Daniel Hannan:
Deep down, we can’t really imagine it happening in Britain. We tell ourselves that extremism is something that afflicts more excitable peoples. A PM who took the Kremlin line during the Cold War? A grimly unfunny Citizen Smith bent on expropriating private pensions, private schools and private companies? A leader who has never backed his own country in a quarrel with others? We are surely a more level-headed nation than that. Aren’t we?
My friends, brace yourselves. The idea that It Can’t Happen Here has a major flaw, namely that it is already happening here. At the last election, in defiance of all the opinion polls, Jeremy Corbyn won 40 per cent of the vote and came within a whisker of power. Since the election campaign began this time, Labour has risen by somewhere between eight, nine or ten points, according to the different polls.
Ponder that. Sure, a chunk of our electorate, as of any electorate, is broadly Left-of-Centre. Sure, there are Labour loyalists, just as there are Tory loyalists, who back their party on tribal grounds. But that cannot explain why the figure is rising. What can people have heard during the past three weeks from Corbyn, or from Richard Burgon or Diane Abbott or John McDonnell, that has made them more likely to back Labour than they were before?
Corbyn has a Trump-like ability to get away with things which, according to all the established rules, ought to make him unelectable.
The revelation that he worked with diplomats from Warsaw Pact states during the Cold War should rule him out of contention. The fact that the former head of MI6 is moved to describe him as a “present danger to our country” ought to put his unfitness for office beyond doubt. Corbyn’s repeated and open dalliance with Britain’s enemies would until very recently have been considered a disqualification, and not only by the Right. Even The Guardian used to deplore Corbyn’s “romantic attachment to the IRA”.
Yet the old boob has not been felled by any of these blows. On the contrary, he rises higher each time. One after another, his MPs walk away, warning that Corbynism means the end of the non-Marxist Labour Party Britain has known for the past 100 years. Yet Corbyn gains support.
His economic plans are received with slack-jawed horror by every analyst: no one, not even the most committed Momentum fanatic, truly thinks that Britain can pull off a budget increase equivalent to creating an entire new NHS each year simply by taxing the top five per cent. But, again, Corbyn gains support.
The Chief Rabbi is driven to make an unprecedented intervention in politics to warn people against Labour’s antiSemitism – an intervention made all the more powerful by the poor man’s visible discomfort at having to speak out. Yet still, somehow, Corbyn gains support.
In a normal world, any one of these developments would put the election beyond doubt. Yet the race keeps tightening. What is going on? The explanation may owe something to the sheer profusion of media outlets. Never before has it been so easy to find facts, or purported facts, that sustain your prejudices.
Talking to Corbynistas, especially first-time voters, I am struck by how many of them march to drums inaudible to the rest of us. In their milieu, the story is of a principled leader who stands up for the poor against a government of billionaires.
Their online timelines are filled with near-deranged reports about rising poverty, tax cuts for the rich and Americans buying the NHS.
These narratives don’t intersect with reality. Poverty is falling in both relative and absolute terms. According to the IFS, the number of people suffering from severe deprivation has dropped by a fifth since 2010. Unemployment keeps dropping, and Boris Johnson proposes to take low-paid workers out of National Insurance while raising the minimum wage. There are more doctors and nurses in the NHS than ever before. But, if you don’t like these facts, you can now shop around for alternative ones.
On the headline figures, the Conservatives lead by around eight, nine or 10 points. But many individual constituencies are close to level-pegging and, as the New Statesman’s Stephen Bush puts it, “we are a normal-sized polling error away from a Labour government”.
Bear in mind the following factors. First, this election is being fought on outdated boundaries. In a staggering act of partisanship in 2013, MPs voted to reject the work of the Boundary Commission – in other words, they blocked the independent review that brings constituencies into line with the census data. That unprecedented vote will exacerbate a phenomenon that has been a feature of most recent elections, namely that it takes more ballots, on average, to elect a Conservative MP than a Labour MP.
Second, there is an unusually high rate of voter registration. Some 3.9million people have joined the electoral roll in the past year, two thirds of them in the under-35 age group that is Labour’s most dependable base. There have been reports from university towns around the country of students being enrolled en masse without being asked. When Labour leads the Conservatives among students by 72 per cent to 8, this matters.
Third, the Tories need an absolute majority. If they fall short, by even half a dozen seats, we end up with a coalition of the losers: a Lib-Lab-SNP consortium that will force through new referendums on the issues that were supposed to have been settled by once-in-a-lifetime votes in 2014 and 2016, namely Scottish independence and EU membership.
Fourth, some Labour MPs may hold their seats because of Nigel Farage’s insistence on running candidates – candidates who stand no chance of winning but who, if the polls are to be believed, take twice as much support from the Conservatives as from Labour.
And consider one more thing. In past elections, there was a phenomenon known as the “shy Tory factor”. When public discourse casts Labour as compassionate but the Conservatives as selfish, some Conservatives become reluctant to reveal their allegiance. Pollsters have since tweaked their methodology and, in any case, Boris Johnson has removed the taint of embarrassment associated with the party during John Major’s lamentable leadership. But I wonder whether this election might see the converse, namely a “shy Labour factor”.
Which party, after all, now carries the greater social stigma? Few voters mind admitting that they back Johnson’s plans for new hospitals, better mobile phone coverage and extra police. But Labour? This week, the Jewish Labour Movement produced a report on abuse at party meetings – members being called “Tory Jew”, “Zio scum” and the like. It told a disgusting story of cover-ups designed to protect favoured far-Left activists.
In such a climate, might some Labour voters become shifty when it comes to admitting that their dislike of Conservatives crowds out their sympathy with minorities? Sir Richard Evans, the Leftist historian, recently declared that “the failure to deal with anti- Semitism in the party makes me very angry, but in my constituency only Labour can beat the Tory”. That remark provoked such a backlash that he ended up backing down. (Or said he was backing down: there is obviously no way of knowing what he will do in the privacy of the polling station.)
We don’t know how many voters will shamefacedly allow their Euroenthusiasm to trump their concern for persecuted minorities. But an alarming number of people seem to have lost their moral bearings as a consequence of the 2016 referendum, moving from “Brexit
Corbyn has a Trump-like ability to get away with things that ought to make him unelectable
How many voters will allow their Euro-enthusiasm to trump their concern for persecuted minorities?
is racist!” to “Vote for the racist to stop Brexit!”
For all this, though, I remain optimistic. Labour is repeating the mistake it made during the referendum, treating voters as thickos. Its insistence that we are living in Dickensian conditions doesn’t match most people’s experience. More people are in work than ever. Wages are rising. The deficit is back to pre-Gordon Brown levels. Our schools are shooting up the international league tables.
Worse than assuming that voters lack brains is assuming that they lack empathy – specifically, that they are not concerned about the welfare of their Jewish neighbours. Earlier this week a Brighton rabbi reported: “I was forced to light Chanukah candles under police protection, Corbynista militants were discovered organising a march against my synagogue.” My guess is that almost all Britons, Left or Right, Jewish or gentile, will be uneasy and a little ashamed to read those words. On Thursday we can show the world, and ourselves, that we are still the people we were.