Last week’s result may be as good as it gets for Corbyn
THE 2017 General Election will go down as the greatest upset in the history of our democracy. When Theresa May announced the poll at the end of April, most commentators predicted a landslide Conservative victory against an inept, divided Labour party led by Left-wing extremist Jeremy Corbyn. Yet this weekend, as the Tories now face a hung Parliament, Theresa May is the one whose leadership is in crisis, while Corbyn has never looked more secure.
He basks in the adulation of his jubilant followers. She feels the fury of hers, and rightly so. The blame for the Conservatives’ election fiasco lies squarely with her. She fought a dire campaign, characterised by robotic performances, empty slogans and despised policies.
Confronted by this selfinflicted mess, which has put both the economy and Brexit in danger, some Tory loyalists have tried to downplay the extent of Labour’s progress.
They point out that Corbyn’s party lost a general election for the third time in a row and is still more than 60 seats behind the Conservative total. But this reeks of either desperation or complacency.
The reality is that Labour enjoyed their biggest advance in terms of vote share since Clement Attlee’s victory in 1945. The party even won seats in Tory strongholds such as Canterbury.
This was a very personal success for Corbyn. Last summer, no less than 80 per cent of his Parliamentary party passed a motion of no confidence in him. Yet he defied all his critics by emerging as a dynamic campaigner, able to galvanise young people and exploit the weaknesses of May’s campaign.
REMARKABLY, if he had gained just 2,000 additional votes in seven Tory-held constituencies, he would be prime minister by now, heading some kind of progressive alliance.
Indeed the prospect of a Corbyn premiership, which would have once been laughable, was reinforced yesterday by an opinion poll from Survation, the company which got the general election result almost exactly right. This astonishing new survey put Labour on 45 per cent, six points ahead of the Conservatives. The tide, therefore, seems inexorably in Labour’s favour.
A new era of British socialism appears to beckon. But before Corbyn’s supporters become too excited they should consider an alternative scenario. It may well be that, far from moving forward, Labour has already reached its peak and will soon go into decline.
So far Corbyn has escaped proper political scrutiny, precisely because he has been regarded as a no-hoper rather than a potential prime minister. But now with Labour in the lead, his radical plans for Britain will have to be taken seriously. The irony of the general election was that Labour based their strategy on the theory that Corbyn could not win. Voters therefore felt that they could safely lodge a protest against the Conservative Government without any risk of putting the Marxist revolutionary into Downing Street.
Moreover, because there was little chance of Labour taking office, the party could be fiscally irresponsible on an epic scale, dishing out lavish promises of extra expenditure such as £12billion a year on the abolition of student tuition fees. The manifesto was a fantastic credit bonanza for which Labour never planned to pay the bills.
But next time, when Corbyn
HE IS just as weak on the crucial question of Brexit where he uses confused vagueness to cover up the huge split between the majority of his pro-Remain Parliamentary candidates and the large swathe of pro-Brexit Labour voters. But that division will come into the open if he has to take charge of the Brexit process.
The idea of Corbyn negotiating our national destiny will alarm voters. But that illustrates how hopelessly unfit he remains for office. At the election, he and his supporters enjoyed a free hit against the hapless May.
But their unexpected rise does not mean that their own problems have gone away. They remain trapped in their outdated ideology, utterly divorced from the mainstream on issues such as mass immigration, crime, counter-terrorism and trade union power.
Nor has the calibre of the Labour leader been transformed by Labour’s election surge. He is not the Messiah, as his deluded followers claim, but rather a lifelong professional agitator, devoid of any capacity for or experience of governance.
Now that Labour is closer to power, Corbyn will be judged by a far higher standard than previously. His pretensions to the premiership will soon fade in the harsh spotlight of relentless examination, just as the public will soon weary of his avuncular old socialist act.
Politics are unpredictable and volatile at present. For a time, the ultimate triumph of the Scottish Nationalists looked inevitable. Now they have declined dramatically in the face of a Conservative revival. Corbyn might be riding high now but the same fate could soon await him.
‘Marxist revolutionary cannot be trusted’