I voted for Corbyn. Now I want him to resign

Last summer, I joined the Labour Party, in order to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in their leadership contest. Now, I want him to resign.

As Labour MPs voted 170-40 today that they have no confidence in Corbyn, and his shadow cabinet just keeps resigning, Labour is little better than a football team with no players. Coach Corbyn has been left yelling to a few die hard fans in the cheap seats long after everyone else has already left for the pub.

The Tories are in breakdown and facing a leadership contest. Given that Jeremy Hunt will go down with the public like a fart in a lift after the Junior Doctor’s strikes, and nobody knows who Stephen Crabb is, the party is likely to choose between Boris Johnson and Theresa May.

BoJo is favourite to win, but he’s also a total mug. The Tories achieved a tiny majority under Cameron in the last election. If Boris wins the Tory leadership, this does not provide a mandate for him to become PM and negotiate a monumental deal with the EU which 48 percent of the country does not want. Particularly when most of the 52 percent who voted Leave just want to play this to Boris and Farage on repeat:

We’ve even coined a phrase for it: “Bregret”. The worst Friday-morning comedown ever.

So if there is an early General Election, and it seems pretty likely, who will be there to challenge the Tories?

Certainly not Corbyn.

Back in the heady days of summer 2k15, I voted for Corbyn. Compared to your average politician, he has backbone. Corbyn is genuinely principled, anti-establishment and Left of the Party mainstream. He maintains a distance from and difference to the Conservatives. He doesn’t pander to the media with patronising soundbites (I say: “hardworking families!” You say: STFU! Amirite). So yeah, at the time, Corbyn represented positive change. Labour needed a kick up the arse.

I paid my £1 student membership fee and followed @JeremyCorbyn4PM on Twitter before heading to a Labour Conference in Nottingham and waving a campaigning pledge around a bit for a photo-op. I also told loads of people about his alleged motor-cycling trip around East Germany in the 70s with ex-girlfriend Dianne Abbott because, to be fair, what’s not to like about love and leather?

So don’t get me wrong: I still like Corbyn. I just don’t think he should be the leader of the Labour Party.

At the moment, Labour is on the cusp of changing from a major, mainstream party with realisable political ambition, to a niche, party, representing only specific, marginal interests. AKA the interests of a hard left, semi-radical student vote.

AKA people like me, the thousands who joined the Labour Party in order to vote for Corbyn last summer. And he even let us down, the students who got him the job, when it came to the EU ref.

Note to future campaigners: if you’re leading a campaign which affects the future of a nation, don’t dress up in fur on a comedy show the week before a vote and say that your heart is only “seven and a half” out of ten in it . Please. Because you will lose and people will blame you.

I mean “what were you thinking” doesn’t quite cut it.

Corbyn was brought to power by a huge youth vote. He did not represent our interests well enough in the EU campaign. He stood less for what we thought, than what he thought. So how can he lead us now?

Supporting Corbyn last summer was a good way to protest against the patronising, often disingenuous parliamentary Labour party. Supporting Corbyn now is a failure to recognise the glaring national interest for an effective opposition.

And that’s just why we, poor, long-suffering students, should want him gone. Pretty much everyone else in the Labour Party, the country, and probably most of the EU already do.

As shown by a post-Brexit poll, the majority of people who voted for Labour in the last election want Corbyn to resign .

Let’s face it: if Corbyn were to rival the Conservatives in an early general election, Labour would tank. Corbyn can barely form a cabinet. He does not have the necessary experience to negotiate a Brexit deal, or even a Bremain. He would split Labour’s core vote. He cannot be the galvanising force we so desperately need to unite opposition to a Conservative-negotiated Brexit. A Labour leader like Dan Jarvis could be.

Corbyn appeals to people like me: students with nose-rings who go on protests. But as Peter Mandler (a Cambridge Historian) argued, lefty London-centric “movements” don’t “look all that different from the London of fat-cat bankers and thieving politicians” to someone in Sedgefield, Hartlepool or Doncaster .

Labour needs a leader who would re-attract its core, working-class vote. Currently, the working classes, the former-Labour voters who voted for UKIP in their millions in the last election, and, when that changed nothing, voted to leave the EU, have no reason to return to Labour. I mean, come on: look at Labour now, and what do you see? Factionalism and ineptitude at a time of national crisis.

The Labour Party need to abandon their lily-livered coup, grit their teeth and call a leadership election. Fast. Otherwise, through our failure to act, the Left makes room for the next Tory leader to get a huge mandate from a disaffected and terrified population. We make room for a small, right-wing portion of the 52 percent to negotiate Brexit unfettered and unopposed.

And most of the students who voted Corbyn in probably won’t even turn out to stop it.

With the Lib Dems pledging an election campaign run on Remaining, rejecting Brexit is not off the cards quite yet. But it seems unlikely that the Lib Dems have the reach, financing and infrastructure to win a general election on this platform in the next few months. Labour do.

They just need to get rid of Corbyn. It’s a classic: sorry mate, it’s not you, it’s me. Except that it is you. And it’s over.