Election 2017: Now It Gets Interesting

No denying there is still a Tory lead. But the poll in the Telegraph puts Labour at 38% and the Tories on 44%, a lead of just six points. This confirms the trend in all the other polls and evident from the start of the campaign, when May had a lead in the mid twenties. Based on the 2015 turnout this would give the Tories 13.2 million votes, 2 million more than in 2015. Labour would achieve 11.4 million, also 2 million up on their last result. It would also be their best result since the Blair landslide of 1997. Indeed on these figures Corbyn stands to get more votes than Blair in 2001 and 2005, Brown in 2010 and Milliband in 2015. So the idea that Corbyn is a vote loser is rubbish and pedaled only by people who cannot add up, mostly in what was ‘new labour,’ now a muttering rump of lost souls in a political dark corner.

Unfortunately with a first past the post voting system, the number of votes is not the whole story. Blair lost a staggering three million votes between 1997 and 2001, yet his landslide majority remained almost intact. There are now two critical elements in play before June 8th. The first is whether the Lib Dems and UKIP perform better on the day than in the opinion polls. If they do that will almost certainly hurt both main parties, but the Tories will face the heavier loss. The second is how much the turnout goes above the 30 million or so of 2015. Because the increase will indicate more young people voting and they will break for Labour.

Yes Labour can win.