Corbyn loves an election. Shame he’s stuck in 1983

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2019/jun/02/general-election-jeremy-corbyn-labour-tories-brexit

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Jeremy Corbyn really wants a general election. He blows hot and cold on a second referendum, but he’s always up for an election. I don’t think it’s a tactical thing – after last weekend’s European election results, his grounds for optimism are pretty shaky – I think he just likes general elections. “Let’s get back into the fray and stick it to the Tories!” is the feeling. I reckon it relaxes him. It’s a simple scenario: he knows which direction to strive in and to strive as hard as he can. He can stop losing at political chess and get back to the tug of war.

At heart he’s such a conservative. Small “C”, I hasten to emphasise. I’m not saying he isn’t leftwing. But he’s old school leftwing. He’s determined to find a way of winning the 1983 general election for Labour – it’s his Kobayashi Maru and he’s going to crack it. He’s a sincere reformer, a progressive, a socialist – it’s just his starting point doesn’t happen to be the current date. It’s like he wants to live in an Amish community and expend all his energy trying to persuade them to get a steam plough.

There’s a chance he’ll get his wish (the election, not the steam plough). With nearly 10% of the people who voted Tory a week ago now standing for the leadership of the party, you could be forgiven for thinking the Conservatives would avoid going to the polls, but I’m not so sure. The increasingly extreme no-deal rhetoric of most of the contenders suggests to me that, the party’s disastrous showing at the European elections notwithstanding, they’ve spotted an electoral opportunity.

It was when Jeremy Hunt got into trouble that I started to suspect. He said that a no-deal Brexit would be “political suicide”, but refused to rule it out if he became leader. Interesting that he sees political suicide as a viable option for his party – it would certainly get my vote. But more troubling was the fact that his unenthusiastic view of a no-deal outcome caused him to start haemorrhaging the support of moderate Conservative MPs – the ones desperate to find some alternative to either Boris Johnson or, for those who like a less charismatic and intelligent maniac, Dominic Raab.

Suddenly, in the context of deciding who is to be the country’s next prime minister, ruling out no-deal is on the extreme left of the available options – only Rory Stewart, who hasn’t got a chance, has done that. In reality the nation is divided, not between hard and soft Brexiters, but between Leave and Remain. Until 2016 that was also what divided the Conservative party. Now, in Tory circles, remaining is beyond the pale and leaving in any sort of ordered way is crypto-socialist scare-mongering.

It’s like he wants to live in an Amish community and expend all his energy trying to persuade them to get a steam plough

Nigel Farage is the key to all this, though not entirely in the way he would like. The Tories’ humbling by the Brexit party in the European elections is not necessarily as bad news for them as it looks. Pretty much all those Brexit votes – that 31% of the turnout – could easily go to the Tories in a vote that actually matters. People are always keener to vote Farage when it doesn’t matter, which is why his entire professional political career has been spent in the European parliament, not a proper one. How perverse that he’s dedicated his life to destroying the only institution that will admit him.

This time, though, the Farage vote could revert to the Tories even more comprehensively than usual if, as appears likely, they choose a leader as crazily pro-Brexit as he is. Someone who thrills to the idea of no-deal and remembers to say things like “fuck business” rather than “praise the further enrichment of the sinister interest groups that support me behind the scenes”.

What Farage has done, basically, is helpfully parcel up a section of the electorate and leave it on a window ledge like a warm pie, all ready for the Tories to steal. The very simplicity of the Brexit party’s message makes it so easy. The Tories know exactly what those voters want – Brexit at all costs – so that’s all they have to promise to steal them from Farage. And that’s precisely what all the viable Tory leadership candidates are currently doing.

Under the British electoral system, the Brexit party’s 31% plus the 9% who voted Tory even in the European election (and who would therefore, I think it’s fair to say, vote Conservative under absolutely any circumstances whatsoever) is enough to win a comfortable majority in the House of Commons. It’s hard to be sure of the percentages, because turnout in EU elections is low, but there’s no reason to think it skewed either pro- or anti-Brexit. And if those numbers do hold up in a larger turnout, the new no-deal-embracing Tory prime minister is home and dry. Cameron won a safe majority in 2015 with 37% of the vote; Blair got a larger one a decade earlier with 35%.

I don’t know what percentage would currently vote Remain, but polls suggest it’s higher than the 48% who did so in the referendum and probably higher than 50%. But, the way things stand, even if it’s as high as 60% of the vote, a general election would probably return a government committed to an extreme interpretation of the contrary view. The Remain vote is fatally split between the Lib Dems, the Greens and Labour and, primarily as a result of the Labour leadership’s vacillation on the subject of a second referendum, cannot realistically be united. Without such unity, under the first-past-the-post system, the parliamentary representatives of Remain will be even more impotent and outnumbered than they are now.

This is how poorly Jeremy Corbyn, despite his enthusiasm for general elections, has prepared for one. Labour is the only party other than the Tories that can ever cobble together the 35-40% of voters required to make a movement matter under our current shit system. But Corbyn’s disdain of compromise, his confusing and equivocal view of the EU, and his truculent and inadequate response to accusations of institutional racism – in fact, his whole atavistic and tribal political approach – mean that, under his leadership, it has no chance of doing so.