A More in Common poll shared with my colleague George Eaton this week considers how a hypothetical Jeremy Corbyn-led party would perform at the polls. It suggests the “JC Party” would receive 10 per cent of the vote in an election held today, cutting into Labour by three points, and the Greens by four.
Labour is four points behind Reform right now, but with the new JC Party on the scene Labour would end up seven points behind.
In 2018-19 I commissioned a lot of hypothetical surveys about Brexit. I drafted scenarios and put them to the public. How would you vote if Brexit was delayed? How would you feel if Theresa May was still prime minister and delayed Brexit? How would you vote if hard Brexit was on the ballot? It was unreliable stuff because it all depended on hypothetical prompts, taking the respondents too far from material reality.
The biggest flaw with More in Common’s survey is simple: the Jeremy Corbyn Party isn’t real; it hasn’t accrued baggage; we don’t know who its hypothetical candidates would be or how badly organised it might be. Respondents wouldn’t approach the survey in the same manner as they would at the time when it came to cast the ballot.
Prompting it as Corbyn-led too can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s asking voters whether they’d vote for Corbyn were he on the ballot. It’s making a genuine left alternative a personality contest. That tells you something about how popular Corbyn is. But it doesn’t tell you what you want it to tell you: if there is a real appetite for a left alternative.
I am struggling to think of any moment in recent history when hypothetical polling bore out in reality. In 2019 the poorly named, poorly branded, poorly organised Independent Group got off the ground to pretty favourable opinion polls: even before it announced it would contest elections, it was sitting at 10-15 per cent. It ended up winning 3 per cent in the Euro elections a month later.
It was a dud. When the stakes were real and the party had time to reveal its colours it wasn’t so popular any more.
This 10 per cent for Corbyn tells us there’s an appetite for something with a high-profile name attached. But like with the Independent Group – later Change UK – its raison d’être may be eaten up by parties already in situ. As the Lib Dems did with Brexit in 2019, the Greens may do as the Left Flank in 2025. It’s notable that most of the hypothetical damage a Corbyn party does is not to Labour, but the Greens.
Which brings us to my final point. The appeal of the Greens is not the same as the appeal of a left alternative. Green success in a not insubstantial number of locales comes from not being a hyper-left force, but a hyper-localist, hyper-environmental force. There’s a good argument that deprioritising that in favour of leftism will net it new support in the immediacy. But not without possible losses. It becomes muddy.
[See also: These disability benefit cuts are about to bury Labour]
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