Labour The Polls and Biased Media

It has been two months since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour Leader.  During all that time he has been under intense attack by the Tory media, including from the BBC.  You would have thought, during all that time, as a main element of the attack on him, from the Tories and from the Blair-rights, has been that, however popular he might be with Labour Party members, he would be an electoral disaster, that they would have been falling over themselves, to back that argument up with poll evidence.

But, no.  Only today, have they made a big splash of a COMRES poll, which suggests that the Tories are flat, but that Labour has dropped 2 points in the poll, down to 27%.  In fact, given the venom and intensity of the attacks by the media, backed up by an endless supply of Blair-right MP's, ferried, on a production line basis, to comment in news studios and newspaper columns, that Labour's standing would be lower.  Indeed, you could be forgiven for believing that all of these Blair-right MP's are just itching to lose council and parliamentary seats, to prove their point!

Yet, the truth is that there have been many polls done, since the election, and since Corbyn won the leadership, and they simply do not support the contention of the Tory media or the Blair-rights, which is why they undoubtedly have not been falling over themselves to bring attention to those polls.  The actual position since 2010, since the May election, and since Corbyn became leader, is given by UK Polling Report here.  What the graph indicates is rising support for Labour, and declining support for the Tories.

In fact, as they also indicate

"It is important to note that ComRes’s post-election polls are significantly worse for the Labour party than polls from other companies: since the general election ComRes have shown Labour with an average of 29% and a Conservative lead of 11 points; other companies have on average had Labour on 32% and an average Conservative lead of 6 points. Suffice to say, while this is a bad poll for Labour even by ComRes’s standards, it’s not some great slump in Labour support. The reason the Tory lead is bigger than in recent polls giving them a lead of only six or seven points is down to ComRes having a different methodology, not a sudden fracturing of support."

Yet, none of this was mentioned by any of the very highly paid, supposedly professional, and well informed political journalists on programmes such as "The Sunday Politics" or "Murnaghan", this morning, who for the first time were falling over themselves to highlight merely the headline figures of this rogue poll to support their party line.

In fact, as the above link indicates, if you take the IPSOS poll of 17th November 2015, it shows that Labour's standing is UP 2 points from 32%, on 19th October to 34%!  Of course, there has been no, and nor was there any reference, to this poll, on any of the politics programmes, whose duty, in the case of the BBC, is to inform, and not just to entertain.  A look at the table shows that IPSOS are not the only ones to show Labour's standing rising since Corbyn became Leader.

Once again the biased reporting of the media shows why we need our own Labour Movement mass media, and the sooner the better.