Jeremy Corbyn is deluded if he thinks Labour is remotely ready for an election
When Jeremy Corbyn told Labour members last week that “we’re ready and chomping at the bit for an election”, one can only assume that he was using the royal we.
With the exception of the leader, it’s hard to find anyone in Labour who believes that the party is anywhere near ready for an election – and most MPs are clearly quite terrified at the prospect of one.
And well they should be. According to a YouGov poll out this week, the Conservatives are now outperforming the opposition in London – meaning that Labour is behind in every single region of the UK. Worse still, Labour can’t even count on the youth vote: Boris Johnson leads Corbyn among voters aged 18-24.
Let that sink in. After nearly a decade of Tory dominance, the Labour party is not only comprehensively failing to pick up support, but is also haemorrhaging voters in its strongholds.
Why? In general terms, contrary to Corbyn’s belief that he can repeat his surprisingly not-dreadful performance in the June 2017 election (which he seems to conveniently forget that he lost), a lot has changed in the past two years.
Not only has the Conservative party abandoned its unpopular rhetoric about austerity (now aping Labour’s sky-high financial commitments to public services) and found itself a far more engaging campaigner as leader than Theresa May, but Boris, Jo Swinson and Nigel Farage all have crystal-clear Brexit positions – something that Corbyn manifestly lacks.
More specifically, Labour is being squeezed on either side by the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats. Places like Battersea (a landmark win for Labour off the Tories in 2015) and Finchley and Golders Green (where Labour had been hoping to count on strong anti-Brexit sentiment to win back a Tory seat) have become three-way battlegrounds, and it’s Swinson’s party which is making the most headway.
You might have thought that urban areas filled with middle-class millennial graduates would be the perfect base for a party opposed to the Conservatives’ vision of Brexit.
But while such voters may be ardent Remainers, they are far from natural Corbynites, and now Swinson is banging the Revoke drum they’re flocking to the Liberal Democrats in their droves.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Labour is struggling to keep the Brexit Party at bay. Conventional wisdom dictates that the Tories will suffer the most from the resurrection of Farage, but that’s not necessarily the case.
In 2017, the Conservatives found it difficult to win northern seats off Labour, because although places like Boston and Skegness are packed with Brexiteers, cultural antipathy towards the Tories in the north of England runs deep. Former mining communities couldn’t bring themselves to vote for May, so, with heavy hearts, they opted for Corbyn.
This time around, they’ve got another option – and you can bet that they’ll use it.
And that’s just the basic electoral maths. Still mired in an antisemitism scandal, riven with internal division, and unable to come up with a proper line on the most important issue of the day, it’s hard to think of a time in history when the Labour party has been less prepared for a General Election.
Who does Corbyn think he’s kidding?
Main image credit: Getty