Journalists (but not editors) talk to the proletariat!

It has been such a disaster that Observer journalists have been forced to travel North.To talk to proletarians! They have uncovered some shock results:

“You are talking about the north-east of England. It is not just based on a strong unionised workforce, but also the armed services. There is hardly a family around here who has not had a son or a brother or a father serve. A man like Corbyn, with his history, they could not vote for him.”

[There were those]... who believed that remaining in the EU could have been sold as a Labour issue and a patriotic one – by arguing that pooled sovereignty was enhanced sovereignty and that a strong economy was what made Britain great – but that argument was over before it began....

That could be dog-whistle accusations of racism,of course. The journalists could find only one supporter of 'what is generally described as Corbyn’s “London” politics'. 

The old habits die hard though. At the head of the news section is news --  Corby has written an article for the Observer that appears lower down as 'Opinion':

We must now ensure that the working class, in all its diversity, is the driving force within our party

Still weaselling then --is the solidarity of the working class the policy or pursuing ultra-liberal splits over 'diversity'? Corbyn's 'reflections' so far extend to this:

As Labour leader I’ve made a point of travelling to all parts of our country and listening to people, and I’ve been continually struck how far trust has broken down in politics....the election became mainly about Brexit....we paid a price for being seen by some as trying to straddle that divide or re-run the referendum.

He doesn't seem to connect the two parts of this section. Trust in Labour politics (for me anyway) broke down after all the prevarications, Parliamentary games and sabotage over Brexit after promising to implement it in the 2017 Manifesto. Corbyn is left with the consolation of a moral victory which asserts, in effect, that he is still right despite the vote.

on austerity, on corporate power, on inequality and on the climate emergency we have won the arguments and rewritten the terms of political debate.

The Observer's own strategy of tactical voting also flopped (R Liddle in the Sunday Times says the catastrophe was down to sending Hugh Grant to support each of the LibDem carpet-baggers).

Last Sunday, we recommended candidates in 50 seats. Our results were not great....In England, our preferred candidates triumphed in only four seats...

it was not the fault of Deltapoll’s data [the writer is a pollster]. Almost everywhere, they identified the correct challenger. Most dramatically, they showed rightly that the Liberal Democrats were snapping at Dominic Raab’s heels, despite the foreign secretary’s apparently impregnable 23,000 majority...[which shrank to about 4k]

Deltapoll’s data showed what tactical voting was up against. Lib Dem supporters were reluctant to help Corbyn become prime minister. Likewise, Tory Remainers feared voting for a badly led Lib Dem party that might support Corbyn....The big lesson is that tactical voting needs not just a common enemy, but a broadly common vision, shared by the Labour and Lib Dem leaders.

I thought they had one. or at least their party leadership did -- the imagined community of Europia where there would always be cheap strawberries for tea.


Meanwhile, there are some comforting possibilities in the editorial to say they told us so:

Leaving the EU on 31 January 2020 under the terms of the withdrawal agreement will not see “Brexit done” in any but the most superficial sense....[Johnson now faces a] political imperative to tack towards a soft Brexit that minimises its economic impact, protects the union and recognises that over half of voters did not give his version of Brexit their seal of approval last week...there were still more voters who did not endorse Johnson than those who did

none of the existential questions facing our country have gone away. How do we balance the trade-offs involved in Brexit? What is the UK’s future as a union of four nations? How do we make it a greener and kinder country in which to live, in which older people do not go without basic care and children get an equal chance in life regardless of who their parents are?

However:

Johnson will no doubt extract a dangerous lesson from his win: that putting out untrue claims about your opponents, blaming them for events that happen on your watch, and avoiding scrutiny at all costs is an effective political strategy. At least he can no longer rely on the toxic, populist narrative of “people versus parliament”.

What gave that toxic narrative legs, I wonder.