Poor old Jezza - he just doesn't get it

Poor Jeremy Corbyn. He really is completely out of his depth, a man promoted far beyond his level of competence. He flounders and flails and sadly sinks.

Greeted like a pop star at the Glastonbury Festival, he went with his advisers’ instincts and organised his own festival in London, Labour Live. In the end, by dint of slashing ticket prices, they were able to attract a turnout of 13,000, way below expectations.

At ‘Labour Live’: a voice Corbyn should be listening to

Why was the turnout so poor? For the same reasons as he is still trailing the Tories in the opinion polls, even though Theresa May’s government is divided, unpopular and distrusted. He simply doesn’t know how to build a majority.

What threw many of his critics, including myself, at the general election of 2017 is that he won a huge surge of support from young voters. That fooled opinion pollsters who expected that the 18-24 age group would be the one with the lowest turnout, as in most previous elections. But, inspired and mobilised by Corbyn, they confounded that expectation and gave him a far more healthy score than we’d predicted for him.

His supporters presented this as some kind of victory, even though he did in fact all the same come second, and there are still no silver medals in elections. Fail to come top and you’ve lost. What he achieved was a more honourable defeat than had been forecast, but it was still a defeat.

However, there’s something else about that 18-24 age group. It is massively pro-European: 71% voted to stay in the EU. Indeed, even the next age group up, 24-49, voted 54%-46% to remain.

In other words, to hold on to the youth vote, Corbyn needed to adopt a Remain stance. That shouldn’t have been hard since it is, after all, the official policy of the Labour Party he leads. But he has two problems that have led him to make no unequivocal statement on the issue: the first, is that a large proportion of Labour MPs represent constituencies with a Brexit majority and they’re frightened of alienating them; the second, that he has traditionally belonged to the anti-EU group on the left of the Labour Party.

All I can say about the fear of Brexit supporters is that leadership does sometimes involve challenging the views of voters. The greatest fear of working class Brexiters is immigration. Labour will truly sell its soul if it tries to accommodate that kind of xenophobia for electoral considerations.

But when it comes to the Brexit left, I have to say that I’m bemused. The central tenet espoused by these people is that the EU is a neo-liberal institution forcing casualisation of the labour market and poor wages on the working class. This vision seems to suggest that Britain is a nation thirsting for radical change, held back only by the vicious free-market ideology of the EU. The reality is that Britain usually leads the charge towards deregulation. You have only to compare worker rights and labour regulation in France or Germany with Britain to see how much further Britain goes in this direction.

Indeed, many of the rights enjoyed by British workers are protected by the EU against serious objections from entrenched interests in the UK. Unsurprisingly, it is the very people who want to tear up regulation and rights that most strongly back Brexit. The Brexiter left has therefore found itself in bed with some strange people, perhaps most strongly symbolised by veteran left-winger Kate Hoey campaigning in a boat on the Thames alongside the hard-right Nigel Farage.

A shameful moment: left-winger Kate Hoey (right)
with ultra-right winger Nigel Farage (left) campaigning for Brexit

In this context, it’s interesting to see that some of the small band of young people who attended Labour Live hoisted a banner calling on Corbyn to ‘stop backing Brexit’. The truth is that he dodges and evades rather than openly backing Brexit, but I share the suspicion of the banner-holders that he does, indeed, secretly back leaving the EU, lacking only the courage and honesty to say so.

It was interesting to discover from the Guardian’s Tim Adams, that a group who wanted to raise a pro-Remain banner during Corby’s speech were bundled away and prevented from protesting. So it seems that the Corbyn regime is not only as ready as Blair’s to evade and fudge, it’s also happy to block the freedom to oppose its views. I know I’m in a minority in this view, but it has often struck me how much more Blair and Corbyn have in common than is generally admitted, at least in the way they operate.

Meanwhile, the anti-Brexit voice was gagged at Labour Live (suggesting that ‘Live’ is a bit of a misnomer). But even more striking than the young people who were silenced is the number of young people who stayed away. It seems to me that they too suspect Corbyn of favouring Brexit, and therefore diametrically opposing them on the biggest question of the day.

He doesn’t get it yet, but maybe it’s time Corbyn worked out this was why he couldn’t get young people to a festival, or to back him again in the polls.