Solid voting against prospect of PM Corbyn
JEREMY Corbyn may not have weaned the Labour Party off defeat yet but he does claim to have them on solids. ‘Solid’ was how he described his party’s results in last week’s local elections in England. Solid. The sort of thing a kind schoolteacher writes about the performance of a pupil who is clearly failing at their subject but seems willing.
This was the party that thought it was set to take London by storm with the gusto of the Red Army when it took Berlin in 1945. Instead it has been ‘solid’. Hardly the passion of the revolution.
Let’s think about what was going in Mr Corbyn’s favour ahead of last week’s elections.
Traditionally, oppositions do well in local elections, particularly when governments have been in power for years, as voters use even the best of local councillors as political piñatas who can take a whack for what central government is doing.
Neil Kinnock gained hundreds of council seats and lost two general elections. Michael Foot won hundreds of council seats and then led the party to its greatest rout of modern times.
Mr Corbyn took the country by storm by adding 77 councillors and losing control of bellwether councils such as Redditch, Nuneaton and Derby. These make up the parliamentary seats that must be won to win a general election.
If that is a solid result perhaps it needs an overnight stay in the fridge to set properly.
This in a week when Home Secretary Amber Rudd resigned over the Windrush scandal – the third of Theresa May’s most senior Cabinet Ministers to leave in disgrace in recent months.
A week when the Prime Minister could not get her own proposals for a customs union through her Cabinet committee.
Turnout was around 30 per cent. Usually in these mid-terms government supporters stay at home, giving the opposition the opportunity for victory.
This time many seemed motivated to get out and vote against what Mr Corbyn calls his ‘government in waiting’. It might be that they don’t want a Marxist government. It could be that they didn’t like Mr Corbyn’s pro-Russian stance over the nerve agent attack in Salisbury or the chemical weapons used in Syria.
And you could add to that a touch of Labour racism.
The deportation of some of the Windrush generation who lived in the UK for decades is a scandal.
Its root causes can be traced back to Theresa May’s time in the Home Office. Yet now that the scandal is public a Minister has resigned, policies have been changed and apologies issued.
Compare that to the Labour Party’s anti-Semitism scandal. Its root causes can be traced back, if not to Mr Corbyn himself, at least to his supporters. Cloying condemnations have squeezed from his lips with his best sincerity face on.
But action against it? We are still waiting and when there is an attempt to act it is overshadowed by continuing attacks on Jewish Labour MPs from members of their own party. As the party found in Barnet, Jewish voters don’t vote for anti-Semitic parties. Neither do non-Jewish voters.
But don’t hold your breath for Mr Corbyn to change anything. He comes from the hard-Left wing of Labour that is more interested in running the party than appealing to the country.
He is more certain of his own moral purity than any Pope.
Mr Corbyn has spent his career in a faction that was described as a ‘party within a party’.
Thanks to the fact you can now join Labour for less than the price of a pint, that has become a faction that has eaten the party.
Even if Mr Corbyn were to step down it is difficult to see how the grip of Momentum can be loosened unless it withers of its own accord.
Instead, excuses will be sought, repeated until they become new truths, and scapegoats found.
So Diane Abbott blames the inaction on anti-Semitism completely wrongly on Iain McNicol, the general secretary Mr Corbyn sacked, knowing that men hoping for peerages rarely speak out until they are wearing ermine.
They have their slogan that this was Labour’s ‘best result in London since 1971’ – just like they said last year’s general election defeat was the ‘biggest increase in their vote since 1945’. This is how they sell losses as victories.
The biggest loser in the local elections was Ukip, which lost 123 councillors and now has only three in all of England. Yet the party described by its own leader as the ‘Black Death’ may well be a winner. It will haunt our politics like Banquo’s ghost.
The Tories seemed to gain most votes from Ukip, winning wards in areas that voted to leave the EU.
That has already strengthened the hand of hardline Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson against the Prime Minister.
BUT Mr Corbyn is an instinctive Brexiteer who will want to win those voters over. Labour has lost voters to Ukip, who then voted to leave the EU and now seem to be voting Tory. Just as in Scotland, where traditional Labour voters voted ‘Yes’ in the referendum, flirted with the SNP and instead of returning to Labour now vote Tory.
It suits Mr Corbyn’s agenda to tack to the Brexiteers rather than the Remainers, no matter how little electoral sense that makes for his party.
In last year’s general election Labour defied expectations.
Perhaps in the face of an arrogant Tory campaign, people protested by voting for a man no one thought had a prospect of becoming Prime Minister.
Now people see there is a chance of it, opposition to the idea of it is what is really looking ‘solid’.