Conversely

The best thing about Andrew Rawnsley’s latest weekly exercise in self-parody is this comment, by one mwhite:

Like most Guardian columnists, Andrew Rawnsley seems to believe that the adjectives “unelectable” and “unelected” are interchangeable when applied to Jeremy Corbyn. If he was unelectable, then his centrist predecessors, Brown and Miliband, were even more so since Corbyn increased Labour’s share of the vote by 10 points in 2017. 

Even in 2019 he won a larger share of the vote (32%) than either of them – and this in the face of a vicious and unparalleled media campaign of character assassination and despite being forced by his own party to promise another referendum, thus turning the Labour manifesto into the longest suicide note in history.

Predictably, since two thirds of Britain’s parliamentary constituencies had voted for Brexit and 75% of the electorate didn’t want another referendum (Opinium, 26/10/2019), Labour lost 54 seats, 52 of which had voted Leave in 2016. Equally predictable were the conclusions of the Ashcroft post-election survey, which showed that 73% of the voters who switched from Labour to Tory did so to “get Brexit done”.

As for the claim that Corbyn was a vote loser, the reality is that only 4% of voters regarded him as the most important factor affecting their vote (JL Partners, 13/12/2019), whilst YouGov polls consistently indicated that most of his unpopularity was down to Labour’s reversal of its commitment to Brexit, for which voters held him personally responsible.

But the real architect of this U-turn was shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer who, according to Michael Ashcroft’s biography, deliberately sabotaged cross party talks to agree a common approach to Brexit by insisting that any deal should be subject to a second referendum. This is confirmed by Theresa May’s Chief of Staff, Gavin Barwell, who wrote in his 2021 book (Chief of Staff: Notes from Downing Street) that “Keir … killed off any last chance of a Brexit compromise”.

It is telling that Starmer reversed his pro-EU stance as soon as he became leader – which makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that he deliberately exploited Brexit divisions to engineer Labour’s 2019 election defeat and help him win the party’s next leadership election.

Because centrism is a cult which worships the pursuit of power for its own sake, its disciples venerate the arch-opportunist Tony Blair, the last Labour leader to win a general election. But they overlook the 20 point plus poll lead Blair inherited from his predecessor John Smith – which was wiped out by 13 years of New Labourism as 5 million voters deserted the party.

And they conveniently forget that Blair was supported by the Murdoch press, faced hopeless Tory leaders like Duncan Smith, Hague and Howard, and was guaranteed the votes of nearly half the electorate in Scotland, most of which Labour lost to the SNP during the 2014 referendum campaign. Corbyn enjoyed none of these advantages. Yet his election performances in England (34% of the vote in 2019 and 42% in 2017) still stand comparison with Blair’s (34% of the vote in 2005, 41% in 2001 and 43% in 1997).

Conversely, Keir Starmer, the liberal media’s centrist messiah, is less popular than Corbyn (YouGov, 6/10/2021), and leads an opposition whose poll advantage over an unprecedentedly corrupt and incompetent government is still only 5% (Opinium, (08/07/2022), narrower than under Ed Miliband’s failed leadership at the same stage of the election cycle. And the same opinion poll reveals that only 28% of voters think that Starmer would make a better prime minister than Johnson.