Corbyn’s contortions
There were no chants of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” at Glastonbury this summer, said Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express. And no wonder: he has led Labour to the “brink of collapse”; its support is haemorrhaging at an alarming rate. An opinion poll last week put Labour in fourth place on only 18% – behind the Conservatives on 24%, the Brexit Party on 23% and the Lib Dems on 20% – its lowest rating since the dark days of Gordon Brown’s premiership in 2009. One major problem – highlighted in a Panorama documentary on Wednesday – is the rampant anti-Semitism of so many party members. Three Labour peers resigned this week in protest at Corbyn’s abysmal failure to confront this “sickening” behaviour.
But the key issue, said the New Statesman, is Corbyn’s inability to sort out his Brexit policy. At the 2017 election, Labour’s ambiguity on this front was an asset: it allowed both Leavers and Remainers to imagine the party favoured their preferred outcome. But once Theresa May had repeatedly failed to pass a Brexit deal, Corbyn needed to take a decisive stand in favour of a second referendum. That was never going to happen, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times, because the small clique around Corbyn – his chief of staff, Karie Murphy; his aide, Andrew Murray; his director of strategy, Seumas Milne; and Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite – are all instinctive Eurosceptics, convinced the working class would be better off outside the EU. This week, however, Corbyn felt compelled to announce that Labour will now support a second referendum, said The Daily Telegraph. But it was an obvious fudge. By saying he’d only call a referendum “on any deal the Conservatives reach with the EU or in the event of a no-deal withdrawal”, he left open the possibility of campaigning for Brexit at a general election. His gambit drew cheers from Remainer MPs, but it left everyone else “none the wiser”.
The phrase “existential crisis” is overused, said Nick Cohen in The Spectator. But it is “hard to find a better description” of a party whose members and supporters “overwhelmingly oppose” Brexit, but whose leaders and senior advisers – despite last week’s partial concession – still “cling to the old communist party line that the EU is a ‘capitalist club’”. Desperate to bring back a sense of order and purpose, Labour’s disaffected deputy leader, Tom Watson, is said to be preparing a “hostile challenge” for the top job. Someone certainly needs to. “Even Labour can’t stagger on like this indefinitely.” But there are those at the top of the party who believe “someone is running to save them”, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. And that someone is Boris Johnson. Their thinking is that a Boris premiership will force disaffected Remainers to return to the Labour fold, because Labour will be seen as the only party with a realistic chance of dislodging Johnson. Well, maybe so. But don’t forget May took the same line when she gambled, in 2017, that the electorate would be so repelled by Corbyn that it would swing back towards the Tories. And we all know how that ended.