Labour’s standing in the polls has been the subject of news bulletins and headlines at the start of 2017. The purpose of these is not informative, but about bullying Corbyn and the left in general. We are told that the polls show that the kind of policies Corbyn is seen to represent - from rail nationalisation, stopping austerity, defending migrants and abandoning Trident - are totally out of touch with the views of ordinary people and so should be abandoned in favour of more ‘palatable’ and ‘electable’ positions.

The same polls are used to suggest that Labour will be wiped out if an election were held tomorrow and the party should therefore turn away from the left and adopt drastic tactics for survival. The Fabian Society declared that Labour was ‘too weak’ to win a general election, citing Corbyn’s unpopularity in opinion polls and suggesting a number of ways forward, including forming alliances with the Lib Dems and the SNP while at the same time appealing to Leave voters with tough-talking over immigration. Even Len McCluskey, whose support for Corbyn has been vital, brought the Labour leader’s tenure into question when he left open ended an answer as to what should happen if polling didn’t improve by 2019. As such, Labour’s poll numbers have become a major issue.

Corbyn’s decisive victory over the right in the summer ensured that his enemies adopted a less public form of undermining him, but they now have a fresh avenue from which to launch their attacks. Speaking upon the publication of the Fabian report, the incoming chair of Welsh Labour said that Jeremy Corbyn had ‘failed to make the impact people were suggesting he would’ and added that he didn’t see Labour making any headway while Corbyn is leader of the party.

Where last January we had the farcical coverage of the Labour reshuffle, this year it seems to be the opinion polls that are providing the vast array of anti-Corbynites with their ammunition. Just like all the major attacks on the Labour leader this goes beyond him personally and the confines of the party itself. In this time of deep crisis where the capitalist status quo is coming under almost unprecedented pressure, the attacks on Corbyn are an attempt to stop and delegitimize any left wing arguments being made in this moment.

In concrete terms, this means that general left wing ideas: that poor people and immigrants are not to blame for low pay and lack of housing, the bosses are; that money spent on wars and bombs should be spent on schools and hospitals; that it was the global ruling class who caused the crisis and it’s them who should pay for it, is stamped out in favour the kind of economically pallid, gradual migrant bashing approach that we saw under Ed Miliband. As mentioned above, it also means a completely unequal alliance with the thoroughly neo-liberal, austerity architects of the Liberal Democrats, a move that would cause tremendous damage.

For this reason, responding to these attacks on Corbyn’s politics via the opinion polls becomes an issue for the whole left and socialist in general, not just those in Labour. So what should be our response?

First of all, let’s look at Labour’s poll ratings under Corbyn. In December, they have averaged around the late twenties. The last three polls conducted in chronological order have been 29%, 31% and 24%, the last of these gaining the most traction in the press and providing the right with their line of attack. There are clearly ups and downs in polls, but over the course of 2016, the party has been hovering around 30% and has therefore dropped slightly at the end of the year.

When it comes to personal approval ratings on whether respective leaders are performing well in their job, Corbyn fares much worse than Theresa May. The same goes for the question on who would make a better PM.

We can't ignore Labour's bad polling and Corbyn's poor personal approval rates, but we can seek to understand and explain them. Looking at the political environment more broadly and seeing the polls in this context leads to a much different conclusion to that of the doom mongers who want us to focus on the polls in isolation and not much else. But polls are only part of the picture and they are not neutral.

Not a good time for the polls

It goes without saying that pollsters all over had a bad 2016. Of the two major political events of the year, the EU referendum in Britain and the US election, polling organisations and individuals made embarrassing errors and predictions.

Pre-Brexit, several leading pollsters predicted a narrow but relatively comfortable win for Remain. On the eve of the vote, both the Financial Times and the Telegraph had Remain in the lead by 2 points and YouGov and Ipsos MORI had Leave trailing by 2 and 3% respectively. Markets went into the night confident of avoiding a shock to the system and across the live news channels an air of resignation was visible in the Leave camp. People generally believed that the polls had called it right. But when they awoke the next morning, something else happened. Leave won by almost 4 points and shock which was unexpected suddenly became a brutal reality.

The pollsters hadn't been able to predict the result partly because there was a level of volatility in the vote that was very difficult to see in advance. This came in the form of unusually high turnout in areas that was not necessarily thought of as being eurosceptic. In the Labour stronghold of the South Wales valleys, this turned out to be the case. In the constituency that voted most heavily for Leave in Wales, Blaenau Gwent (also among the poorest ) turnout was over 70%, ten points higher than in the 2015 general election. Also, the total number of Leave voters was more than double the number of combined UKIP and Tory voters registered in previous votes (i.e, the majority of Leave voters were not easily identifiable as stereotypical Eurosceptics). This pattern was repeated elsewhere, and it was this level of participation and enthusiasm for voting Leave amongst a section of people who are usually not decisive in national votes that pollsters simply hadn't been able to pick up.

The election of Donald Trump in America has very similar dynamics to the EU referendum. While the polls didn't do a bad job of predicting the overall result nationally in terms of voter share, they failed in key Midwestern states that flipped from Democrat to Republican and arguably handed Trump the presidency. This meant that several of the models used by people at places such the New York Times and fivethirtyeight, which predicted a high percentage chance of Clinton winning the Electoral College, proved badly wrong. In Michigan for example, a once fairly solid Democratic state, every major poll in November showed Clinton winning over Trump by 5 points or more. In the end, Trump narrowly won Michigan. Pollsters had failed to see how much Clinton's vote would collapse across the state, whilst at the same time taking for granted those voters who were seen as the traditional Democratic base. As with Brexit, there was an unpredictable volatility which came from a section of working class people who defied the pollsters outdated expectations. In the case of Brexit, this group generally turned out in huge numbers to vote Leave. In the case of the US election, they generally stayed at home and in some cases, even went for Trump over Clinton.

Giving more hope to the left, the same pattern was repeated to a greater degree in the Michigan Democratic Primary. On the day before polling, a Fox Detroit poll put Clinton on 64% against Sanders’ 34%. They weren’t the only ones predicting an easy Clinton win. The star pollster Nate Silver, on his fivethirtyeight site, declared that Clinton had a ‘greater than 99%’ chance of winning Michigan and wrote that it would be ‘among the greatest polling errors in primary history’ if Sanders won. But a day later and history was made. Sanders won Michigan by 1.5 points. The sense of victory was all the more euphoric for having defied everyone’s expectations.

Licking their wounds shortly afterwards, fivethirtyeight got writer Carl Bialik to try and make sense of why pollsters had made the ‘greatest of errors’. The key factors he cited were that his industry woefully underestimated how high turnout would be amongst young people and independents (those not registered as Democrats). Pollsters knew Sanders led among both groups, but hadn’t realised the extent of his support or how enthusiastic these people were to get out and vote. Again, this decisive element of volatility was what caused such a big electoral upset.

These examples alone are proof enough that polls cannot be trusted as a reliable source to gauge how a real election would pan out, but we can also throw in a few more cautionary notes.

The bigger picture

Jeremy Corbyn is under constant siege in a way rarely ever experienced for a leader of the opposition. This is down to politics, not personality. Corbyn comes from a background of radical left politics that has seen him get involved in the major social struggles of our time and take consistent positions against British imperialism, whether it is through support for Palestine, opposition to Apartheid or his central role in the Stop the War Coalition. It is this that poses a fundamental threat to the British ruling class. It makes sense then that the attacks come not only from within Labour, but almost the entire press and the establishment at large. This was at its height during the coup, and had eased off in some aspects since his emphatic victory, but it persists in many ways.

One effect of this bombardment is that in order to stem the rebellion amongst MPs, team Corbyn is under constant pressure to water down the radicalism that was inherent in both leadership election campaigns. And they are often forced to accept members of the shadow cabinet tacking way to the right on major issues such as immigration, Trident and foreign policy. When there is not an immediate election, big political questions are not posed as sharply in people's minds, and so all the other sludge rises to the surface and becomes dominant.

This mix of constant attacks and contradictory messaging creates the effect of a radical left message not getting through on the one hand, whilst on the other hand the majority of reporting around Corbyn is overwhelmingly negative. In this context, it's not surprising that people say they won't back the Labour leader or won't admit to doing so. And as so many of the attacks on Corbyn focus on him personally, it would stand to reason that his personal approval ratings will suffer. In other words, the relentlessly biased political dialogue can produce skewed polling.

In a general election things might be different. Campaigning would take place in our already heightened political atmosphere and the nature of the debate would shift. Political differences on issues such as the NHS would be forced to the fore. If, and only if, Corbyn and Labour adopted a clear radical left line that was bold and clear (in the way Corbyn can be and very much like Sanders in the primaries), then we should have every reason to believe that those arguments can win among a large section of people. Questions over rail nationalisation, NHS privatisation, fracking, militarism abroad and austerity policies such as welfare cuts and local spending cuts are already major issues in the current climate, but would be posed much more sharply in a general election. This is not to turn around now and say the left would win, but it is to say that on the major issues we can win an argument if we take a clear line.

When there was a national election of sorts under Corbyn was the local government elections in May 2016. In the run up to those elections the polls did narrow, and of the three polls YouGov conducted for The Times before the vote, Labour was ahead of the Tories every time. This is partly because the media purposefully made the elections a referendum on Corbyn and that strategy misfired, as the reality was that when the issue was put in the front of people’s mind as a choice between Cameron or Corbyn, more people than expected came to the conclusion that they were deeply fed up with the government and were willing to entertain an alternative.

We know that there is a huge social and economic crisis ripping through society. One example is the NHS. As I write this, NHS England has just declared that it will no longer fund lifesaving blood transplants for cancer patients, a practice that was routine a few years ago. The crisis in A&E has just claimed two lives at Worcestershire hospital. But it’s not just health. The last 9 years have seen the lowest wage growth in any period since the Second World War. At the same time, the wealthiest are rolling in it: by midday on 4th January, the UK's top bosses had already earned more than the average worker will earn in the whole year. The effects of this gross inequality could not be clearer as we enter 2017, according to The Trussell Trust, Foodbank usage is twenty times higher now than it was in 2010. This is the material basis for why socialist and radical left arguments can have traction and must be made in the clearest way possible, not opinion polls.

The point is that socialists should be wary of basing their political outlook on opinion polls and should instead look at how our arguments can play out in the real world in its totality. We might also wonder if polling is a neutral act and if it exists in a political vacuum where it produces clean, unbiased snapshots of what people are thinking. The truth is that polling is swayed and influenced by the political dogma under which it operates. For years, that dogma has taken a cynical and complacent view of working class and poor voters. This outlook has insisted that this constituency will always, by and large, vote a certain way no matter what or will not vote at all. The conclusion, therefore, is that they can largely be taken for granted.

Even while people’s lives has gotten considerably worse under neo-liberalism, the common held view was that they would still passively vote for any old left-of-centre candidate. This cynicism underpinned New Labour and Clintonism. It eventually destroyed Labour in Scotland and was the reason Clinton lost the Rust belt. But it has also seeped into polling models, where voter bases are assumed to follow a certain path and therefore produce certain predictions. While these predictions may have worked in a time of relative political stability, they have struggled in a time of upheaval and crisis. The political centre has failed to understand and react to this situation, but so too have the major pollsters. This doesn’t meant that polls are totally worthless of course or should be ignored, but it does challenge the view that they are king. In fact, they are too often reflecting a failed political model that is upheld by the liberal centre.

The dead centre

In this context, it should come as no surprise that the people who cite the polls as evidence that the left is failing are generally people who occupy the liberal centre ground of politics who are fighting for their political survival. They are the real failures.

Some of these people have spent their lives trying to stop the radical left from getting a hearing. In the Fabian Society report, they explicitly call for Corbyn to build on Tony Blair’s idea of occupying the centre ground. What this means in practice is abandoning any bold and radical left policies in favour of the kind of thing we got under Miliband but this time with the explicit call to form alliances with the Liberal Democrats. This would be disastrous for the left. We know this because where this strategy has been put under the greatest of tests in national elections, it has failed miserably.

In America, where the left by and large subordinated its aims to Clinton, the Democratic candidate had an almost perfect run. She had the support of everyone from the unions all the way to the major players in the U.S establishment and much of the media. Her opponent was a sexist bigot who was considered to be the most unpopular presidential candidate in history. Clinton was consistently elevated by popular public figures as an enlightened figure. Despite all this, she lost those key states and with them the election. Yes, she won the popular vote by a huge margin and that is a separate scandal in itself. But this cannot hide her campaign’s total failure in losing several key states, much of which was down to its bone-headed obedience to polls that turned out to be wrong.

Then there is Labour’s performance in Scotland, where a ‘progressive alliance’ of a different nature, between Cameron and Miliband, was formed in order to keep Scotland in the UK. That, and Labour's overall lurch to Blairism, destroyed the party in spectacular fashion.

These are the polls that should be informing us: the ones that show how politically toxic the liberal centre has become. And yet it is these very same people who are now fighting hardest against the radical left. This was there for all to see in the Labour coup and appeared again in Barack Obama's attack on Jeremy Corbyn. Obama and others are desperate to make out that the left is irrelevant, when in fact it is them who are oblivious and who have their head stuck in the sand. It would be disastrous if we started to believe their twisted version of reality.

In truth, the polls are still catching up with the enormous rate of political change we are witnessing and have largely been unable to take account of the volatile, angry nature of our politics. But socialists and the left don't have to play catch up. In fact it is this volatility and anger that can be to our advantage but only if we are able to put forward clear, radical arguments and show how real change from the failed status quo can be delivered.