Internal polling conducted by the Conservative party reportedly shows that if there was an election held today, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party would completely obliterate the Tories by a massive 12 points.

ITV political correspondent Paul Brand said on Twitter that “one senior Conservative MP told me this week that internal polling shows a 12 point gap”, and implied that the Conservative HQ had subsequently descended into:

Blue Panic

And in line with the huge failure of public polling during the 2017 election, Brand went on to say that some Tory MPs revealed that they “instinctively feel the gap is bigger than polling reveals.”

Public polling might put Labour only 2 points ahead of Tories, but one senior Conservative MP told me this week that internal polling shows a 12 point gap. Blue panic. — Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) November 19, 2017

The news comes as numerous pundits and former politicians question why, amid extraordinarily shambolic Tory chaos, Labour are not polling much higher than they currently are.

In yet another anti-Corbyn tirade last week, former Labour Prime Minister and illegal war-instigater Tony Blair said that ‘Labour should be 20 points ahead in the polls’.

Blair made the claim despite Corbyn’s party currently polling at exactly the same figure Blair himself won in the historic 1997 Labour landslide election victory.

And just today whilst interviewing John McDonnell on the BBC, Andrew Marr continued this chosen attack narrative, beginning the interview by asking Labour’s Shadow Chancellor to explain exactly why the party were not “way ahead” in the opinion polls.

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McDonnell resisted the obvious temptation to blame both the polling companies who got things laughably wrong during the General Election, or the relentlessly anti-Labour media narrative, cleverly turning Marr’s question into a discussion about Labour’s progressive economic policy plans.

Brexit Will Be The Tories’ Last Stand

The fact that Labour are not further ahead in the public polls has absolutely nothing to do with the party supposedly missing a trick or failing to capitalise on the Tories’ incredible incompetence.

The main reason the Tories are not being utterly obliterated in the polls is because huge numbers of pro-Brexit voters are reluctantly hanging on to Conservative coat tails to ensure Brexit is implemented as soon as possible.

Evolve has consistently argued that once Brexit is done and dusted, the Tories will be finished, and we would challenge anyone to argue against this theory.

A huge section of ardent Brexiteers – many of whom became hugely politically active for the first time in many years during the EU referendum – see the Tories as merely the vehicle with which to ensure the quickest possible exit from the EU. Many seem to have bought into the notion that by simply escaping the clutches of EU bureaucracy, Britain will simply be able to sail off into the sunset and everything will be rosy.

Tony Blair may well have won over a huge number of Tory voters during his time as Labour leader, but, by adopting Thatcher’s neoliberal consensus of deregulation and mass privatisation, Blair also tainted the Labour brand almost irrecoverably with working class communities – driving them away from the Labour Party and leaving them politically homeless.

Following Thatcher’s decimation of working class communities and a subsequent neoliberal political consensus that developed between Labour and the Tories during the Blair years, a politically homeless working class adopted Brexit, rather than Labour, as the new holy grail to ensure real change in their favour.

And therefore Labour’s far more pragmatic Brexit stance of attempting to protect jobs, EU citizen’s rights, and the wider economy, is now seen by many Brexiteers as merely holding up our exit. And added to the fact that huge numbers of working class former Labour voters still don’t trust the party after Blair basically crossed the floor, it no surprise that we’ve seen many former Labour voters do the same to support, in their eyes, the most pro-Brexit, and therefore the most ‘pro-change’ party.

It is incredibly ironic then that, given his latest anti-Corbyn outburst, Tony Blair himself almost certainly has far more culpability for Labour’s failure to capitalise on the current Tory incompetence than Jeremy Corbyn.

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