Is UKIP's Paul Nuttall Britain's ultimate "post truth" politician?

[Denzil_DC]

16. Then it should hold an internal party election.

The mechanisms for doing so are clear.

And this time, instead of the lame stalking horses who ran last time, let one or more of the "big hitters" show some guts and stand for the leadership against Corbyn (if he even chooses to run again) rather than carping from the sidelines like spoilt brats.

And this time, let the NEC not disenfranchise and smear a vast swath of the party membership and ban constituency branches from meeting on wafer-thin pretexts.

Don't get me wrong - I piped up at length over the anti-democratic way Corbyn was challenged last time, but he's stretched my patience. His "brand" over the years has been principled stands. I see nothing principled in the accommodations over the last few months, especially to do with Brexit and the frantic chase for supposed "lost" Labour voters to UKIP. Here's John Curtice on this:

Remain voters must now be Labour’s top priority – Stoke and Copeland prove it
...

Labour’s share of the vote has now dropped in every single byelection since the Brexit referendum. From leafy Richmond to windswept Copeland the message has been the same: the party is struggling to hang on to the already diminished band of supporters who backed it in 2015.

The party’s problems were, of course, in evidence long before 23 June last year. But the vote to leave the EU has exacerbated them.

Labour seems to have decided in recent weeks that its first priority is to stave off the threat from Ukip to its traditional working-class vote, much of which supposedly voted to leave in the EU referendum.

But in so doing it seems to have forgotten (or not realised) that most of those who voted Labour in 2015 – including those living in Labour seats in the North and the Midlands – backed remain. The party is thus at greater risk of losing votes to the pro-remain Liberal Democrats than to pro-Brexit Ukip.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/24/stoke-copeland-labour-remain-richmond-copeland-ukip

Curtice conflates "supporters" with "voters" there, but anybody who imagines that Labour's problems would be solved merely by appointing a new leader is in for a rude awakening. The rot runs a lot deeper than that.

If you can get to the stage where the right wing of the Labour Party has fixated so much on demonizing Corbyn as the root of all evil and successfully sold that far and wide through the eager media, it's no surprise that you end up with situations like this, reported from last night's Copeland by-election:

Labour canvassers admitted before the byelection that the leader was the most common topic on the doorstep. Yet activists hoped the Corbyn factor might be drowned out by widespread anger at Tory-backed plans to downgrade the maternity unit at the West Cumberland hospital.

When it came to voting, however, many said they believed lifelong Labour voters turned blue in the hope it would trigger Corbyn’s removal and save the party from perceived electoral oblivion.

“This week I’ve spoken to a lot of people, lifelong Labour voters who I’ve known for a very long time, who voted Conservative because they want Jeremy Corbyn out,” said Mike Starkey, the independent mayor of Copeland.

Starkey said he believed the Labour revolt would claim further scalps in the party’s heartlands if Corbyn remained in charge.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/24/the-view-from-copeland-lifelong-labour-voters-want-corbyn-out

Read it. By all accounts, there's not an ill some people won't now pin on Corbyn, no matter how outlandish (and bear in mind that the MP who resigned, triggering the by-election, was a very vociferous Corbyn critic, as was no doubt widely reported in the local media over the last couple of years).

It's a grim irony that the drive to oust Corbyn may lose many of the plotters' own seats because they've been so successful. And once lost, it's hard to see how Labour claws its way back to credibility - as I've witnessed myself here in Scotland, where they're a joke and haemorrhaging voters, and that's been a continuing process that began well before Corbyn took over the leadership.