Labour’s love lost

Just as it seems that Labour has reached the bottom of the abyss, Jeremy Corbyn and his party somehow manage to find a new low. The latest nationwide poll puts them at 24 per cent, trailing the Tories by 16 points. No wonder Labour MPs look so boot-faced around Parliament, and an increasing number are hunting for jobs elsewhere. If a general election were called now, the Conservatives would win a huge majority. Labour would be further than ever from power, arguably even finished as a major parliamentary force.

Polls are not rock-solid indicators of future electoral success or failure, but Labour’s ratings are so abysmal as to suggest a party facing an existential crisis. Labour’s support in Scotland is now as low as 14 per cent, which may lead to another humiliation in the coming council elections. Corbyn’s approval ratings are extraordinarily bad. Any which way you cut the demographic — old and young, Leave and Remain, northern and southern, male and female, those who voted Labour at the last election and those who didn’t — Labour’s leader has a net negative rating, usually a big one. The polling company YouGov has found that for the first time in the party’s history, Labour ranks behind Ukip and the Conservatives among lower-income voters — this in spite of Ukip’s increasingly shambolic performance. Corbyn could fall lower still — no-one has attacked him in any significant way for his support of Hamas, the IRA or the disastrous experiment in socialism that is Venezuela (see p. 14).

For all his faults, however, Corbyn is a symptom rather than the cause of this malaise. Deeper shifts in politics are tearing Labour apart. The party is bitterly divided over Brexit. Seven out of every ten Labour constituencies, particularly those in the north of England, voted to leave the European Union.