From The BBC
12th September 2015
Jeremy Corbyn has promised to lead a Labour "fightback" after being elected the party's new leader by a landslide. The veteran left-winger got almost 60% of more than 400,000 votes cast, trouncing his rivals Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. The Islington North MP won on the first round of voting in the leadership contest, taking 251,417 of the 422,664 votes cast - against 19% for Mr Burnham, 17% for Ms Cooper and 4.5% for Ms Kendall. Former minister and Gordon Brown ally Tom Watson was elected deputy leader.
He immediately faced an exodus of shadow cabinet members - but senior figures including Ed Miliband urged the party's MPs to get behind him.
Mr Corbyn was a 200-1 outsider when the three-month contest began. But he was swept to victory on a wave of enthusiasm for his anti-austerity message and promise to scrap Britain's nuclear weapons and renationalise the railways and major utilities.
[Well, it looks like they’ve gone and done it! The people have spoken and therefore the Labour Party looks to be taking a significant lurch to the Left – and about bloody time! It appears that I am far from alone in despising what the Tories have done so far and what they plan to do over the next 4-5 years in power. Well it looks like at long, long last, we actually have a political alternative rather than just a Tory-Lite so-called opposition in the guise of New Labour.
It would seem from the media coverage over the past few weeks that, as it became clear just how popular Corbyn was, that the Establishment is in a flat panic over the possibility (and now the fact) of his election as the new leader of the Labour Party. That in itself warms my heart gladly. If he lives up to his reputation and his speeches there’s a real possibility that the Labour Party might actually become a Socialist Party again. If they do I for one will start voting for them again. From some of the scenes on TV at his packed out appearances I’m guessing I’m not alone in that thought. Unelectable after moving away from the hated Tories? I’m thinking that they could win in 2020 especially if the Tories crank up their austerity programme as they’ve promised to do. Oh, we’re going to have a very interesting time ahead……. Watch this space indeed!]
2 comments:
Yay! I'm really hoping a similar thing happens here and Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination. The lack of news coverage of him is blatant. He's drawing massive crowds that other candidates are not. He's raising a massive amount of money in individual contributions and from labor unions. He's refusing to take money from special interest super PACS (corporate and billionaires), yet the media ignores him, or says he doesn't really have a chance of getting elected. He's now surpassed Hillary in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire. That should be huge news, yet corporate owned media desperately want to convince the people to ignore him. It's offensive.
I saw an interview by a Tory today who said two things - First that Corbyn's election threatens the western world (reading between the lines but essentially what he was saying) and that Labour elected the wrong person - and not their strongest candidate - in other words not one of 'the boys' who won't rock the boat too much.
Oh, and it did make me laugh comparing the 'socialist' Obama to the real Socialist Corbyn. If Corbyn was elected leader of a party in the US I'm sure that many thousands of people would drop dead from shock!
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