Corbyn’s Labour: High Water Mark?

Nobody ever imagined Corbyn would become leader of the Labour Party. Nor that he would survive in that job. Nor that he would turn the tide on May in 2017 and push Labour to over 12 million votes for the first time since 1997. Nor that he would make Labour the biggest party in Europe. But he did. Yet now there are some signs that Labour is slipping both in the polls and in the total of its membership. So has the tide of the Left reached as far as it will go?

There is no doubt that Corbyn has changed the political conversation, moved the centre several steps to the left and brought into political engagement millions of young people. That gives Labour a massive foundation on which to build. The problem for Labour is Brexit, but not in the ideological sense of the Tories. Seventy per cent of Labour party members voted to stay in the EU and as many as eighty percent are thought willing to come out and vote Remain in a new referendum, which the majority of them want.

But large numbers of the seats Labour holds voted Leave. Many of these are marginal. So Corbyn and his senior team have been ambiguous much of the time on what their Brexit policy actually is. If you listen carefully you can grasp the main threads, but only if you are an enthusiast for nuance and detail.  To everyone else the party seems, while not riven in shreds like the Tories, indecisive and muddled and Corbyn’s leadership is beginning to look weak. If you add the ongoing rumbling about antisemitism, you have a dangerous build up of a not good something.

The Labour leadership is not in trouble, but it could be if it does not come down off various fences and stand somewhere on firm ground, where people can see and understand. Not all will like it. But that is politics. And that is how Corbyn was chosen in the first place.