http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38547760



Any other Labour leader would be ripping her apart over this, and rightly so.

There hasn't been an opportunity to yet, and what makes you think it'd be allowed even if there was? There's been no PMQ for a month until this week coming and Corbyn either won't appear on the Sunday politics circuit or they won 't have him on. You can forget any of the mainstream papers giving it a fair hearing - you only have to look at the Sun's recent coverage of the NHS to know that.

You're making a massive assumption - that the media want there to be a valid political debate. They don't. It's that simple. They want the people who are best for them in charge, and bugger the rest of us. Expecting the likes of the Sun and Telegraph to give publicity to Tory failures is expecting turkeys to publicise Christmas.

There is no space left for actual political debate in the major public forums in the UK. It's been removed. Once you grasp that fundamental truth, the behaviour of politicians starts to make more sense.

Hospitals are being shut. Numbers of beds are being reduced. There are reports of patients dying in hospital trolleys.
Certainly since the coalition were in Govt, there have been budget cuts terms "efficiency savings". Add to this an increase in the population without a commensurate increase in funding means there have been massive cuts to the NHS. Add to this the fact that the NHS runs at 90% capacity at all times - partly down to "efficiency" and it's not difficult to find hospitals overwhelmed over the winter period. Other European countries seem to have hospitals run at 50-75% capacity so lots of head room for "emergencies".

I know immigrants are blamed but a few points:
- i work in a gp surgery in a relatively affluent area with few ethnic minorities (I can count the number of households as such on one hand). Yet we struggle at times. Often due to patient demand. Frequently due to secondary care giving us work that we are neither paid to do or do we want to do. Sometimes dus to patients being poorly and needing urgent assessment. Over the festive period from Christmas Eve until after New Years day, there was not one patient who had a genuine medical need to be seen.
- i have worked in A&E over the Christmas period a few years back. Christmas eve was busy and chaotic. Boxing day was busy and chaotic. Christmas day? During my entire day shift, we had a total of 8 patients in the whole department. Eight. These were patients who had developed heart attacks, strokes, or involved in severe accidents.

I accept a lot of that, but considering he made a video on a train and got that off to the Guardian, I'd like to think him and his PR team could do better with this. FFS, we live in an age of social media and he knows it. And I don't believe he couldn't get a full interview on the BBC or channel Four on this issue (might happen tonight?), for instance. Or do a piece for the Guardian, even a YouTube video. Anybody else would be hammering this home. At the moment I can only find one brief video where he waffles on as usual and lets the BBC interviewer ask him the usual sh1te about funding it when that question should have been addressed before it was even asked. Even so, most people would answer in a few words and start calling out the PM in the same sentence. Not Jeremy...

I will say this in his favour, if he was surrounded by MPs actually doing their fcuking jobs/as stated in their individual manifestos he would at least have back-up. It's quite obvious May is running scared on this issue, otherwise the other useless Jeremy would have been dragged out from under his rock and she'd have been able to keep her hands relatively clean.

Err... You might want to actually go and have a look at his social media feeds for say the last week? I'm sure they're easy to find if you're not following them already. And you can bet pretty much every political journalist in the country is following them. Yet nothing that goes out on them has been publicised in the press at all - the fact he has been doing exactly the things you're asking for yet you don't even know it is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.

He can do or say whatever he likes, however he likes. The mainstream press have no intention of reporting it unless they can find an angle they like. You still seem to the notion that the political press is responsible and feels some sense of duty to the public and to democracy. Believe me, that died quite some time ago. The first time he's going to get a chance to do something they can't ignore is PMQs. And the first PMQs for a month happens this week.

That's why there's been no apparent opposition. It actually has been there, but you simply haven't been told about it. Because the people you trust to tell you what's going on have no actual desire to do that job any more.


Agreed about that part but that's not going to change any time soon IMO. We're stuck with a split opposition half of which doesn't want to oppose, and the other half isn't allowed to.

I'm under no illusion about how the press currently treats Labour - they ignored Miliband until he got traction with things like heating costs. The point I'm making is it should be obvious that May is frightened of Labour becoming the voice of the disenfranchised again, she knows nobody buys her Brexit story and she suspiciously kept Hunt of all people around, only to have to somewhat throw herself on the NHS grenade today. She's very shrewd, but it's her public moves that show where she's most fearful.

And yes, I've seen the likes of Jeremy's Twitter feed - it's nowhere near enough. Firstly it'll realistically reach a few thousand people who are permanently scrolling and even less will take it in. Secondly it uses that quick, pretty awful interview I mentioned. Reaction on Twitter needs to be instantaneous and him asking questions of the media if need be. It's no good playing their game any more and there's nothing to stop him doing his own quick video and putting it on there. It's what his PR team have certainly done in the past.

The BBC interview, such as it was, was the place to call May out. Meanwhile she's only changing the story today on Sky. He can't simply wait until the BBC make him a video, he needs to make his own straight away, linking May to the farce and continuing his own story. The Beeb and everyone else will run that video so long as it's about 30 seconds long and can't be obviously edited down. His version, no awkward questions. Every situation has it's own response, and the Red Cross having to go into hospitals is just perfect for the internet.

It's all about making it your interconnected rolling story and narrative, and it'll eventually become 'true' because the media still need some sort of protagonist in their good vs evil, simplistic [LIFTED]. And as a side note, if anyone could get the protesters out shouting about it in front of the cameras, it's Corbyn.

I'm sorry, you're still making the same mistake. To paraphrase, you're saying 'If you build it, they will come'. They (in this case 'the press') just simply won't. There ARE protests, there are marches, there are campaigns. There are even strikes. They get no converage in the mainstream press at all. Or if they do it's entirely negative. The press is mostly just not interested in the truth any more. Brexit? Trump? Any of this ringing any bells?

Jeremy Corbyn could have a hundred thousand people marching tomorrow, it would not get mentioned. Jeremy Corbyn could be caught eating a bacon sandwich in a slightly clumsy way tomorrow and it would be on the front page of half our national newspapers. On the day after the Red Cross (the effing Red Cross for pity's sake) declared the British NHS was a 'humanitarian disaster', this was the front page of the Sun...



Now, are you seriously going to tell me the mainstream press can be relied upon to accurately report something which is not in line with their own agenda any more? Really? You're utterly naïve of you think that. As I said before, Jeremy Corbyn could cure cancer and the headline would be 'Corbyn puts thousands of medical staff out of work'.