Labour’s friends deliver tough news
SOMETIMES it takes a friend to deliver tough news. The Fabians are not just friends of Labour, they are an affiliated socialist society that has been instrumental in the party’s development – and they do not hold back in describing the extent of the crisis it now faces.
The title of today’s report describes Labour predicament: Stuck: How Labour is Too Weak to Win, and Too Strong to Die.
For Labour supporters, this will provide bedtime reading more frightening than any Stephen King novel. The report suggests the party’s vote share could tumble to 20%, pushing its tally of MPs down from today’s 231 to a mere 140.
With admirable candour, the report states that winning a majority of just one is now “currently unthinkable”.
But there is a silver lining to the report. It stops well short of predicting annihilation.
Britain’s First Past the Post voting stem represents, it argues, a firebreak which makes it just about impossible for any other party to supplant it as the biggest Opposition group. Ukip is not expected, at least in this analysis, to win a large number of seats.
The study of the polls further suggests that there is a real possibility that Labour could “govern in partnership with other centre left parties”. Such talk will trigger memories of the long lead-up to the 2015 election. Commentators spent years explaining why a hung parliament was likely and how nationalist parties, together with what remained of the Lib Dems, might be able to work with Labour to keep the Conservatives out of power.
David Cameron merrily exploited such chatter and sought to scare Middle England with the prospect of Ed Miliband governing in partnership with the SNP.
In the end, the Tories won an outright majority and pundits were almost as gobsmacked as they would be by the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump.
Recent electoral earthquakes will cause some in the Labour tribe to treat the Fabian poll-based prognostications with scepticism. Mr Corbyn’s supporters hope he will prove that he can deliver astounding victories in a general election and not just in leadership contests.
But the report does show that winning a majority will be exceptionally tough so long as it has just one Scottish MP. A meltdown in post-industrial England and in Wales would be catastrophic.
Can it rebuild in Scotland while articulating a distinctively English message that will counter Ukip and Conservative populism?
Equally, can it stop these parties luring away pro-Brexit voters while also preventing the Lib Dems winning the support of people who wish Labour had done much more to fight the case for staying in the EU?
Labour will never see a revival in the polls if the coming years are defined by internal warfare which voters will see as self-indulgence.
To taste power, it will need a spirit of fraternity both within its ranks and potentially in discussions with Commons partners. The Western Mail newspaper is published by Media Wales a subsidiary company of Trinity Mirror PLC, which is a member of IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation. The entire contents of The Western Mail are the copyright of Media Wales Ltd. It is an offence to copy any of its contents in any way without the company’s permission. If you require a licence to copy parts of it in any way or form, write to the Head of Finance at Six Park Street. The recycled paper content of UK newspapers in 2014 was 78.5%