LONDON — Bloodbath. Massacre. Slaughter. Take your pick. Any adjective that characterizes a brutal loss will describe the shellacking that Britain’s main opposition party, the center-left Labour Party, seems fated to suffer in the United Kingdom’s June 8 general electmon.
Labour is facing a defeat of potentially existential proportions mainly for one reason: Jeremy Corbyn. He’s the shambolic, unabashedly socialist and widely unpopular leader of the party, a man most voters seem unwilling to hand the reins of power.
The electorate’s distaste for Corbyn undoubtedly factored in Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May’s surprising decision on April 18 to call for a snap election. May, who was appointed premier by her party last July and has yet to face voters, also see the election as a means to hand her a popular mandate before starting two years of Brexit negotiations that will shape Britain’s exit the European Union.
The campaign officially begins on May 3 with the dissolution of Parliament, and current polling aggregators show Labour badly trailing May’s Tory party by around 16.5 to 18 points. If that gap holds, Labour, which currently has 230 seats in Parliament, would see its total plummet, perhaps to as low as 150 — a nadir it’s not scraped since 1935.
Of course, the polls here were infamously wrong in 2015 when they predicted that the Labour and Conservative parties were essentially tied, and that Labour would likely govern with a coalition of other smaller, left-leaning parties. Instead the Tories eked out a narrow 12-seat majority. But even if current polls aren’t accurate, they’re not likely to be off enough to give Labour any hope.
Polls here historically tend to overestimate Labour’s share of the vote. “So the loss they are facing could be somewhat worse,” says Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at the University of Nottingham.
To be sure, Corbyn has his supporters, mainly Labour’s grass-roots members. But they lean much further to the left than most Labour MPs, not to mention most U.K. voters. Many leading party members regularly describe him as disorganized and inept, and 75 percent of Labour MPs voted “no confidence” in Corbyn last summer.
Few of Corbyn’s hard-left views resonate with mainstream voters. He supports renationalizing railways and utilities, and placing a cap on individual earnings. He’s anti-NATO, and has referred to members of Hamas and Hezbollah, the fundamentalist Islamist organizations, as “my friends.” And last year a cross-party Parliamentary report alleged that Corbyn’s Labour Party had become too cozy with anti-Semites.
“A majority of voters simply do not share his values, or think that he is strong and competent enough to be prime minister,” says Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary, University of London.
Additionally, while it may not be fair to judge a politician on how he looks, people still do, Fielding says. And the perpetually disheveled Corbyn “looks like a geography teacher. He doesn’t look like a leader.” Because of widespread public disdain for Corbyn, 67, even Labour policies that should appeal to voters — like more funding for the National Health Service and cutting university tuitions — don’t gain traction. “The products are not so bad,” Bale says, “it’s the salesman.”
However, the elephant in the voting booth is Brexit. The Labour Party is trying to make the June election one that focuses on issues ranging from NHS funding to public services. But that’s an uphill effort. “Essentially this election is about who should be in charge to negotiate Brexit,” Fielding says. And for most voters, the answer to that question isn’t Corbyn.
May has opted for a so-called “hard Brexit,” or also pulling out of the EU’s 500-million-person single market — which includes free movement of people — so Britain can curb immigration. That may turn out to be a bad choice, but at least it’s a clear one.
Labour’s Brexit stance is more muddled. It says it wants to remain in the single market, but also limit free movement — a position that’s a nonstarter with EU negotiators. Historically, Corbyn’s been pro-immigration. But he’s also been anti-EU, because the hard left dislikes Europe’s free-market capitalism. Nevertheless, Corbyn supported staying in the EU during last year’s referendum. But his efforts were so half-hearted he was accused by some as trying to sabotage the Remain campaign.
Meanwhile, Labour is now giving lip service to reigning in immigration because a large number of traditional party supporters voted for Brexit, largely because of concerns over immigration. There are justifiable fears that many of those voters will flee to the anti-immigration U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) or even the Conservatives.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led Labour to three election victories by dragging it toward the middle, says the party should make Brexit central to its campaign. He’s urging it to call for a second referendum on whatever agreement May’s government reaches with the EU. But Blair is unpopular with the party these days because he steered Britain into joining the disastrous Iraq War. And grass-roots members largely swarmed to Corbyn because they said Labour’s centrist approach led to its defeat two years ago.
If a Labour rout next month is a foregone conclusion, a Corbyn retreat to the backbenches isn’t, even though party leaders usually step down after a loss. “I think he has no intention of doing that,” says Paul Webb, a professor of politics at the University of Sussex.
Instead, Corbyn may wait until the party’s annual conference in September, when his supporters will seek to change the rules for picking a party leader to make it easier for another unreconstructed leftie to replace him. It’s no sure thing that Corbyn supporters will prevail. But if they do, “that might be too much for some MPs to bear,” Webb says, and they might opt to splinter into a new centrist party, possibly joining forces with the Liberal Democrats who occupy the middle of the road. “We are,” Webb says, “looking at the possibility of a realignment.”
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Jeremy Corbyn Appears to Be Leading Britain?s Labour to Defeat originally appeared on usnews.com
