah blah).

Plus politically Labour would have been dead if he'd voted against Brexit.

He certainly made a tricky situation worse. He has all the political astuteness of a three-year-old.

And it further fleshes out the stereotype of fundamentally right-on operators lacking nouse; I think everyone here knows of plenty of instances in their lives of people that buck that entirely.

What is really scary is May isn't exactly the example of strong leadership her catchphrases and polls would suggest.
A mediocre, populist could win one of the biggest landslide result in our history.

Massive Corbyn rant incoming. It's been a while. 

Corbyn has been the worst Labour leader ever. It would have been a difficult job to handle this right and I'm not saying any of the other leadership contenders would have been able to do it properly. Neither is Corbyn guilty of the worst crimes going on in politics. It's more like he's a bumbling security guard and the whole place has been ransacked. He didn't commit the crime but if he'd been doing his job properly it wouldn't have happened.  

The situation Labour and the country are in now is completely due to him being the Labour leader. The Tories have been able to turn into UKIP without fear of losing their moderate voters (who could vote for a Blair, possibly stomach a Brown, but never a Corbyn). They're now in the same position as the SNP, having the advantage of incumbency and, because of Brexit and simpletons, being the party for change. So if you're happy with the way things are you can vote Tory. And if you're not, then vote Tory. 

He's been abysmal from Day 1 but has made three huge howlers that stick out. One was being shit in the referendum, a national campaign that he chose to take no part in, turning down plenty of opportunities to speak directly to the public at a time when they would have been listening. Any chance of representing the Remain vote as an opportunity for something better was lost. Instead he wanted Brexit, pretended otherwise but not in any meaningful sense, handicapping the Remain campaign. 

Another was staying on as Labour leader when his MPs voted to get rid. There was no way back to winning an election after that. Still, here he is, pretending otherwise despite all the evidence to the contrary. 

And then backing Brexit unconditionally. Even if he was in favour of Brexit, I can't understand how he's given the Tories a completely blank cheque. There would have been nothing undemocratic about making support contingent on protecting jobs and holding the govt to their statements about keeping the 'same rights and benefits' people have at the moment. What he was probably trying to head off was, if the Article 50 bill got defeated, and May called an election, Labour would have been painted as the ones standing in the way of the people and its Labour's fault we're having an election now etc etc. But his unconditional support stopped Tories rebelling on the bill too, as it would have been pointless. If he'd held his ground, they'd have ripped themselves to shreds. And if he was any good at public speaking or using any media to his advantage, he could have legitimately argued that it was May's failure to stick to her own guarantees on Brexit and failure to manage her own party, that had led to an election.

The problem with Ukip collapsing is that they won't split the right wing vote any more.  In the GE, they took a couple of million votes which could now go to the Tories.

Shit, I thought I was high with that figure.

Or the left could just sort its shit out and unite around the party most likely to win an election.

I know the evidence also backs it up given the way the seats have moved in yesterdays ballots, but I don't get why a lost UKIP vote is a gained Conservative vote. I thought we were told that people that voted for Brexit were the poor uneducated northerners who had lost their jobs to a cheaper foreign workforce. Wouldn't those people be traditional Labour voters

You think that the south didn't vote for Brexit?

Fuck me Labour has lost Glasgow. A few decades of skeletons are going to fall out of closets.