Mr. Corbyn is playing a dangerous game with the majority of LAB voters who want to remain
He’s got away with it so far but that could end abruptly
One of the extraordinary features about the current febrile political situation is that Corbyn is taking a totally different line on Brexit from the vast majority of Labour voters. His ambivalence survived the GE2017 campaign because, frankly, no one believed his party stood an earthly and it didn’t receive the critical attention Team TMay had to deal with.
Now LAB is leading in the polls (2% up in today’s YouGov) and the leader is coming under greater scrutiny.
The latest YouGov Brexit polling tracker is above and shows the party splits and highlights the vast gap between the rhetoric from the LAB leadership and those who actually support the party.
There’s a good article from Hugo Rifkind in the Times (£) this morning about the widespread misconceptions about Corbyn. This is what he notes on Brexit.
“…..Another misconception, albeit one that may have somewhat hit the skids this weekend past, is the idea that Corbyn, at heart, is sad that we are leaving the European Union. “So what,” his Remainer supporters shrug, “if he voted to leave the common market (1975), voted against the single market (1986), opposed Maastricht (1992), opposed Lisbon (2007), and campaigned for Remain (last year) with all the keen enthusiasm of a chap with vicious haemorrhoids having his annual prostate check-up? He’s still one of us!”
This misconception survived even his sacking of three shadow ministers for backing a pro-single market amendment to the Queen’s Speech, which led Nigel Farage, of all people, to declare “he’s almost a proper chap”. Billy Bragg, the folk singer, immediately declared that Corbyn must be playing a cunning “long game”, with a plan to soften Brexit once the Tories had self-destructed over it. Hey, it’s a theory. This weekend, the Labour leader told the BBC that his party would leave the single market so as to end “wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe”. Is this the great antidote to Tory Brexit? Is it the politics that the crowds of Glastonbury gathered to cheer? Doubtless, some will be frenetically triangulating, right now, to find a way to insist that it was…”
The LAB leader has got away with it so far but I get a sense that the pro-Corbyn media narrative is starting to fade and when that happens things can change very quickly. His explanation on on what appeared to be a campaign promise on student fees looked feeble.