Labour: snatching humiliation from the jaws of triumph

George Osborne’s 2016 budget was one that was billed beforehand as one with few nasty surprises so as not to scare the horses on the Chancellor’s own side, who have been awkwardly navigating an uneasy peace ever since the Prime Minister announced the date for the EU referendum in February. That it included in it a measure to cut Personal Independence Payments, a measure that outraged even some Conservative MPs, sparked an internal civil war within the party and gave the Tories perhaps their worst few days since before the 2010 election. This presented Labour with a golden opportunity to exploit government weakness, one that grew bigger with the departure of Iain Duncan Smith, the secretary of state for Work and Pensions, who – ostensibly, at least – resigned over the issue. That they were not able to do this is a fact that will distress even some of Jeremy Corbyn’s loyal supporters.

Many Labour MPs were aghast to see that in Cobyn’s probing of Cameron, who had had to come to the House of Commons on the last Monday before Easter to give a statement following the European Council meeting, the Labour leader neglected to mention Iain Duncan Smith’s evisceration of the government’s welfare policy which, over the previous few days had sent the government into turmoil. Had he forgotten to mention it? Grim-faced Labour MPs could only look on and wonder. It was up to Cameron himself to bring up IDS, when he later paid tribute to his contribution to the government. Instead, Corbyn used his address to ask where George Osborne was, and somewhat inarticulately laid into the absent Chancellor of the Exchequer for the black hole in his budget. Corbyn had been calling for the resignation of the Chancellor even since Duncan Smith had resigned, something that has always seemed unlikely to happen until at least the completion of the next Tory leadership race.

Ultimately, the government performed a U-turn, with the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Stephen Crabb, announcing minutes later in the Commons that the plans to cut Personal Independence would in effect be scrapped. In response to this announcement, the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Owen Smith showed Corbyn how it ought to have been done, and made a much better fist of attacking the government. Incidentally, he will have done his own leadership ambitions no harm at all in the process.

Corbyn, to give some credit, obviously recognised the error he had made on Monday, as two days later, during Prime Ministers’ Questions, he finally mentioned IDS. Unfortunately, by this time, the government’s budget had already been voted through, which meant that his line of questioning felt more like an attempt to lock the stable door after the horse had long since bolted. In addition, a new problem had arisen for the Labour leader to distract the Tories from their problems over Europe and unpopularity over welfare reform.

It concerned a list, found by a journalist for The Times but apparently put together by Corbyn allies, that categorised the majority of Labour MPs on their loyalty, neutrality, or hostility towards the leader. The list did contain some strange inaccuracies: more than one journalist said after its publication that they’ve spoken to people in the ‘Core group plus’ category (MPs who aren’t in the inner-circle but are thought of as being on-side) who have moaned to them about the way things have been going. Other MPs joked that they planned to appeal the fact that they had not been placed in the ‘hostile’ category.

Whatever the inaccuracies, though, his was an absolute gift for Cameron,  who batted away the Leader of the Opposition’s questions with what many Labour MPs will have regarded as a depressing degree of ease. How had this been allowed to happen? The MP for Cumbria, the noted Corbyn-sceptic John Woodcock wrote a -hastily deleted – tweet soon after Corbyn’s exchanges with the Prime Minister that read: “F***ing disaster. Worse week for Cameron since he came in and that stupid f***ing list makes us into a laughing stock.” One can only imagine he deleted it because he meant to type ‘worst’, not ‘worse’.

This has renewed somewhat the talk of an attempt to oust Corbyn at some point this year, though if it happens, it will not be until after the EU referendum has taken place. But if Sadiq Khan fails to win in London and the party goes backwards everywhere else, it is hard to see how they won’t have a try. They may expect to fail given the strength of feeling that there still is for the current leader within the membership. But they may well decide that it’s worth doing anyway, because come the next party conference in the autumn, the Corbynite wing of the party will attempt to change the rules to make it easier for Corbyn, or someone else like him, to get onto the ballot of any future leadership contest come what may.

Now, admittedly, there has been some more favourable polling in the last week or two, with one putting Labour on level-pegging with the Conservatives, another putting them one point ahead. This seems to be more of a result of the Tories sinking than Labour rising and overtaking the government, but even if that were not the case, it will never be enough: after George Osborne’s omni-shambles budget in 2012, Ed Miliband’s Labour enjoyed double-digit leads over the Tories in the polls and still managed to lose in 2015.

It may be that this recent development is the start of a trend that takes Labour beyond the Tories in the polls, but it cannot be over-emphasised that for Labour to win in 2020, a swing greater than the one it had in its 1997 landslide is required to even get a majority of one. The response to this from some is often that Labour can still win if it attracts people who don’t vote. Research shows that non-voters tend to hold roughly similar views to those who do vote, but even allowing for that, this aim may prove difficult to achieve if polling carried out recently by YouGov and Election Data is to be believed.

This polling shows that only 13.7% of those who didn’t vote last time would vote for Labour now, as opposed to 40.7% of people who still would not vote for anyone. Given that this 13.7% were not moved to visit their local polling station for any party last time, it’s no guarantee that even they would turn out for Labour next time, or that 12.7% wouldn’t turn out for the Tories. This is without even considering the more centrist voters now put off the idea of voting for a Labour government for as long as the current leadership is in charge. In any case, though, it appears that if Labour are trying to attract these people, they are not succeeding.

Heath vs Wilson: The Ten Year Duel

A BBC documentary, here, about the ‘ten year duel’ between Harold Wilson – Labour leader between 1963 and 1976, eight years of which was also spent as the British Prime Minister – and Edward Heath, his opposite number on the Conservative benches. Wilson, a member of the party’s ‘soft left’, long the Labour membership’s centre of gravity, is one of only three people to win a majority for the Labour party at a general election since 1945, and he would have been one-hundred years old last Friday.

This documentary tells the story of Wilson and Heath’s rivalry as they swapped places with one another between the government and opposition benches, and the tumultuous period of British history that they oversaw in charge of their respective parties.

Labour’s polling woes

A new poll was published by ComRes over the weekend just gone that will have made grim reading for some in Labour: it shows that Labour are currently eleven points behind the Tories in terms of voting intention, the former on 29 per cent, the latter on 40 per cent. It also found that only 22 per cent of voters thought that Jeremy Corbyn was likely to make a good Prime Minister. It’s often difficult to appear like a Prime Minister when you aren’t one, but even if you allow for this disadvantage, there is no sugar-coating that number, nor the percentage of voters (56) who disagree.

Meanwhile, less than half of the people who voted for Labour in May think that he would be a good PM: 45 per cent say he would, 31 per cent say he wouldn’t. To put these numbers into perspective, 81 per cent of Tory voters consider Cameron to be a good PM, with 8 per cent disagreeing. Nationally, the verdict of voters on the job Cameron is doing is more polarised: 42 per cent say that he is doing well, compared with 40 per cent who say he is doing badly.

It’s interesting to look at voters’ leader satisfaction ratings, because as Mike Smithson of Political Betting points out, this measure is often a better indicator of who is likely to win an election than when voters are asked to choose a party. He has tweeted a graph, which you can see below, that shows how accurate leader satisfaction ratings have been at predicting election winners since 1979:

My chart on leader ratings being better GE predictor than party shares was shown by @debmattinson at Fabian conf pic.twitter.com/c88gYZoUDG

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) January 17, 2016

For a broader look at how Labour is doing in the polls, there is a good – but bleak – post by Glen O’Hara of Oxford Brookes University, which finds that Labour may receive as little as 25 per cent of the vote at the next General Election. These numbers would, ordinarily, be a source of great concern for the Labour leadership, who in the normal course of events, might be worrying that if the next set of local elections goes badly, the pressure might get to be too much, necessitating a change at the very top. These are not ordinary times, however, and for as long as Corbyn enjoys the support of the members and the unions, his position is not in any immediate danger.

This is not to say, however, that the road ahead to 2020 is completely clear. A poor performance in elections this May, though it will probably not be a tipping point, may put doubt into the minds of some of those who voted Corbyn so enthusiastically last summer. Andy Burnham, the Shadow Home Secretary, has said that he would resign to the back benches if the party voted in favour of scrapping Trident, and it is quite possible others would follow. And, at the weekend, Len McCluskey, the General Secretary of the Unite union, which was Corbyn’s biggest backer during his leadership campaign, said that while he backed Corbyn being given a chance to set an agenda in opposition to the government, he would be ‘looking at giving him two or three years’ to do this:

‘Some of the media and some of the right-wing Labour MPs have started to talk about May [being] a referendum on Jeremy’s leadership. What utter nonsense. I mean, he’ll have been in power for about eight months by the time May comes around, and Labour face some challenges. In particular, in Scotland, the idea that either Kezia Dugdale or Jeremy Corbyn can wave a magic wand and regain Scotland for Labour is nonsense. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have got to be given the opportunity to start to develop an alternative to the current government’s austerity programme… now, how long that will take, we’ll have to wait and see. Certainly not eight months, and I would be talking in terms of allowing Jeremy two or three years to see what impact [he might have].’

McCluskey did go on to say that he didn’t necessarily mean Corbyn should go at that point, but one imagines that if things have not improved very much he could well use his not insignificant influence to force a change at the top: as Stephen Bush of the New Statesman says, McCluskey, Dave Prentis of UNISON, and Tim Roache, the head of the GMB union, are the only part of the Labour movement who, if they combine, have the potential to bring him down.

Were the unions to successfully move against Corbyn at some point, there are one or two possible candidates to replace him, though none of them are likely to be from the right of the party. People like Hilary Benn and Dan Jarvis may need to be ruled out at this point, too, because of the fact that they voted in favour of the extension of air-strikes in Syria, an emotive subject for many members.

Tom Watson, the deputy leader, would automatically become acting leader if Corbyn were to stand down, and is the only other Labour MP who can boast that he too has a ‘mandate’ from the members, having won the deputy leadership fairly overwhelmingly in the summer. Other possibilities are Lisa Nandy, or Owen Smith, the shadow Work and Pensions secretary, who told the New Statesman’s George Eaton a week ago that it would be ‘an incredible honour and a privilege’ to be able to lead the party.

Smith is interestingly positioned: though he is closer to the centre than his leader, he has served him loyally up to now, and has made it clear that as far as he is concerned, Corbyn will lead the party into the next election. He comes across as a polished performer in television interviews, seems well-liked in the party, and has been talked about by some as a potential ‘unity candidate’ to pour oil over the troubled waters that have engulfed Labour in recent months. This sort of thing is hard to predict with any certainty, though, of course: if it is to be two years before Corbyn is forced out – still a decent-sized ‘if’ at this point – the volatility of recent times in Labour tells us that much may have changed between now and then.

Project Corbyn: 100 days in

Jeremy Corbyn has made it through his first one hundred days as Labour leader. In spite of all that has happened in that time – on occasion it has looked as though he might have been relieved of his duties before the end of the year – his grip on the leadership is stronger now than it was when he was first elected.

In retrospect, the week of the Oldham West and Royton by-election and the vote for military action in Syria at the start of December was a clear turning point. Corbyn started it with his Shadow Cabinet in revolt at his plans to whip them to vote against military action in Syria. Over the previous weekend, he had encouraged members to let their MP know their views on the matter, knowing that most of them agreed with him.

But at a hastily convened Shadow Cabinet meeting, they had refused to leave the room until Corbyn had agreed to a free vote. He relented, and after a day of debate in the House of Commons speaking for and against the prospect of airstrikes in Syria, 66 Labour MPs voted against their leader and with the government. This figure, though, was lower than had been expected: it may well have been that some of them who voted against it did so to save themselves from the ire of anti-war activists in their local parties, some of whom were allegedly threatening MPs with de-selection if they did not vote against action.

Amongst the MPs who did speak in favour of Syrian airstrikes was Hilary Benn, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, who wound up the debate from the opposition benches with a speech which was in direct contradiction with his leaders’ words at the start of the day. Whether one agreed with him or not, it was an extraordinary piece of oratory that held the house in complete silence for its duration. Some took this speech as the start of a leadership bid in the event of a coup against Corbyn, and one wonders whether, if the by-election result in Oldham had not gone Labour’s way, the leader might have been usurped by MPs, with Benn put forward as the alternative candidate.

But as Danny Finkelstein said on Newsnight later in the week, anyone who thought that Benn could have taken the leadership having made a speech in favour of military intervention does not understand the current geography of the Labour membership. Following Iraq, to say that there is deep unease at the idea of military intervention amongst Labour’s members is something of an understatement. John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, said the following morning that it was a good speech but that it ‘reminded him of Blair,’ and he did so deliberately, one suspects.

Had he made a speech like this a couple of years ago – albeit on a different subject, perhaps – during one of Ed Miliband’s wobbly periods between 2010 and 2015, there might have been a chance of Miliband being replaced, but not now. Thousands of new members, inspired by Corbyn’s message that opposed strongly Blair’s time in charge have joined the party, and a substantial chunk of moderates, turned off by Corbyn’s views and exasperated by the propensity for him and his team’s propensity to shoot themselves in the foot, have left. Labour is a much-changed party, even compared to the one it was at the May election, and it is hard to see anyone in the PLP not from the left of the party succeeding against him if this state of affairs continues.

**

On the Thursday of that same week, the Oldham West and Royton by-election took place and did, of course, go in Labour’s favour. There was much doom and gloom in the days and weeks before the result, some predicting that their majority would be severely reduced to less than 1,000 seats, turning Michael Meacher’s old ultra-safe seat into a marginal one, vulnerable to swings away from the party in a general election. Others said that Labour might even lose the seat.

That the Labour candidate Jim McMahon, the leader of Oldham Council, won it with a majority that was slightly reduced in actual terms, but with a larger vote share, was a very good outcome. In a sense, this result had something for everyone. Corbynites took it as confirmation that their man was not the electoral liability that his critics had accused him of being, while his critics said that McMahon won in spite of the leader, that he was a locally popular moderate candidate who had voted for Liz Kendall in the leadership contest. One suspects the latter explanation is more likely: the focus of Labour’s campaign was very much on McMahon’s achievements rather than the national picture, while Corbyn only went up to Oldham to campaign on one occasion. His face only ever appeared on UKIP’s campaign literature.

Regardless of the reasons for the victory though, the result had an immediate effect of pouring oil on troubled waters, putting a lid on the hostilities that had been regularly breaking out into the open since Corbyn’s ascent to the leadership at the end of the summer, and stopping the attempted coup, that was almost certainly on the cards, in its tracks. Discontent still burbles away with the occasional exasperated proclamation – not least over the leader’s decision to attend the Stop the War Christmas party earlier in December – but in general, things have gone relatively quiet.

There is recognition, at least for now, that Corbyn will be very difficult for MPs to get rid of, that even a poor set of results next May, when a new London Mayor will be elected, and Scottish, Welsh, and local elections take place, may not be enough to shift him. A few weeks ago, some MPs sought advice from the party’s lawyers to see if the leader would automatically get on the ballot in the event of a future leadership contest. The advice given was that he may not because of a precedent set in the late eighties, when Tony Benn challenged Neil Kinnock for the leadership, and Kinnock had to get the required number of MP’s nominations.

But the rules themselves are vague, and there is a risk he would automatically get onto the ballot after all before going on to win by an even bigger margin than he did at the end of last summer. If that happened, moderate MPs would have no choice but to try and hang on until after the party collided with the electorate in 2020, and then, if they were still around, try to salvage what was left.

The worrying thing, looking at the polls, is that if Corbyn carries on until 2020, there may not be many of them left at all, particularly given the impending redrawing of parliamentary boundaries that will tilt the system more in favour of the Tories. We are also yet to see an opinion poll showing a Labour lead since the election, and more often than not, the party seems to have been at least six or seven points behind the Conservatives. For the most part, too, Corbyn’s personal ratings remain fairly dire. Admittedly, there have been one or two polls that point to voters ‘liking’ and ‘admiring’ him for sticking to his principles, but this is not the same as them saying they’re actually going to vote for them.

Not that this is a particular worry for Team Corbyn, who in any case often justify their decisions by referring to their popularity with the membership, which is drawn from an extremely small section of the population, while the opinions of the wider electorate are rarely – if ever – mentioned. But Corbyn and the people around him seem more interested in changing the party rather than changing the country, and the idea of a concerted attempt to get into government appears to be a secondary concern at best.

Some moderates seem to have decided on playing a longer-term game in any case, resolving to attempt to attract enough moderate members to the party to eventually challenge and defeat Corbyn, perhaps in 2017. It’s hard to see at this point how this could actually work, particularly given how hard it would be to attract relatively centrist members to the party while it is in its current state, but this should certainly not be discouraged. The regular stories of anonymous backbenchers calling for Corbyn to go will ultimately not lead to anything, and would end in tears if they did.

There was another one on Sunday evening, about Alan Johnson being lined up for about the seventeenth time, but it won’t happen, because he doesn’t want the job, and quite apart from the fact the make-up of the membership means he probably wouldn’t win, a sitting Labour leader who does not want to go is very difficult to defenestrate. As long as the membership like Corbyn, the only way he will go is if he resigns by choice or disappears under a bus.

In truth, what moderates need to do to retake control of the party will not be easy and it will not be quick. They need to articulate new ideas about what Labour can achieve in government, and to try to persuade these new members not only of the best route to power, but that being in power is even worth it.

This will be very difficult, but not necessarily impossible: just about all we really know of a lot of the new intake is that they voted for Corbyn because they liked what he was saying compared to Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, and Liz Kendall. It could well be a mistake to assume that they are all unbending Corbynites, wilfully driving their party into a permanent political wilderness where principal trumps power every time. They, and indeed the unions who back him, might become more open to persuasion that there is another way if things continue over the next couple of years as they have started over these first three months.

Mao and Syria: another troubled week for Labour

Another extraordinary week in the recent history of the Labour Party. It feels as though all of my pieces here start in this way, but it is true. This was the week in which the discontent that has been bubbling away in the Parliamentary Labour Party ever since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader in September came out into the open, and followed on from a weekend in which a poll came out that showed the party fifteen points behind the Tories. The public rows have come about from John McDonnell’s poor response to Osborne’s autumn statement on Wednesday, and the party’s response to Cameron’s proposals for military action in Syria on Thursday.

Even allowing for the fact that Autumn Statement responses are not easy things to get right, or even excel at, McDonnell floundered. He started well enough, speaking in very general terms about the hardships that the Conservative government was visiting upon the country, but he soon began to lose focus, and started tripping over his words as he ran out of steam. Not a popular figure within the PLP, he was unable to rely upon his parliamentary colleagues to greet his lines with many roars of approval. In any case, they tended to miss rather than hit.

And then, it happened. Towards the end of his speech, he criticised the Chancellor for selling off whatever public assets he could to the People’s Republic of China. Pulling out a copy of Chairman Mao’s ‘little red book’, he said: ‘I think he’ll find this invaluable. I thought this would help him, Mr. Speaker. Let’s quote from Mao… rarely done in this chamber.’ To the clear discomfort of some Labour MPs – Chris Bryant was seen on camera looking particularly awkward – and the obvious delight of Tory MPs, scarcely able to believe that McDonnell had given them even more ammunition than they already had for 2020’s general election campaign, he did so.

Now. There is something to be said for the fact that it was obviously a joke, and should perhaps not be taken as seriously as all that. Clearly, in his mind’s eye before he stood to give his response, McDonnell had anticipated a bravura performance at the despatch box that was complemented perfectly by a humorous flourish that would poke fun at the Chancellor for his enthusiasm for selling off public assets overseas. But that is not how it transpired, and was a gross error that only served to highlight some of the doubts that the British public clearly have about McDonnell and the broader Corbyn Project being too far to the left for their comfort.

There were some valid points in his response about the political nature of the statement, but McDonnell failed to make any political capital out of the Tax Credits about-turn, and in any case, anything he said was overshadowed by the Mao incident. He would appear on BBC News later in the day, confirming that, of course, he condemned Mao. It was a gross error that should have been spotted. One can only assume it either wasn’t, or that it was and its bad reception was under-estimated at best. Either way, it’s a damning indictment on McDonnell and the team around him, and further confirmation of the fact that the leadership at the top of the Labour Party at the moment have a tin ear for what anyone outside of sympathetic members will think.

**

If the Mao incident was bad, worse was to come, at least for the party’s internal dynamics. On Thursday, David Cameron set out his proposals for military action in Syria, and this was always bound to present a tricky dilemma for Labour, a party upon whom Iraq still casts a long shadow. At the meeting of the Shadow Cabinet that followed, no consensus was reached. Corbyn was late to the meeting, and said that he wanted the meeting to last no longer than 45 minutes, but Lucy Powell, the Shadow Education Secretary, told him that it would take as long as it had to.

Corbyn made it quite clear that he did not support military action – though as has been noted in recent days, his opinion on this matter lacks authority, as it is a reasonable bet that he would disagree with military action in almost all situations – though both Tom Watson and Hilary Benn, who it is said is single-handedly holding the PLP together just at the moment, spoke in favour. In the end, it was agreed that they would re-convene on Monday afternoon, and come to a settled view.

After the meeting was over, Corbyn sent a letter to each member of the PLP, explaining the doubts he had about the merits of military action in Syria. The following evening, to the fury of some MPs, he sent another e-mail, this time to (some, not all) Labour party members to urge them to make their views known. Presumably, he wants to use the fact that he is popular amongst members as leverage against the PLP, who, he suspects, may not all share his views on intervention in Syria, or very much else. One wonders if this is a sign of things to come.

At the time of writing this, Corbyn has not come out and stated whether he will whip his MPs to oppose military action, or allow a free vote. While one might think it seems inconceivable that he won’t go for the latter option, Sam Coates of The Times tweeted this evening that although that might have been the case on Sunday morning, his sources were casting some doubt upon this. He surely must offer if he is to avoid mass resignations from his Shadow Cabinet.

Corbyn does have the backing of his members – a YouGov survey this week showed that a vast majority of the members who voted for him think he’s doing a good job – and this is a powerful weapon to use when he wants to get his way, but at the moment, it is all he has. He has little support within the PLP – as reported in The Times this weekend, some MPs are consulting lawyers to see if Corbyn would automatically get on the ballot in the event of them trying to oust him – and if polling of the general public is to believed, he doesn’t find much favour amongst voters either.

This has been underlined in the by-election campaign currently taking place in Oldham. In May, Michael Meacher won a majority of over 14,000 votes, but according to evidence from activists on the ground, Labour are expecting to win by around 1,000 votes, if not less. What transpires over the coming days there, and in the vote on Syria, could have a significant bearing on Corbyn’s fortunes in the months to come.

 

Ken Livingstone, and Corbyn’s low approval

An extraordinary twenty-four hours in the recent history of the Labour party, even by modern standards. On Tuesday evening, George Eaton tweeted that Ken Livingstone would co-chair Labour’s defence review with Maria Eagle. This is a loaded appointment: Eagle had previously told Eaton it was unlikely she would change her opinion on Trident, and Livingstone, well known to be opposed to its renewal, is closer to Corbyn than most of the PLP on the issue. Ken had also previously said that Eagle was ‘mad’ if she believed that nuclear weapons were worth spending money on.

On Wednesday, the Shadow Defence minister Kevan Jones, along with other MPs, questioned his appointment. One unnamed MP said they had assumed it was a joke when they first heard about it. Jones gave a quote to PoliticsHome, saying “I’m not sure Ken knows anything about defence. It will only damage our credibility amongst those that do and who care about defence.” Within an hour or two, Livingstone responded to the remarks of Jones, who has spoken in the Commons previously about his battles with mental illness, telling the Daily Mirror that: “I think he might need some psychiatric help. He’s obviously very depressed and disturbed… He should pop off and see his GP before he makes these offensive comments.”

There then followed a twelve-hour period of media appearances by Livingstone, where he was initially unwilling to apologise (“he was rude about me [so] I was rude back to him: he needs to get over it… don’t wait for [an apology.]“) before then half-apologising on the World at One and ITV News (“I wouldn’t have made these comments if I knew... if Jeremy wants me to apologise, I’m happy to do so… that’s best you’ll get out of me“), then apologising ‘unreservedly’ on Twitter after Corbyn had phoned him, and then appearing to backtrack in an extraordinary appearance on Channel 4 News, and then another on Newsnight, where he essentially said “I’m sorry if anyone’s upset, but he started it.” For his part, Jones appeared unwilling to accept his various apologies, perhaps knowing that Ken probably didn’t mean it and only made it because Corbyn had told him to do so.

One can only wonder what impact all of this have on Labour and its standing with the public. If they’re paying attention, it is likely they will be fairly bewildered, as they might be by stories coming out as I write this of John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, who signed a letter in April that called for MI5 and the armed police force to be scrapped. Even prior to these latest episodes, Labour has stayed stubbornly in the low 30s in most opinion polls, with the Tories generally between 36 and 39%. On Wednesday, YouGov also published polling data that showed Jeremy Corbyn’s favourability rating amongst the public was down to minus 22%. This reflects that while around 30% of those polled think he’s doing well as leader, 52% think he is doing badly.

Looking at previous previous surveys, it would appear that the number of people who think he is doing well has remained fairly steady since he became leader, but that the people who previously weren’t sure are now deciding against him. That is a worry for him, but one imagines that it does not put him in immediate danger: the people who liked him before still like him. It’s when the numbers of people who actually approve of him start to shrink that he’ll find himself in bother.

Interestingly, Hopi Sen has also been looking at how Jeremy Corbyn’s performance compares with that of Ed Miliband’s five years ago. It seems that while there are people in each demographic group who think that think Corbyn is an improvement, there are more – an awful lot more – who think he’s doing badly.

I used today’s @yougov poll to compare how people think Corbyn is doing with Ed Miliband 5 years ago. Not Great. pic.twitter.com/92nszw2wM8

— Hopi Sen (@hopisen) November 18, 2015

 

The good news for Corbyn is in every group more think he’s doing very well than thought Ed was 5 years ago.. but.. pic.twitter.com/MOD8fnligy

— Hopi Sen (@hopisen) November 18, 2015

Livingstone, and Corbyn’s low ratings

..bad news is his enthusiasts are dwarfed by those who think he’s doing very badly. He is fairly polarising. pic.twitter.com/0IFoR7hrCf

— Hopi Sen (@hopisen) November 18, 2015

 

It’s fair to say Corbyn is not going down very well among over 60s. Among 18-24s & Labour voters it’s closer pic.twitter.com/zZsLYek4Yb

— Hopi Sen (@hopisen) November 18, 2015

 

It is still, of course, early days in this parliament, and we are still four-and-a-half years away from a general election, provided the Conservatives don’t repeal the Fixed Term Parliament Act and call one by surprise. Much can change, and events can easily get in the way of pre-conceived notions of what will happen. But as we know, leaders of the opposition have very little time in which to create a good impression upon the general public, and so far it feels almost generous to say that Corbyn does not appear to have done so. One feels though that, given the scale of Corbyn’s victory in September, bad polling data on its own will not be enough to convince Labour members (for it is them, rather than MPs who will ultimately decide) that the party is going in the wrong direction.

Two small victories for Labour’s moderates

This week, for the first time in what feels like a long time, Labour moderates had one or two small reasons to be, if not cheerful, at least not morbidly depressed about their party’s direction of travel. Firstly, a clutch of MPs from the centre and the right of the party were elected by the PLP to chair its backbench committees. These committees have in fact long existed, but Corbyn said before he was elected leader that he wanted these committees to help to drive the development of policy, and one assumes he will be less than pleased that none of the MPs who won voted for or nominated him in the leadership contest in the summer (eleven of them nominated Liz Kendall). One MP told the New Statesman‘s George Eaton that the MPs chairing the committees were in effect a ‘shadow shadow cabinet’.

The internal e-mail advising MPs of the results is below:

Secondly, following the sad death of the veteran left wing MP Michael Meacher in October, there was a selection meeting for his seat of Oldham and West Royton on Thursday evening. Among the candidates were Jim McMahon, the leader of Oldham Council, Mohammad Azam, who had been nominated by the Unite union, and Chris Williamson, the former MP for Derby North. McMahon – considered a moderate and the favourite – won and will contest the seat for Labour in December.

It is being seen as an early test of Corbyn’s electability, though given that McMahon is not seen as a particular supporter of the leader, how much we will learn from his likely win is debatable. It should also be said that the vote was not open to members who have been in the party for less than six months, so none of the people who joined specifically to vote for Corbyn will have been allowed to take part. Might the result have been different if they had?

If and when another by-election is triggered, it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the voting habits of CLPs, particularly those in safe Labour seats, which, anecdotally, is often where Corbyn’s support is quite healthy. It will also give us a clearer idea than we currently have of whether the new members joined purely to vote for the leader, or if they are interested in taking a more active role in their local parties in the longer term.

How committed the new members are to Corbyn’s grand vision, and to Labour in general for that matter, are key considerations when MPs who are not on the left of the party ponder on how long it will take them to get back into a position to exert influence on the party’s direction.

One month in

We are one month in to Jeremy Corbyn’s time as leader of the Labour Party, and one wonders already whether the currently tense relations between the PLP and the leadership can be sustained for the next few months, let alone until next May. The prospect of this carrying on until 2020 seems even less likely.

Two weeks ago at Labour conference, John McDonnell told Evan Davis that the party would sign up to George Osborne’s fiscal charter. He said: ‘ We will vote for it on the basis that we want to assure people that we will tackle the deficit, we will balance the budget, we will live within our means.’ Early on Monday afternoon, he sent an e-mail to his fellow Labour MPs to advise that he was considering the party’s position on the issue, and that he would consult with the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Shadow Cabinet. 

But before Labour MPs even had chance to discuss it at yesterday evening’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, McDonnell announced that the party would vote against the fiscal charter. At the meeting, he attempted to explain himself, but sparks flew. George Eaton of the New Statesman wrote that the centrist MP and former Culuture Secretary Ben Bradshaw left at the end of the meeting saying that it had been ‘a f***ing shambles,’ that John Mann had called the decision to backtrack on it ‘a huge joke’, while another unnamed Shadow Minister had said of the meeting that they had never seen anything like it.

This afternoon, there were more developments. On today’s edition of the BBC’s World at One, the Corbynite MP and the Shadow Minister for Energy, Clive Lewis, suggested that McDonnell changed his mind on voting for the charter because he hadn’t realised until now that doing so would not give Labour the scope to borrow to invest. And then, from Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, who tweeted that Corbyn had not known that McDonnell was going to be announcing the change in policy:

All sorts of reasons why McDonnell U turn on budget surplus not a laughing matter, including that Corbyn himself had no idea it was coming

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) October 13, 2015

McDonnell, for his part, says that it is not an alteration of policy but of tactics, and has put his change of heart down to the situation in Redcar, and to happenings in the global economy over the past few weeks, though it is thought that many Labour MPs think this explanation to be specious at best. While it is perhaps for the best that Labour has arrived at the stance it probably should have taken in the first place (from the point of view of being in line with McDonnell’s outlook, rather than whether it’s the right thing to do electorally) it has been a muddled, unedifying spectacle to behold. If what Clive Lewis says is true, it is also a little worrying that a prospective Chancellor changed his mind on whether he was in favour of the fiscal charter because he hadn’t, until very recently, understood it properly.

Video: Denis Healey’s last broadcast interview

Last night’s Newsnight showed Denis Healey’s final broadcast interview. Asked whether he regretted not becoming Prime Minister, having become regarded as the best PM the country never had. He replied:

‘I do now, but I never wanted to be Prime Minister, because I wanted to do something rather than be something. But of course, I didn’t realise when I said that, that if you want to do something, it’s more important to be PM than to be Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary.’

‘… Actually, now it makes you want to celebrate the fact that Labour lost the election.’

The Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has made a speech at the Conservative Party Conference in the Labour stronghold of Manchester that is widely perceived to have parked Tory tanks on the Labour lawn. Appealing to people who voted for Labour in May, he said the Conservatives should “extend our hand” to people who feel abandoned by Labour’s new leadership.

Some Tories feel the party has relatively free reign to do as they please given what a mess Labour seems to be in just at the moment, so it remains to be seen whether he pulls it off, particularly if the economy falters.

Anthony Seldon, David Cameron’s biographer, was on television after the speech was over, talking about Osborne as:

‘… a master strategist, [although] not a man who arouses love or support. So if things go wrong, then the skates will be under him as they were in 2012 and 2007… because he doesn’t have that kind of bedrock of love, affection, [or] admiration. He is fuctional, he is a brilliant strategic functionary… he’s very aware… of how people think about him. He knows that people admire him and value him for what he does… but he also knows that he has yet to win the hearts.’

Nevertheless, Osborne’s strategy is probably the right one if his party wants to consolidate its grip on power, even if he will have to tread carefully if his party is to allow him to pursue it very far. The Tories, after all, don’t seem to have quite the same complexes as Labour about what compromises they must make to retain power.

This was thrown into sharp relief across the city at Manchester Cathedral this evening at the People’s Post, a rally to discuss the future of Labour and of the postal industry. Terry Pullinger, deputy general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, spoke at the event, and seemed to say that Corbyn’s election made him want to celebrate the fact that Labour lost in May:

‘It’s unacceptable that the political debate has got so narrow. Since Thatcher, that conventional wisdom says it has to be the free market, there has to be competition and there’s no other way – and anyone who says different is barmy, or non intelligent… we’ve been desperate to see that conventional wisdom blown apart and we have by  Jeremy Corbyn… actually, now it makes you want to celebrate the fact that Labour lost the election.’

According to the accounts of those in attendance, Owen Jones shook his head at these words, while the MP Lucy Powell [both were speaking at the event] mouthed the words ‘I’m not clapping that!’