Britain's Socialist Revolution? Not Gonna Happen
A bizarre thing is happening in Labour, Britain’s main left-wing party. After the humiliating defeat of Ed Miliband, Labour’s center-left leader at the General Election in May, Labour Party members are now threatening to elect Jeremy Corbyn, a greybeard socialist with a Lenin cap, as their leader. Internal polls conducted by the other candidates and also public polling carried out by the British polling company Yougov show Corbyn with a commanding lead in the votes of Labour Party members.
The interests of Labour Party members and Labour Members of Parliament are not always aligned. In this case, the far-flung membership is supporting Corbyn, but the MPs want anybody else. Their priority is getting re-elected, not making a political statement. However, their priority doesn't count for much. In Labour, unlike in American parties, anybody who has paid to be a member or registered supporter can vote for its leadership. Anyone who pays the fee (which can be as low as $4.70) can vote. The voting is done by mail or online, so voter fraud is easy.
Taking advantage of this, some supporters of the Conservatives have signed up to Labour in order to vote for Corbyn, in the belief that this admirer of Hugo Chavez who has called Hamas and Hezbollah his “friends” would prove unelectable nationally. Peculiarly, these Conservatives stand accused of wildly underestimating Corbyn’s potential to win a General Election. According to some misguided commentators, Jeremy Corbyn might change the terms of British political debate, build a coalition of voters from across the political spectrum and be carried into office on a wave of celebration of his “authenticity.”
But Corbyn has no chance of winning a General Election. He is indeed authentic; a vegetarian who grows much of his own food and cycles everywhere, buys his clothes at market stalls and says “we all owe something to Marx.” But authenticity alone will not make him Prime Minister, and taking a cursory look at the British electorate should dispel most notions that Britain would elect somebody like Corbyn.
At the General Election in May, the Labour Party won 30 percent of the national vote under Ed Miliband, its most left-wing leader in more than 25 years. For a more radical politician to get more votes and stand a chance of becoming Prime Minister requires several, if not all, of the following unlikely scenarios:
1. At least some of the people who switched their votes from Labour to Conservative in 2015 would have to switch back. They're the swing voters who make the difference in the English marginal constituencies. These are people who voted Conservative largely because they believe Labour “lacked economic credibility,” wanted to tax hard-workers, was “in the pocket of the unions” and was “not tough enough on immigration.” Jeremy Corbyn thinks he can fund public infrastructure projects by printing more money, or in his words, “People’s Quantitative Easing.” He has said he will raise taxes. He is backed by more of the unions than all of the other candidates put together, and also has the support of Britain’s derelict Communist Party. He is reportedly in favor of open borders, and is certainly pro-immigration. These crucial marginal voters are unlikely to be convinced by Corbyn when they weren't by Miliband.
2. Corbyn would have to hold onto centrist Labour voters. His strategy seems partly that he could be expected to reel into Labour a good number of those who voted for the ultra-left Green Party (5 percent of the electorate). But how many, realistically? Half of them? Surely not. Even if he succeeds in absorbing many of the far-left environmentalists with his promises of full nuclear disarmament and a nationalized energy industry, this does him no good if these policies repel Labour’s realist, centrist voters, and even around 30-40 percent of members, who may then find other parties more suitable.
3. Scotland. Policies that appeal to the Greens will usually appeal to the Scottish Nationalists, who now tend to poll well above 50 percent in Scotland. Labour’s left is banking on retaking some of these voters. This is naïve on two levels. First, the SNP is not primarily a policy-driven movement. It is a nationalist Zeitgeist that shows little sign of abating. Some SNP voters might switch back to a radicalized far-left Labour, but for many of them there would be no point. Secondly, the dominance of the SNP is so huge that the swing to Labour would have to be enormous for them to gain a worthwhile number of parliamentary seats in Scotland.
4. Corbyn would potentially have to appeal to disenfranchised, white, working-class protest-voters – i.e., UKIP (13 percent of the electorate). These are voters whose primary concern is overwhelmingly immigration, particularly Islamic immigration. Corbyn is restrained from actively bidding for these voters by his pro-immigration stance and Labour’s close ties with Muslim communities. There's no obvious route from UKIP to Corbyn unless he becomes the next protest-vote Zeitgeist, or sides with the campaign to leave the EU in Britain’s forthcoming referendum. This is unlikely.
5. Corbyn would have to turn non-voters into Labour voters. In addition, these voters would have to move to different constituencies. It is true that 34 percent of the electorate didn’t vote. But turnout figures show that non-voters are vastly more likely to live in safe Labour seats anyway. If non-votes had counted as votes for a “None of the above” party, the Conservatives would have retained 208 of their constituencies, while Labour would have retained 42. For Labour to make anything of this situation, a successful targeting operation that assumed non-voters in marginal seats to be monolithically far-left would be needed. However, polls suggest that non-voters wouldn’t necessarily be in love with Corbyn’s Trotskyism. “Ensuring that we have a stable economy is identified as the top priority by a majority of voters and non-voters alike, with job creation not far behind,” according to UK polling company Survation.
Even allowing for another financial crisis to undermine the Conservatives’ claims of economic competence, it requires a deep disdain for the intelligence of the British people to suggest that they would elect somebody who thinks he can pay for the state by printing more money and hiking taxes. The center-left Fabian Society's polling has 76 percent of unaffiliated voters saying that Labour is already less electable than it was at the election.
And if Labour members do elect Corbyn as their leader he might not even survive until 2020. Labour MPs are already plotting a coup to depose him if he is elected, and could do so quickly. It’s also worth remembering that the last time such left-wingers were at the top of the Labour Party there was a schism and a new, center-left Social Democratic Party was formed. There’s no good reason why Labour couldn’t commit the same electoral suicide thirty years on, if they really wanted to.
Jeremy Corbyn’s chances of becoming PM are remote. Perhaps there is a universe where, in 2020, Prime Minister Corbyn and President Trump sit together on the UN Security Council. It probably isn’t this one.
Nicholas Stone is a contributor to Economics21. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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