Corbyn was the biggest reason for Labour defeat

JEREMY Corbyn’s personal responsibility for Labour’s drubbing in the General Election has been revealed in a survey of the party’s former supporters.

Voters who abandoned Labour over the past few years overwhelmingly blamed Mr Corbyn’s leadership.

The second biggest reason was the party’s stance on Brexit, followed by its hard-Left economic policies.

Labour suffered its fourth consecutive electoral defeat on December 12 and crashed to its lowest number of parliamentary seats since 1935.

YouGov conducted interviews with nearly 500 voters who backed the party at the election in 2017 but did not earlier this month. Spokesman Chris Curtis said ‘these voters were key’ to explaining why the party’s vote share fell 8 per cent.

When asked why they had decided to abandon Labour, the most popular reason cited was Mr Corbyn or the party’s ‘leadership’. More than one in three – 35 per cent – said this was why they had switched their allegiance.

The second most popular reason was Brexit, on 19 per cent, ahead of Labour’s policies and economic competence on 16 per cent. Five per cent said they did not get around to voting, 3 per cent cited ‘extremism’ in the party and 20 per cent said there was some other reason.

One voter told the pollsters: ‘Corbyn has proved himself totally unfit for government.’ Another said: ‘I don’t like Jeremy Corbyn and I can’t support him, even if some of his policies I like.

‘I couldn’t believe that Corbyn was the right man. He was so indecisive about a lot, how could I trust him when he couldn’t even decide if he was proBrexit or not.’

One commented that Labour’s ‘sums didn’t add up for all the things they promised’. The damning verdict on Mr Corbyn emerged as Sheffield mayor Dan Jarvis hinted he could join the leadership race to replace him.

Mr Jarvis, who is also MP for Barnsley Central, said he wanted to ‘ play my part’ in the party’s future. Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry has already said she is running, as is Treasury spokesman Clive Lewis.

Brexit spokesman Sir Keir Starmer and backbench MP Lisa Nandy are also expected to throw their hats into the ring.

During the General Election campaign, Mr Corbyn was hammered by the Tories over his weakness on Brexit. Tory strategists cited as a key moment the Labour leader’s decision to say he would be ‘neutral’ in a second referendum if Labour won power.

The announcement during a leaders’ debate on the BBC’s

Question Time programme dominated news bulletins.

YouGov figures also showed that just 21 per cent of voters overall had a favourable view of Mr Corbyn after the election, compared to 46 per cent at the same point after the 2017 election.

As the race to replace Mr Corbyn ramps up, Mr Jarvis, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme, said: ‘Too many people said they weren’t prepared to vote Labour this time. We have got to listen to those people.

‘Yes, it is about the leader. It is about having someone who you can credibly present to the country as a prime minister.’

Meanwhile, Miss Thornberry admitted that Labour promised ‘the earth, moon and stars’ in its manifesto without saying how it planned to pay for it.

Writing for the website Labour List, she said she had opposed the party’s uncosted spending commitments during the election campaign, but was over-ruled.

She added: ‘When you put it all together, it did look like we were promising to deliver the earth, the moon and the stars, and we didn’t need to worry about explaining how we’d pay for all of it.’

‘He proved himself totally unfit’