Jeremy Corbyn had to whip his MPs on Article 50 – even though it could destroy him You’ll be familiar with the story of the dog with two bones. One day, a hound was wandering by a […]

You’ll be familiar with the story of the dog with two bones. One day, a hound was wandering by a river, happily in possession of a juicy bone, when it spotted another dog in the river, carrying an equally appetising joint. It barked, to scare its rival out of its dinner: and dropped the bone into its own reflection and down into the murky depths.

For Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, the story feels painfully familiar. The party’s natural coalition – the alliance that it relies on in good years and bad, in election defeats and in victories – is badly split by the Brexit vote.

On the one hand: the young, ethnic minorities, and graduates of all ages opted to stay in Europe. But outside England’s great cities, the white working classes – the other half of Labour’s vote – opted to leave.

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Close to two-thirds of voters now rate their referendum vote as more important than their vote in the 2015 election. This prompted Corbyn’s decision

Britain’s electoral system makes the problem more acute. Though a majority of Labour voters opted to Remain in the European Union, they were concentrated in a handful of seats. Its Brexiteer vote is spread throughout the country, making it more powerful electorally.

The Scottish nightmare

The nightmare for Labour MPs is that they go the same way as their Scottish colleagues, who found themselves on the wrong side of a referendum result, and were reduced from a parliamentary group of 41 to one of just one.

For the Labour leadership, that nightmare now looks like a grim reality. Labour is braced to not one, but two by-elections later this month, both in seats that it has held continuously since 1935 but where voters backed Brexit.

While the half of Labour voters that backed a Remain vote cannot win power alone, Labour cannot win power without them

According to the party’s own private polling, presented to Jeremy Corbyn and his two closest allies, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell last Monday, close to two-thirds of voters now rate their referendum vote as more important than their vote in the 2015 election.

That was the motor behind Corbyn’s decision to commit Labour to voting to trigger Article 50, the official mechanism by which Britain leaves the European Union. As far as the arithmetic of cobbling together a parliamentary majority under Britain’s first-past-the-post-system, if the party is seen as implacably opposed to the most important electoral decision of voters’ lives in large swathes of the country, Labour will never win again.

The difficulty, however, is that Labour, rather like the famous dog, risks sacrificing the very meal in between its jaws for a mirage.

The voters who backed a Remain vote – university graduates, the young, liberals and ethnic minorities of all ages and incomes – are also the voters to whom Jeremy Corbyn’s brand of Labourism most appeals.

The voters who opted to leave – the old, those without university degrees and the socially conservative – already dislike Corbyn and everything he stands for.

The Liberal Democrat threat

In letting loose the Labour jaw to bark out a Brexit tune, Labour risks losing everything, not least as those voters who opted to stay in the European Union do have a home to go to. That home is the Liberal Democrats, the dog with no bone at all. Although just under half of the people who backed the status quo last June want to re-run or undo the referendum, that still represents 22 per cent of the country, a rather larger bloc than the eight per cent that the Liberal Democrats got at the last election.

The Liberal Democrats scent a bigger prize. Don’t forget that while Brexit is now the antimating issue of British politics, we haven’t actually left yet. Even a successful Brexit will create losers as well as winners, losers who, the Liberal leadership believe, will flock to them, not a Labour party who marched into the same lobby as the Conservatives to bring about Britain’s European exit.

For Labour, becoming the party only of London, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle means being confined to decades out of power. But for the Liberal Democrats, a Labour nightmare is a dream to them: a clean sweep of any seat where graduates, ethnic minorities and the liberal cluster in great numbers.

They believe too, that thanks to the increasingly fractured pattern of voting, even in areas where Remain secured just a third of the vote, that third might be enough to win seats under first past the post.

Are they right? The bad news for Labour is that if they are even half-right they will do damage to Corbyn that cannot easily be repaired or even survived. While the half of Labour voters that backed a Remain vote cannot win power alone, Labour cannot win power without them.

It’s not recorded what happened to the hound after it lost its supper. Corbyn’s great gamble is that the hungry pooch’s tale ended in a forgotten happy ending. But the real risk is that the dog simply starved to death.