Methinks the AI bot what wrote the article got it wrong.

Post at haste, edit at leisure.

He refused to lift the cap on child tax benefit that the Tories set to 2 children only.

He made the pensioners' winter fuel allowance means-tested - only available to those on benefits for the very poorest.

Both of these have been hugely unpopular in the party - the latter so much that he succumbed to pressure and gave the allowance back, for the coming year, to more people.

No, Corbyn is not "into the politics of grievance on the left as much as Farage is on the right". That kind of both-sides-ism, when one was the former leader of your party, is nasty triangulation. Your own sentence says this - "no one whines and complains like Trump and his (blessedly few) imitators". Farage is a Trump imitator; Corbyn is not.

Starmer has declared Palestine Action, a group that trespasses and vandalises property that is used to build arms for the Israeli military, but doe not target people, a terrorist group, despite the lack of terror (in the targets of Palestine Action, that is - plenty of terror in the targets of the IDF). This means that saying "I support Palestine Action" is a crime. He has had over a thousand people arrested for doing that.

The problem with "pragmatic thinking" is that it often ends up being "do what the opposition would, to 'claim the centre ground'".



To be only +13 among your own party's voters is not good. Among all adults, his polling is now 72% "doing badly", 18% "doing well". Among Labour 2024 voters, only 44% say the country is going in the right direction: https://archive.ph/xSqDS

They see things differently, but GB is rather fractured at the moment, and I accept that many parts of the spectrum are well-represented, and each makes plenty of noise on their own. The lack of a language barrier between there and the USA helps, of course.

As far as Corbyn goes, we'll have to agree to disagree there. I found him to be quite disagreeable, and his policies were, as far as I could tell, very much based on grievances. I find Farage to be far more dangerous (having no morals at all helps), and I think he is enjoying as much secret support from outside now as he was during Brexit, which I thought was brazenly Putin-led. Brexit has turned out to be a complete fiasco, and I am convinced that if one were to have asked the people of GB at the time (2016) if they thought it wise to leave the EU, a majority would have said no way. They were so self-confident that enough of the stayed home to let the disaster happen--something that I wish Democrats would observe and learn from. As was evident in 2016 and 2024, that message has not gotten through to the ones that needed to hear it most.

As one who lives in the middle of an area that is seeing several middle-Eastern conflicts being fought out by proxy in our midst, my trust in any faction that claims non-violence is right at zero. Any of them that can get away with violence against their opponents on European soil without getting caught would gladly do so in a heartbeat.

Corbyn's policies were actually popular when polled in ways that omitted him from being identified with them: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/corybn-labour-policies-toxic-general-election-2019-leadership-latest-a9279946.html

I believe similar results were found in the US with some of Bernie Sanders' policies.

Now, even with Corbyn clearly identified as a figurehead for those policies, recent polling has shown that 1 in 3 Labour voters would vote for Corbyn's nascent party even before it has a name, and 1 in 5 of the general population would do so: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/one-five-britons-would-consider-voting-new-left-wing-party-rising-one-three-young-people-and-labour

Other polling has shown that Corbyn is currently regarded as having been a better Labour leader than Starmer is: https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52935-how-do-britons-see-jeremy-corbyn-and-his-new-party-10-years-since-his-labour-leadership-victory

The OP could only really have been written by someone who doesn't live in the UK and has little grasp of its politics.

Starmer assumed the Labour leadership by coasting a wave of right-slanted purges of the membership that gutted the party of any semblance of approaches that could properly address the issues the country faces. Its grey managerialist dogmatism might fly if it was coherent and was providing positive results and evidence of support in polling. It's plainly doing none of that.

That's why the initial period of Labour's term has been so fraught and electorally disastrous, to the extent that if the government doesn't change tack in fundamental ways, we're left praying that Farage and Reform implode before any general election, otherwise we're all seriously fucked.

Lashing out at Corbyn in these circumstances is pathetic. His own slated new party is undergoing its own all too predictable teething troubles, but his platforms have always been truer to leftwing thought in the UK than anything Starmer and his dwindling, flailing cabal of supporters in the Labour Party and the media currently champion. Polling when Corbyn was leader showed his policies were popular among the general public even as the man himself wasn't.

There's a reckoning coming for Starmer's Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney and a number of other shady operators within the Labour Together group and its "Blue Labour" (note for US readers: blue is the colour of the Tories in the UK, red is the colour of Labour and the broader left) fellow travellers who were shamelessly undermining Labour and its leadership during the last but one election because they preferred to see another term of Tory government than a Labour one that might veer left of centre. I hope it comes sooner rather than later, before Reform cements any further gains.

Link to tweet

On Friday, Mr Albanese said people in Australia were "concerned about elements of the far right rising in various countries".

"Our job is to make sure that people continue to have faith in the system," he said.

On Friday morning he took part in a panel discussion at the Global Progressive Action Conference alongside Sir Keir, Canadian PM Mark Carney and Icelandic PM Kristrún Frostadóttir. (pictured)