11 May Corbyn in hot water after local election disappointment
As Labour officials insist that Jeremy Corbyn is “well-placed”, criticism of the party’s leader intensifies over anti-semitism. James Middleton reports.
MPs have been calling for a swift autopsy of Labour’s limp local election campaign following the 2018 elections, in which the party managed to win just 70 seats and missed many of its major targets, gaining only one London council.
The party also suffered in several of its heartlands, particularly in Leave-voting working-class areas. This is in part owed to the disintegration of UKIP, whose share of the national vote fell form 16 percent to just 2.
But it was the scandal of anti-semitism that hung most heavily around the neck of Jeremy Corbyn following the election, after Britain’s Jews rejected the Labour Party en masse following controversial comments from the former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, as well as historic associations between the Labour leader and anti-semitic organisations including Hezbollah and PressTV, the national broadcaster of Iran – a nation whose regime has a long history of antisemitic policy.
Inset: Find out what these results mean for the Conservative party
Barry Rawlings, Labour’s leader on Barnet Council (a heavily Jewish constituency), decried Labour’s failure “to deal with antisemitism on a national level”. Labour MP Jess Phillips, meanwhile, said that “the anti-semitism problem has been a problem [for Labour] in big metropolitan areas like London and Birmingham.
“The Labour Party has to look at the results, have a really honest strategy about it to improve it, a real hard honest look at itself.”
Mr Corbyn, meanwhile, is insistent that the party is “well-placed to fight and win the next general election”. Writing on Facebook, the Labour leader stated : “We have consolidated and built on the advances we made at last year’s General Election, when we won the largest increase in Labour’s share of the vote since 1945.
In these elections we have won seats across England in places we have never held before. We won Plymouth from the Tories, who lost control of Trafford, their flagship northern council”.
Indeed, the night was not universally negative for the Labour Party. In addition to losing control of Trafford, fellow Tory flagships South Cambridge and Richmond. Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that these are constituencies that each voted Remain in the EU referendum . Combined with the Tories’ benefitting from UKIP’s implosion, this has led several commentators to speculate that Brexit continues to loom large in the political landscape.
Not so, says Labour MP Ian Austin. Speaking on Radio 4’s Today Programme, he instead claimed that “[Corbyn’s] response to recent events in Salisbury or Syria have not given [the electorate] much confidence”. Disputing this, Shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon claimed “it’s very rare in these local elections that people have been – when I have been knocking on doors – raising Jeremy’s leadership in a negative way”.
So while the cause of the results may be controversial, one thing is difficult to dispute. As the nation’s leading psephologist, Sir John Curtice, told BBC News “nothing much has happened”. The parties having beaten one another into a stalemate, all that is left for the politicians to do is apportion blame over the coming weeks and months.
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