Support for Britain’s governing left-wing Labour party has cratered, but its own members think the threat isn’t existential and can be solved by simply changing its public face, new polling reveals.
A massive 74 per cent of paid-up members of the Labour Party — which presently controls the House of Commons and consequently chooses who the Prime Minister is — believes they’d outright win the next UK General Election if the present Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham took over as party leader.
The results from new polling on a variety of questions asked of Labour members underlines that the small — but for the next few months, very powerful — group believes they don’t have a party problem, but merely have a much more easily solved leader problem.
Indeed, the YouGov polling seems to imply that while Labour members understand the voting public doesn’t like Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, they also disagree with them for it, apparently believing he has been a good leader. A considerable 66 per cent said they thought Starmer had done a good job.
While a Labour leadership contest has been a matter of constant speculation for weeks, one still hasn’t been called as at least one potential candidate demurred at the last moment and another scrabbles to become eligible for the ballot. Nevertheless, asked how they would vote in a theoretical Labour leadership contest the weight of the party appears to be very much behind Mayor Andy Burnham at 47 per cent, with 31 per cent saying they still backed Starmer to keep the top job.
No other candidate broke ten per cent. Reducing it to a two-horse-race, Burnham picked up most of the support from the also-rans, leaping to 59 per cent, while Starmer advanced only a little to 37 per cent.
To what extend these Labour insiders have managed to delude themselves on the key question of whether their party is actually finished, having run out of voters to represent, or if it can wipe the sin away with a simple change of leadership, can only be truly tested at election time. Yet swathes of the country did already vote less than two weeks ago in nationwide local votes for councils and devolved Parliaments, in which Labour recorded some of its worst results ever.
The party even lost regions it has held for the entire history of the party going back to the end of the Great War. The greatest beneficiary of this collapse has been Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party which surged in those votes. On whether Labour can recover, Reform insiders clearly differ from the optimism of Labour members, with party strategy chief Danny Kruger saying last week: “the fact is, it doesn’t matter who it is, because the Labour Party is absolutely unable to govern in the national interest… the fact is they can’t make the changes the country needs and we won’t get that under this government, I’m afraid.
“So I do want a general election, we need that as soon as possible, but I don’t have any faith in any of the candidates coming through on the Labour side”.
Read the full article here