Quote of the day 9th July 2017

"I suspect the Left overstates the degree to which Corbyn and Corbynism is popular. Labour benefited from low expectations during the election campaign. There was a sense in which a Labour vote was a cheerful protest vote precisely because so few people thought that Labour might actually win the election. Voting Labour was the best way to send a message to a government that foisted an unwanted election on an unhappy people.

It was not necessarily an endorsement of everything in the Labour manifesto even if, individually, many of those policies polled well."
 
"Consequently the actual contents of the Labour manifesto and the party’s specific policy proposals were of relatively little importance. Labour offered an alternative – in terms of rhetoric as much as anything else – and that was more than enough. The contradictions in Labour’s offer mattered little; nor was it deemed necessary to explain how, precisely, that offer might be paid for. Labour’s weakness – that is to say its evident distance from power – became a paradoxical strength."
 
"Elections are a two-step process in which voters make two decisions. First, is the government good enough to deserve another term? Secondly, is the opposition good enough to deserve office themselves? In this election, voters answered both questions in the negative."
 
"The evidence that voters thirst for purity, on either extreme, remains dubious."
 
"It’s reasonable to think that a more plausible Labour party could actually have defeated May last month. Then again, if she faced a more plausible Labour party she wouldn’t have called an election in the first place."
 
(Alex Massie, from an article on CAPX which you can read in full here.)

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