2017: the end of Corbyn’s ‘revolution?’

As Labour’s support drops to record lows, the party must begin to evaluate whether Jeremy Corbyn is really the Opposition Leader the UK needs in an age of destabilising global politics.

By Sam W. Shenton | 7th January 2016

New Year, new opinion polls. The latest? Before Christmas, a YouGov national poll showed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party on just 24% of the vote to the Conservatives’ 39% – a deficit of 15% and the lowest ever recorded by a single pollster for an opposition party since 1983, and easily the lowest for Labour since 2009, when Labour recorded just 19% support in a European Elections poll. Meanwhile, on the question of who would make the better Prime Minister, just 14% of the electorate say Jeremy Corbyn would be better than Theresa May. Meanwhile, 39% said that they didn’t know or couldn’t choose between the two candidates. Whatever problems Labour faces regarding UKIP, Brexit and policy, it is increasingly clear that Jeremy Corbyn is part of the problem Labour is facing regarding its support decreasing and standing stagnant.

Jeremy Corbyn of course entered the first Labour leadership race in 2015 as the rank outsider – a no hope candidate allowed onto the ballot as a way of, quote, “expanding the debate” to all wings of the party. After 13 years of Tony Blair, three years of Gordon Brown and five years of Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn looked, spoke and sounded different: his politics came from the left, singing from a different hymn sheet to his opponents ‘soft-left’ Andy Burnham, Brownite Yvette Cooper and Blairite Liz Kendall. His victory was substantial in 2015 – it was a sign that the Labour Party demanded change and that the Labour Party needed vast overhaul of its structures, its policy and its image. Corbyn’s leftist platform won out against those who many said could be Labour’s next Prime Minister; an outsider who at one point said he didn’t even want to be Prime Minister, still ran for Labour leader and defeated three experienced former ministers in a race that was meant to see Burnham or Cooper act as the heir apparents to Ed Miliband.

The moderates in the Labour Party have doubted Corbyn ever since his resounding victory on the first-round ballot with 59.5% of the vote, with an initial round of Labour MPs refusing to serve under the new leader dominating stories about Corbyn’s first Shadow Cabinet, and then a mass walk out of Shadow Cabinet members after the result of the EU referendum saw Britain vote to leave the European Union on the back of a third of Labour voters (50% outside of London) opting for Brexit. A leadership battle between former Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary and Jeremy Corbyn ensued and was meant to prove that Corbyn’s experimental strategy of dragging Labour to the left and putting in place a new elections and rhetorical strategy had been enough to put Labour in the running for a bold victory in 2020, and that Corbyn’s lacklustre leadership would now be defeated by someone with better skills and higher approval ratings in the public eye. Instead, Labour re-elected Jeremy Corbyn – proving that the party does not care for the mission of forming a Labour government, and instead has formed a party within a party, splitting between the Parliamentary Labour Party and the majority of members, and splitting between those who want to win elections, and those who support Jeremy Corbyn in a similar fashion to the formation of a personality cult.

The issue for Labour now is that Jeremy Corbyn has led the party to a trench, where he issue of Brexit dominates. With Theresa May now persuing the initiation of Article 50 by March 2017, Labour has allowed itself to fall into a tug of war between the two ends of its voter coalition: working class socially conservative voters who voted for Brexit and mainly find themselves in the North and South Wales, and socially liberal metropolitan voters in London and other large cities.

That tug of war has occurred because the Labour Party now aims to appeal to no one – it has no core vote and no core message. With remain voters from the referendum now accusing Labour of “selling out” regarding Brexit, while Leave voters now see the party as having abandoned them and have moved over to UKIP and the Conservatives. This problem has originated from Corbyn’s lack of leadership, with an unexplainable media absence since he was re-elected Labour leader, – which is continuing into 2017 with a lack of any Labour representation on New Year’s political TV show over the first weekend of the year – as well as a party message that has become increasingly baseless and distant from the reality of many core Labour voters.