"Much of the media and establishment are saying that this election is a foregone conclusion," British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said on Thursday. "They do not want us to win. Because when we win it is the people, not the powerful, who win."

Kicking off Labour's 2017 election campaign two days after Prime Minister Theresa May, leader of the ruling Conservative Party, called for a snap election on June 8, Corbyn surprised critics with a powerful address in which he portrayed Labour as the people's party and reminded his audience that while the polls show the odds are against him, they were also firmly against him during the Labour leadership contest he won in 2015.

Corbyn has been a consistently embattled leader, dealing with revolts from within his own party, as well as a strong media bias against him. He came out swinging on Thursday against his "morally bankrupt" Conservative opponents and those that "monopolize the wealth that should be shared by each and every one of us in the country."

Here's what The Guardian had to say about his speech:

Jeremy Corbyn has had a very good morning. Westminster received opinion - which is sometimes right, but often not - has it that he’s a total electoral liability, but today he sounded like an effective campaigner. He delivered a speech that was focused, coherent and passionate. ... He neatly inverted his perceived negatives - that he’s unconventional, and that he’s expected to lose - by saying that he had defied odds of 200/1 before and that it would take an outsider to shake things up. And he answered questions at length from journalists, without resorting to the brittle passive aggression he sometimes deploys in Q&As, with a candour that contrasted with Theresa May’s fairly dire record when it comes to media scrutiny. Above all, he sounded decent and passionate. This came out especially in the Q&A, where he concluded with this rousing answer to a question about whether Labour was a tainted brand. He replied: "The idea that Labour is somehow or other a tainted brand - well, there are people in the audience that are wearing badges of Keir Hardie. He was vilified, vilified beyond belief, when he was elected as the first ever Labour MP. They said how can a working man go to parliament and represent people. Anyone who stands up to create a better, fairer, more decent society gets vilified. Our party gets vilified. But I tell you what: we’re bigger than we have ever been, we are stronger than we have ever been and we are more determined than we have ever been." Maybe it wasn’t Martin Luther King, but it was easily the most stirring thing anyone has said in this election campaign so far. That is not to say it will prove transformative. It is very hard to shift public opinion much during a short election campaign and Corbyn’s message will resonate more with Labour diehards than with floating voters. Framing the election as a contest between the establishment and the people obviously fits Corbyn’s politics, but it might have worked better in 1989; polling evidence suggests that, it is not just the establishment that is happy with Theresa May and her government, but the people too. May is popular with all demographics. There might just not be enough people out there who care as much as Corbyn about the system being rigged. Still, it’s early days. Corbyn’s critics sometimes argued that his campaign would collapse on exposure to the electorate. Instead his first proper campaign outing was a success.

It's interesting, to say the least, that The Guardian seems to think the "rigged system" argument is outdated, given that Bernie Sanders, who's now the most popular politician in the United States, ran on a similar platform and had an unexpectedly high level of success.

And Corbyn ruled out a second Brexit referendum, silencing Tories who had criticized his earlier reluctance to dismiss the idea of another vote on Britain's exit from the European Union.

Read the Labour leader's entire, inspiring speech below.