Labour Leadership 2016

But their problems go deeper than that. Thus far, the critique of Corbyn is strikingly vapid. It is a meaningless and self-cancelling complaint to say that Corbyn can't unite the parliamentary party around him. All these MPs have to do is accept the mandate of the party membership, work with the elected leadership, and the complaint disappears. But that complaint is the entire substance of most of the resignation letters.

In fairness, Chris Bryant goes further. He blames Corbyn for defeat in the European Union referendum on the basis that he articulated the critical Remain stance that he was elected to lead the party on. The inadequacy of this critique and was underlined by Bryant's extraordinary resort to rumour-mongering, claiming to have evidence that Corbyn "secretly" voted to Leave – no doubt while twirling his moustache and cackling about the "fools".

There has also been no indication of any plausible alternative. There has been little discussion of actual policy. As in the 2015 leadership election, one senses that they would like to be able to oppose Corbyn on such fundamentals as his anti-austerity stance, but are perfectly well aware that their own position of "austerity lite" is not a winner. There are some signals from the Labour Right that yet another sop to anti-immigration politics is called for, but this hardly amounts to a coherent solution either for Labour's dilemmas, or for the coming economic and social crises. All it will do is cultivate ideological terrain for the far right, who will duly seize it when their time comes.

Even on the terrain in which they should have the greatest advantage, public opinion, it is not clear that they are winning: a Times poll of Labour voters suggests that 54 percent want Corbyn to stay, as opposed to 35 percent who want him to resign. Of course, this is just a snapshot of opinion in an incredibly volatile situation. But all the advantages in shaping opinion have been on the side of opposition. It is the Hillary Benns and Angela Eagles who have cultivated the best relations with political editors, and it is they who have been best able to pose as anonymous "top-level sources," fuelling hundreds of sabotage stories throughout the last ten months. And yet, they may have miscalculated, and that there is a backlash against such an obviously orchestrated crisis.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-no-confidence-trick-corbyn-labour-post-brexit