Did Communism Discredit Corbyn's Election Campaign?

politics for a change I received a
request to make a video on this topic probably about two months ago from a generous supporter on patreon I think he is actually my single most generous supporter but I assure you my opinions in the matter have not been corrupted by this money being stuffed into my pockets but my donors on patreon this is more or less the same opinion I had many months ago but if wasn't requested to make a video on topic probably nobody but my girlfriend would have heard me discussing this particular element of world politics right now all right is this unreasonable is it unreasonable for me to be talking about communism in the context of Corbyn and the for him disastrous outcome of the most recent election I do not think it is unreasonable this is a guy named Seamus Milne I'm gonna assume he prefers his first name pronounced Seamus to quote this article from the F P titled Corbin's pet Stalinist in a 2009 interview with his friend George Galloway on talkSPORT radio Milne slipped into a form of wistful Estelle GE nostalgia for the former East Germany familiar from such films as goodbye Lennon describing the fall of the German Democratic Republic as quote an important loss for many millions of people close quote in a column for The Guardian written several years earlier he argued that official communism quote for all its brutalities and failures delivered rapid industrialisation mass education job security had huge advances in social and gender equality close quote take a little bit deeper here's another appointee who served as one of Corbin's on a no right-hand men I mean these two guys they really were standing to the left on the right of Corbin and going through this process Andrew Philip Drummond Murray joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1976 aged 18 well okay that's a long time ago I mean we were all young once I mean some of us have tattoos from when we were 18 years old we might but keep reading it's not such a Junt history he became associated with its straight left faction at this time Murray became a close friend of sheamus mil in case you have a short memory or in case my pronunciation is really terrible that's this guy here who you saw just a moment ago on screen so they were allies together in the same Communist Party extremist faction Murray's allies during this period have been described by Francis Becket as quote more extreme than most of the Stalinist I knew the Stalinist were known as tanki's but Murray's lot were super tanky he's holy this looked following the dissolution of the cpg B in 1991 he was a leader of the Communist liaison group which itself dissolved in 1995 with Murray and its other members joining the Communist Party of Britain see this is this is not such ancient history he you know even though communism was a failure and each one of these specific communists parties was a failure he just keeps at it he's indefatigable in his commitment to communism and this is not moderate communism this is communist extremism Murray served on the Communist Party of Britain's Executive Committee from 2000 2004 and was an advocate of the party supporting the respect coalition give me European and municipal elections that year he served once more in the party's executive from 2008 to 2011 he told John Harrison 2015 quote communism still represents in my view of society worth working towards albeit not by the methods of the 20th century which failed period close quote now you may be wondering is this just a case of conservative exaggeration might it be that the F P article with the headline screaming about Stalinism within Corbin's camp of carefully selected advisors couldn't just be an exaggeration well apart from formal communist party affiliation this guy Milne there is a notorious editorial that he published with the Guardian newspaper I did read the whole thing but those of you who have been spending some time around the Internet pick up on the direction it's taking from this brief quotation here it has become almost received wisdom to bracket Stalin and Hitler as twin monsters of the past century Mao and Pol Pot are sometimes thrown in as an afterthought and commonplace to equate communism and fascism as the two greatest evils of an unprecedented Lee sanguinary era how would the left respond if there were an equivalent article published by the Conservative Party trying to bail out and flatter Adolf Hitler now I can you can read the whole article if you want to but just from this quotation on screen you can see precisely the direction it's taking it is trying to say offer an argument for the moral exceptionalism of Joseph Stalin Mao Zedong Pol Pot it is trying to say that morally they are not comparable to Adolf Hitler well what if somebody on the right wing who was closely associated with a candidate for Prime Minister of Britain or president estates what if someone were making the equivalent excuses for Adolf Hitler if they were making equivalent excuses for mass murder amongst right-wing extremists obviously that would discredit the candidate obviously that would raise fundamental questions of why did you choose this guy as your advisor so on and so forth why was Corvin so popular just a few years ago and less and less popular now really the issue was tony blair jeremy corbyn distinguished himself as the one and only voice within the Labour Party who took his opposition to Blair to the logical extreme of demanding that Tony Blair go to prison and Corbin was promising that if he were lifted up to become the party leader and possibly become Prime Minister that he would actually press criminal charges against tony blair political power rests not the perfection of the plans you present but on the potential for those plans to be implemented if the public does not perceive your promises as truly actionable then you're not going to get elected it doesn't matter how fine they may be whether in broad outlines or in detail quota is he going to be tried for it I don't know could he be tried for it possibly close good hmm in in Canadian English that is what you would call waffling as a politician you can be right and you can be wrong but don't ever whoa what matters above all else is how actionable your opinions are that people believe you can and will implement your promises matters much more than how however so utopian your ideals may be whether an outline or in detail here's Jeremy Corbyn making the same mistake with his promises on education beneath the headline he says uh what I said was we would deal with it by trying to reduce the burden we never said we would completely abolish it oh this is much much worse than mixed signals it really would not be hard for me to find examples of you declaring that you were going to completely abolish it quote the party's manifesto pledged to scrap university tuition fees altogether making him popular with young people well not popular enough to win the election but we continue talking over them people despite criticism from other quarters but the manifesto made no mention of an amnesty on existing debt to the student loans company which currently stands at 76 billion pounds sterling and you know you start looking through the details even if just the propaganda and he doesn't really seem too confident or convincing with this himself I do not think that British people felt that this was actionable implementable palpable accomplishable real I think they felt they were being sold a platitude and the kind of confusion again even just to go back to that subtitle well I said we deal with it by trying to reduce the burden we never said we could little abortion yay did you were just saying that it was a human right that it was there was gonna be no tuition you didn't just say that everyone would get six years of free university education six years of free university education you said you would pay them a salary while they were studying you'd be paid wages while you were always sitting that's not just reducing the burden that is eliminated well what's this confusion whereas this government's going and let's be honest with ourselves guys if you have a terrible system of education and then you've remove the pricing mechanism you get an even worse system of education you would really need profound systemic intelligent reform for a new era in which the university system is no longer built around extracting tuition from students can it be done it can be done but Jeremy Corbyn did not convince the British public that he was the man to do it but hey first things last people if you have a textbook education in political science this is all you need to know as to why Jeremy Corbyn lost the election quite apart from questions of communism putting Tony Blair on trial and whether or not any of his election promises to hand out billions of dollars of the free education to the British people um when you look at this map you're looking at the districts that voted for and against brexit Jeremy Corbyn chose strategically to make brexit the one crucial issue that this election would stand or fall on and when you look at this map you can see clearly what that meant was that the only places he could have possibly made progress the only parts of the United Kingdom where he could have won more seats for his party or Scotland and Northern Ireland those are the parts of the map that are coloured in indicating that they voted to remain in Europe to remain part of the European Union as opposed to voting to exit if you know even a little bit about politics in the British Isles you know that this election was not going to be the election in which the Labour Party dramatically takes over the leadership of Scotland Scotland has its own very separate set of political preoccupations including the Scottish independence movement Scottish Nationalist Party Northern Ireland is even more hopeless okay that's debatable which one is more hopeless for the Labour Party in any case if you have a textbook education in political science you can look at this map and say okay if strategically this was the issue that the Labour Party chose that went on then this is gonna be the issue that they lose on because there are only some tiny little bits and pieces of England there that wanted to remain and where they could possibly gain a few extra seats and that did not happen Jeremy Corbyn congratulations on eliminating yourself from European politics