Sentiment in Action-Jeremy Corbyn.

'When Corbyn won the Labour leadership election, he told voters: “You don’t have to live without power and without hope. Things can and will change.”'

Nothing will change on June 8 precisely because the manifesto, though it has many good policies, is lead by Corbyn who defines 'sentiment in action'. To propose a radical change for Britain requires a leader who has the ability to change the national conversation through oratory and energy and passion.

Corbyn does not have that. He has rectitude, the idea that he is right, that it's obvious and the policies need only largely talk for themselves. He remains curiously 'anti-political' in his determination 'not to play games', not to attack the Tories while imprinting just why his vision and his policies are efficient and just.

It's largely pointless to try to convince Corbyn fans that such a Labour leader with new policies is both long overdue and yet, when he came, was utterly lame. He remains curiously flat and drained, lacking the energy and wit to carry the day with the policies he has that are popular, such as utility nationalisation.

The fact is that Brexit requires leader and a 'team' that appears to be on the ball and to know what its doing. Corbyn ought to have ruthlessly fired Dianne Abbot for not even knowing basic maths as regards the new police officers it has. She isn't very bright and being 'nice' simply isn't enough to be a leader.

Any response that 'we don't want a shiny con man in a suit like Blair' misses the point. Like it or not, the Opposition leader is a leader and if he isn't seen to be leading his own party with any authority, the electorate isn't going to trust him to be able to represent the national interest at a time of leaving the EU.

Blair was actually an appalling leader who hollowed out his party by filling it with on message clones and replacing party debates with choreography. Corbyn has gone to the other extreme, in posing as a 'not Blair' tribal totem pole for the disaffected with politics to rally around, a gnomic guru figure pointing the way forwards..

The feeling that 'rhis is the man' that has been waited for has led to any criticism of Corbyn being subjected to poisonous invective. In fact, Corbyn fans are quite like the Blairites in seeing their leader as a sort of messiah, though a prophet of the cause of the previously ignored and funnel of the 'real people'.

The uncritical praise for Corbyn is out of an understandable sense of desperation. Yet for all the rhetoric of empowering the ordinary people, some people are more ordinary than others. The basic democratic way to empower people would be to agitate for proportional representation. On that, only silence from Corbyn.

When asked in 2016 about PR voting Corbyn just opined, while effectively ignoring it and not giving a straight answer, "I believe in the wisdom of ordinary people'. He then started talking about the need to extend democracy down to the work place and at every level of society, as though worker's councils were about to form.

It was Corbyn's version of democratic centralism. Refusing to mention PR voting as a goal or to put it forward is not 'empowering' people. It's the one big factor causing falling participation and interest in elections. Putting forward the sorts of alternative policies could help, but PR voting is an essential means better ends.