A key plank of Jeremy Corbyn’s strategy for winning power is to secure the votes of the disaffected and the disenchanted who do not normally think it worth their while to make the journey to the polling station.

And Labour’s advance in last year’s general election, accompanied as it was by enthusiastic crowds of young voters flocking to hear Mr Corbyn’s words, appeared to demonstrate that his radical message could indeed reach parts of the electorate that the party had hitherto failed to reach.

Yet the latest research from NatCen Social Research’s British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey — a high quality annual survey that, unlike most opinion polls, contains almost as many people who abstained (27 per cent) as actually did so in last year’s