Res Publica Simon Carr
Could Corbyn’s party win as few as 100 seats at the general election? Given the Ukip collapse and the Lib Dem surge, it may well happen
It being no easy task to predict the past, we can still wonder whether the local election results were aftershocks of an earthquake we’ve had, or foreshocks of the quake to come.
We know that the Tories did pretty well, that Labour came a poor second, that Ukip collapsed and the Lib Dems disappointed. Thus have the runes been read as an indication of how the June general election would go.
Perhaps I can interest you in a slightly different interpretation.
The news from the doorstep in the Labour heartlands is that voters were able to say they’d definitely vote for their Labour councillors. When asked about their intentions for the general election, ‘We’ll have to see,’ they were saying. ‘It depends on the candidates.’
This is a polite way of saying they wouldn’t vote Labour in June if the party were led by a mystic mix of Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher and Mahatma Gandhi.
So, the apparent Labour support, already at sub-michael Foot lows, may be overstated. This is uncharted territory. Political speleologists are looking for depths below Gordon Brown’s low, Ed Miliband’s low.
Is twenty per cent possible? Could Labour go down to 100 seats? Usually, these slumps have a self-correcting facility built in. Good people come to the aid of the party in its hour of need. The prospect of a Tory landslide mobilises the disheartened supporters. That twenty per cent is beyond imagining. But, in the wisdom of the ages, ‘If you think things can’t get any worse, it’s just a failure of the imagination.’
Even without apocalyptic polling, Labour is facing a sea of troubles.
Most Labour constituencies voted Leave. That probably conflicts with Labour’s probable position on Europe. But, if Labour voters want to vote for Leave again, there is only one party that will please them – and it isn’t their own.
Oddly, the same applies to those who want to Remain.
Second: as we know, the Ukip voters who split the Tory vote last time are going back home. In some places, Ukip is ceding the ground and giving the Tory a clear run at it.
So, if we look at constituencies where the Tories and Ukip came second and third and then add their vote together, we see how all sorts of constituencies could go blue. Lord Mandelson’s Hartlepool. Tony Blair’s Sedgefield. Doncaster North is not entirely safe. Ed Miliband said in 2015 that his party had been engulfed by a wave of nationalism. Oh, his prophetic soul. And if the Tory/ukip coalescence doesn’t do it, and if the Labour vote suffering from the Corbyn factor doesn’t quite swing it, there is a third wave of misery.
Look at the Lib Dem vote and see how much it collapsed at the last election. Slumps of up to twenty per cent were not uncommon.
Their resurrection is greatly doubted – even by Lib Dems. Their local election performance has been described as a dead-cat bounce. But local elections have a big local element in them. This general election is the Brexit election. And the Lib Dems are the only party to argue single-mindedly for Remain. They will be sucking Labour Remainers away.
And the Remain vote is substantial, even in the Brexit North-east. In the most exity areas, there was still a third or even forty per cent voting Remain. There are millions of Labour Remainers looking for a home.
The indicator for the general election may not be the local elections but the Richmond by-election, where Zac Goldsmith’s monstrous safest-seat majority was turned by the Lib Dems into an 1,800-vote defeat.
Under this scenario, the country’s Remain energy funnels into the Lib Dems, and brings it back to life.
Labour survives as a hard-left rump of MPS with huge majorities and quasiMarxist party activists.
In the medium term, what happens to Labour’s whopping Remain vote? Where do they go, the MPS and their constituency supporters?
Is this where the fabled new party comes from?
The temptation will be great. But it’s very, very hard to start a new political party. Especially with no obvious leader and Tony Blair’s money.
The SDP, remember, led by saints and followed by thirty sitting MPS, had fifty per cent public approval early in its life. After their first general election, they numbered six.
At least the Liberal Democrats are something of a brand. They have a history. They should brace themselves for a new wave of entryism. They may not recognise their party by the end of the year.