This morning the Labour party is waking up to both disaster and relief. Disaster because the party is falling into third place in the Scottish Parliament – and third to the Conservatives, a party it has long teased for being unpopular and unacceptable north of the border. And relief because so far in English council seats, Labour is holding its own in a way that pollsters did not predict. If today does, as widely expected, finish with a victory for Sadiq Khan in the London mayoral contest, Jeremy Corbyn can face his critics in his party with a fair amount of confidence. He can even brush off the humiliation of coming third in the Holyrood elections because disaster for Labour in Scotland has been priced in for a good long time.
With around two-thirds of councils declared so far, Labour has so far made net losses of 24 seats, which is considerably less than the 150 seats predicted by Rallings and Thrasher. Its share of the vote is up on 4 per cent on last year, and the party held Crawley and Southampton.
Now, these results may well fit the narrative that Corbyn ended up (rather clumsily) crafting this week that his party wasn’t in the business of losing seats. They are certainly the mixed bag that wise owls in his party thought they would be – and will probably have the impact that those wise owls predicted of making a coup rather difficult as the large number of nervous Labour MPs just won’t think this is the right time to move against the leader. But as Jo Cox has made clear in her response to the election results this morning, the party should be gaining substantial numbers of English council seats if it wants to win a general election in 2020, not just treading water.
The problem is that this point may well be lost on the party membership, who will accuse the plotters of crying wolf about the disastrous impact Corbyn has had on his party. And that means that the great fear expressed by moderates even before the leadership contest was over, which was that Corbyn could appear to do OK for a few years before seeing the party collapse in a General Election, is starting to be realised.
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