2nd letter to Observer about Corbyn

Not content with his rant against Jeremy Corbyn the previous week, with repeated, snide comments about his "Lenin cap" and "endorsement of the Trotskyites" and such like, Andrew Rawnsley clearly couldn`t resist dishing out another dose of his Blairite medicine (Labour downs a deadly cocktail of fatalism, fury and fantasy,26/07/15). Particularly noticeable this time was the careful selection of information from the You-Gov poll, where he totally ignored the fact that 62% of those polled said they wanted a leader who was in touch with the concerns of ordinary people, presumably knowing how important this would be, come election time. Instead, Rawnsley concentrated on the 27% who said they wanted a leader "who understands what it takes to win an election", and unbelievably reached the conclusion that "a big chunk of the Labour selectorate knows Mr Corbyn is a loser". Even Michael Gove, when Education Secretary, was not so adept at the misuse of data! The "timely analysis" of this year`s election by the Smith Institute, and its point that Labour needs to win another "100 seats to secure a parliamentary majority", was deemed worthy of a mention, but an unsurprising omission was its recommendation for the party`s strategy to be "based on the values it believes in". Similarly, he shows how Labour`s problems will get worse because of the  "boundary changes", but fails to mention how much more discontented the majority of the electorate will be after the Tories have attempted to return government spending to 1930s` levels, and how even more attractive Corbyn`s policies will then appear.

       Rawnsley has the audacity to patronise his readers by claiming that those who, basically, agree with his views  are "more serious" than those of us who regard Blair as "insufferably smug". He can ridicule Corbyn as the "Pied Piper of Islington" as much as he likes, but millions of us support the attempt to offer the electorate a real alternative to neoliberalism.