Who chronicles the past controls the future: a case study.
By David Cowling.
“And had the party been more united than we had been in 2016, I’m absolutely confident we could have won that [2017] general election, because it was all absolutely going our way and our manifesto was very much in tune with the way people were feeling.”
(Jeremy Corbyn, 10 April 2020 interview published by the Benn Society)
Along with many others, I have long challenged the claim that the 2017 general election outcome was a good result for Labour. The party escaped the most miserable of predicted fates and then presented that escape as on a par with triumphant past Labour victories — not far short of matching the increased vote share Labour achieved in 1997 and the share of the vote the party received in 2001. I have bored you senseless on previous occasions, setting out the electoral facts that debunk this nonsense
- how the 2015 election had seen an unprecedented turning away by voters from the Conservative and Labour parties and how their return in 2017 produced the big increases in both Labour and Conservative votes;
- how the 2017 swing from Conservative to Labour was 2% (compared with 10.2% in 1997);
- and how this supposed Labour triumph still left the party 64 seats short of a parliamentary majority.
The fact that Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour Leader despite the majority of the party’s MPs voting against him, was certainly a problem throughout his tenure. However, it seems we have a new twist to the saga: Mr Corbyn now appears to believe this was the principal reason why Labour failed to win the 2017 election — a victory that he was otherwise “absolutely confident” that Labour would have won “because it was all absolutely going our way”. What does the evidence suggest?
The open challenge to Mr Corbyn took place on 24 June, 2016, when the majority of his Shadow Cabinet resigned, provoking events that led to another Labour leadership election that he won comfortably in September. There were a variety of reasons why this June challenge to his leadership was mounted: one of them was that in May that year, Labour had lost 13 seats in the Scottish Parliament election after a nine point fall in its vote share (compared with an eight point increase in the Conservative vote that gained them an extra 16 seats). The Labour Party was led by Richard Leonard who was the favoured candidate of Mr Corbyn and his supporters in the earlier contest for the Scottish Party leadership. Also, in Wales, Labour lost outright control of the Assembly, with a near eight point fall in its vote. And in the local elections in England on the same day, Labour made a net loss of one council and eighteen seats. Also, in the EU referendum campaign that climaxed on 23 June, 2016, there had been fierce criticism of Mr Corbyn’s “lacklustre” support for the Remain campaign, despite the overwhelming majority of Labour MPs and party members backing that cause.
What did the opinion polls suggest throughout this period? The table below (1) sets out the monthly average of voting intention polls starting immediately after the 2015 general election, through to the beginning of the 2017 election campaign period. What is clear is that Labour’s poll ratings remained dire throughout this period of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership: there was no summit of public approval from which the party was toppled by treachery in the run-up to the 2017 election. When he was first elected, in September 2015, Labour’s monthly voting intention average was 32%: prior to the 2017 election, this share was only bettered once — in March 2016 — when it rose to 33%.
Table 1 Monthly average of voting intention polls
The major rebellion against Mr Corbyn among his MPs occurred towards the end of June 2016, yet, in the first four polls of July, before Mrs May became Prime Minister, Labour’s poll ratings remained broadly the same (32%). It was only in the July polls following Mrs May’s election that Labour’s share dropped (to 29%). By April 2017, Labour’s average was 26% (compared with 32% in his first month as Leader; and 30% in the month he was re-elected).
The difficulty in sustaining Mr Corbyn’s assertion that he could have won in 2017 (for me at least) is the fact that in that election, when he was, apparently, undermined by his MPs, the party gained 36 seats (and lost six); and in the 2019 election, when he was in total control of the party and the election campaign and the PLP was quiescent, the party lost 60 seats (and gained one).
The polling suggests that, from the outset, the public had a negative view of Jeremy Corbyn that he was never able to shake off. He is the only Opposition Leader in Ipsos MORI’s monthly series of party leader favourability (begun in 1977) never to have received a positive rating. There never was a honeymoon with the British electorate subsequently wrecked by disloyal and poisonous individuals within the party: the longer voters knew Mr Corbyn, the more dissatisfied they seemed to become.
Table 2 Ipsos MORI party leader favourability series
We are not dealing here with early Labour Party history; these events took place over the past five years. We were all there. From the very outset of his leadership, Jeremy Corbyn’s views on the IRA and Hamas and on a number of other issues, including the British nuclear deterrent and membership of NATO, were all publicised. Forty years of his activism among fringe political groups were crawled over and documented. All of which contributed to the public’s consistent opinion that he was not ready to be Prime Minister:
Table 3 Q To what extent, if at all, do you agree or disagree with the following statements?
Jeremy Corbyn is ready to be Prime Minister
Source: Ipsos MORI
What happened during the 2017 election campaign to justify Jeremy Corbyn’s claim that he was robbed of victory? The most accurate of the final campaign polls in 2017 was published by Survation. In the table below, I have listed all nine polls they produced during the campaign.
Table 4 2017 Campaign polls
[Polls sampled following 18 April 2017 announcement of a general election]
*Internet polls
The table repeats what we already know: the Conservatives began the 2017 election with a strong lead that led to early predictions of 100–150 seat majorities; then, as its disastrous campaign unfolded and crashed in flames, the Conservative vote started to fall and Labour’s to rise; but in the final week (the three June polls above) everything seemed to stall. Lord Ashcroft’s ‘On the Day’ poll of 14,300 people who voted in the 2017 election offered a number of reasons why millions of individuals voted the way they did.
Table 5 Main reason for voting
In terms of motives and promises, Labour led the Conservatives. In terms of competence, running the economy and simply being a better Prime Minister, the Conservatives led Labour. Although the poll’s voting intention figures had the Conservatives 2-points ahead of Labour, on the question of which of the respective party leaders would make the best Prime Minister, Mrs May registered a 13-point lead over Jeremy Corbyn.
Table 6
At the 2017 general election, Ipsos MORI recorded the biggest swing from Conservative to Labour among the middle class and the biggest swing from Labour to the Conservatives among the white working class since 1979. Labour’s vote increased by 3.5 million in 2017 (compared with the 2015 election) and the Conservative vote increased by 2.3 million. The biggest swings to Labour in 2017 were in London, the South East and South West regions; the smallest swings were in the Midlands and the North of England. Jeremy Corbyn was no champion runner robbed of his Olympic gold by evil trip-wire cunningly concealed 100 yards from the winning post. I do not recall any cries of “we woz robbed” in the aftermath of the 2017 election, just astonished sighs of relief that Labour had not been slaughtered. But now it appears, unbeknownst to the rest of us, Labour stood on the threshold of government. Voters were totally on their side because their policies spoke to the heart of the nation. But then they had to watch their greatest hopes and ambitions shattered by the treachery of fifth columnists within the party itself. This really is nonsense on stilts.
The most telling part of this whole episode for me is the absence of any mention of the disastrous failure of 2019: it appears that Mr Corbyn and his supporters want his grand finale to be entirely about the election he might have won, rather than the election he definitely lost. It is understandable that both he and they should want to create such a chronicle; it would, however, be quite extraordinary if anyone else subscribed to it. For we have here the making of a gothic drama — little less than a political version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. How else to explain the man who delivered the ‘near-miss’ of 2017 and then the disastrous failure of 2019?
Mr Corbyn and his entourage were the sole architects of Labour’s failure in 2019. They controlled the Leader’s Office, the Shadow Cabinet, the NEC and the party organisation; they determined the manifesto as well as the organisation of the election campaign. The PLP was quiescent. The Conservatives reaped the benefit of that election but it was no great electoral triumph; they increased their vote share by 1.3 points. The election result was gifted to them by Labour whose share fell 8 points and who lost 60 seats, finishing polling day with their fewest MPs since 1935. In the end we are asked to believe that, surrounded by internal enemies, Mr Corbyn almost won an election but when he was free of such shackles, against all the historical odds when offered the chance to topple a savagely divided, three-term government party, he lost an election disastrously.
It takes quite a degree of chutzpah to concentrate solely on 2017’s election. Fortunately, Shakespeare had a genius for skewering such hubris: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing”.
David Cowling is a visiting senior research fellow at the policy institute at King’s College, London. He has been involved in the analysis of opinion polls and voting in every UK general election since 1987, first as ITN’s political analyst and then as the BBC’s Editor of Political Research.
Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash
