Jeremy Corbyn’s second leader’s speech was much better than his first. One has to beware the soft bigotry of low expectations when judging his performance as leader of the opposition. But, it’s fair to say that Corbyn’s speech was up there with some of Ed Miliband’s off year efforts. The delivery was much improved, there was a joke or two and some canny lines.
Corbyn cleverly made the moderates an offer they’ll struggle to refuse, saying that the one thing everyone in Labour agreed on was that a divided party would not persuade the public. So, he asked them, ‘accept the decision of the members, end the trench warfare and work together to take on the Tories’. If the moderates don’t do that — and they won’t, then the Corbynites have the excuse they need to blame them for defeat in 2020.
But when it came to reaching out to voters, there wasn’t much in the speech. I suspect that the electorate are now relatively inured to politicians’ promises on housing; there have been so many of them. On Brexit, Corbyn missed an opportunity to speak to either the 48 percent or the concerns of traditional Labour voters who voted Out. There wasn’t much detail in the speech but his desire to ‘to intervene in our own industries without the obligation to liberalise or privatise our public services’ implies leaving the single market.
Corbyn’s big belief is that the crash has sent voters significantly to the left. This is what Ed Miliband thought too. But there isn’t yet any electoral evidence for this. There is, as the EU referendum showed, unhappiness at the status quo. But that is very different from a yearning for Corbyn’s socialism.
Listen to some highlights of the speech here:
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