Why Corbyn can't win a general election

For the overwhelming majority of people this blog post is completely superfluous. They read the newspapers, consider the last election result or think about the 1980s and the fact that Corbyn won’t win an election is obvious. But for the small group that continue to clamour for Corbyn – I hope to change your mind. Here’s why the arguments in his favour don’t stack up.

Pro-Corbyn argument number 1
At the last election voters weren’t offered a real choice. It was austerity heavy or austerity light. The one place voters were given a real choice – Scotland – they overwhelmingly voted for an anti-austerity party. If Labour was a genuinely anti-austerity party, like Corbyn would create, people would have voted for it.

1.  In the rest of the country voters were offered an anti-austerity choice – the Green Party. They didn’t vote for it;
2. One might argue that people didn’t vote Green because, due to our FPTP voting system, the Greens were not a viable choice in most constituencies. But if voters nationally were against austerity, then even if most people's choice was just austerity-light (Labour) or austerity-heavy (Tory), you would expect austerity-light to win – it didn’t;
3. The SNP's success cannot in any case be put down entirely to its economic offering. Nationalism and weaknesses within the Scottish Labour party machine contributed to it;
4. Scotland has for a long time been to the left of most of the country. A policy offering that works in Scotland won’t necessarily work in the rest of the country;
5. It’s worth remembering that even if Labour had won every single seat in Scotland, the Tories would still have a majority nationally. If the next government is to be a progressive one, that majority has to be overturned. If Labour shifts leftwards, it may well pick up seats from the SNP, but there is no evidence to suggest it will take away Tory seats. (And in any case, Scottish seats make up less than 10% of the whole). 

Pro-Corbyn argument number 2

Disillusion with a Westminster elite who are all too similar has fuelled the rise of UKIP. UKIP votes were a protest vote for people who wanted something different. Corbyn is different. He will win back the their votes.

1. A protest vote for something different need not have been a vote for UKIP – it could have been a vote for the Green party, an independent candidate, or a spoilt ballot. So a vote for UKIP also suggests something about the politics of the people making their protest vote – a politics that is anti-immigration and anti-EU. Corbyn is probably the most pro-immigration of the Labour leadership candidates. There is little reason to believe his politics would appeal to UKIP voters;
2. Corbyn has angered and alienated UKIP voters with a recent interview in which he maligned many of them as racists (probably true, but nevertheless not a great way to get them on side…)
3. In any case, Corbyn is not the only candidate who differs from the typical Westminster elite in some regard. Corbyn is an old, white, male southerner. The same can’t be said for any of the other candidates.

Pro-Corbyn argument number 3

Corbyn is brave. He has the confidence to speak to terrorists to promote peace. He has been unfairly attacked in the press for calling them friends, but that’s just how he speaks to people. If peace is to come we need leaders like him, who will do dialogue with terrorists.

1. Corbyn is not the only candidate willing to talk to terrorists in pursuit of peace. At leadership hustings this week Cooper said she would do it. The difference between them is one of language and approach; she would not call them friends.
2. In Corbyn’s interview with Ch4 he explained that he used the word ‘friend’ as a ‘collective term’. The explanation is bizarre – there are multiple ‘collective terms’ that could be used to describe Hamas politicians, such as ‘leaders’, ‘representatives’, or just ‘politicians’.  Why use ‘friends’? Corbyn has since said that he just calls everyone ‘friend’, but…
3. Politicians have to use language in a nuanced way. The word ‘friends’ connotes warmth and support. You don’t need to be someone’s friend to make peace with them. Calling someone a friend, whether one intends it or not, quite obviously conveys support – which ought not to be given to homophobic, anti-semitic terrorists.

Pro-Corbyn argument number 4

What about all those people who didn’t vote? They didn’t vote because all the main parties are too similar. Corbyn is different. They’ll vote for him.

1. Where’s the evidence that non-voters are overwhelmingly leftists? What’s to say that Corbyn's inclusion on the ballot paper won’t rouse non-voters from their political slumber to vote Tory, to make sure he doesn’t win? The truth is, we just don’t know.
2. The reality is that people who don’t vote, don’t vote for a whole bunch of reasons. Some are left wing, some are right wing. Many just don’t care.
3. In any case, it's not a sound election strategy to pin your hopes on the one group of people whose track record suggests that they don’t care enough about politics to vote.
4. Finally, nothing promotes voter apathy as much as an alternative that is not perceived to be credible, and based on all the polling and anecdotal evidence around, a Corbyn-led Labour party would not be perceived as being credible. 

The rise of the CAA - when good PR and bad statistics mix

The Campaign Against Anti-semitism is a fairly new grassroots organisation combating antisemitism. Previously it organised rallies such as this one. However, as I explained last week, it's recent survey, which has made all sorts of headlines, was deeply flawed. And it seems the experts agree...

Some quotes on the CAA's anti-Semitism survey

1.    Social Scientist Dr Keith Kahn-Harris - it was ‘methodologically invalid. There can be no confidence in its representativeness.’

2.     Jonathan Boyd, Director of Jewish Policy Research – ‘They haven’t done some key and fairly basic parts of the process.’
 
3.     Dr Michael Pinto Duschnisky – ‘These figures are not to be trusted’
 
4.     Jewish Policy Research statement – ‘The organisation’s survey about antisemitism is littered with flaws, and in the context of a clear need for accurate data on this topic, its work may even be rather irresponsible… quite basic methodological flaws and weaknesses
 

And while we're at it...

1. The CAA website claims that in July 2014, 95% of hate crimes in London were against Jews. This is false. The figure is only true if limited to faith hate crimes in July, and even then there is no breakdown of the number. And if we look at 2014 as a whole, there were 13,000 hate crimes, of which only 358 antisemitic. That’s not 95% - it’s not even 5%. 

The logical leaps of Gilad Atzmon.

Just found this on Gilad Atzmon's website.

It's a letter from the Israeli ambassador to Nick Clegg, voicing concerns about David Ward MP. For Atzmon, such a letter prompts the question 'Is Britain still a sovereign country? - as he's written at the bottom of the page.

Quite a logical leap that. Not really sure how he gets from an ambassador's letter to Britain lacking sovereignty, unless - like classical anti-semites - it's because he chooses to see sinister Jewish control wherever he looks. (Although he'd probably protest that he was merely being anti-Israel...).

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism - Asking the questions you need to get the answers you ought not to want...

Jewish life in Britain is vibrant, flourishing, and unashamedly public. We have our own book festival and food festival, our own newspapers and magazines. More children go to Jewish schools than ever before. Jewish youth movements take hundreds of children on summer camps each year. At Christmas each year, hundreds of Jews go to a conference, Limmud, to discuss and celebrate Jewish life. As the Jewish Policy Research (JPR) concluded after conducting a survey on anti-Semitism:

“…compared with other Jewish populations in Europe, Jews in the United Kingdom generally experience less anti-Semitism and are less worried about it. There is evidence to indicate that most British Jews feel fully integrated into British society, and that discrimination against Jews is largely a thing of the past”

The JPRs findings were published in July. Yet now a survey by the Campaign for Anti-Semitism (CAA) – a grassroots organisation of activists – claims that over half of British Jews see no future in the UK. And this finding has been making headlines.

It seems too bad to be true – and that’s probably because it isn’t true.

How can it be that the CAA’s findings deviate so drastically from the findings of the JPR report? The JPR survey of anti-Semitism was conducted by experts in their field and subjected to careful statistical testing, all of which is detailed in their report. In contrast, the CAA survey of anti-Semitism was not, and it shows.

In fact the CAA’s survey had two parts. The first, in conjunction with Yougov, examined non-Jewish attitudes towards Jews in Britain. That part wasn’t too bad, although I’d take issue with a couple of things. For example, according to that survey, not wanting a family member to marry a Jew is anti-Semitic. But that logic would surely cast as racist any Jew who opposes a family member marrying out – something I suspect many British Jews feel.

The second CAA survey, of UK Jews perceptions of anti-Semitism, was deeply flawed. Firstly, it fell foul of selection bias, where the method of selecting respondents biases the ultimate findings. I completed the survey after finding it on the CAA's facebook page – and I suspect many other people will have found it in similar ways. People who are looking on websites about anti-Semitism are clearly going to be more likely to consider anti-Semitism to be a big issue, thereby distorting the results.

Secondly, the survey asked questions that were laden with assumptions and extremely leading. For example, ‘Media bias against Israel fuels persecution of Jews in Britain’ – a question that presupposes the existence of anti-Israel bias.

Finally, the report shows no record of which respondents said what. Is there a difference in the responses of respondents depending on how they learnt of the report? Without more data about the backgrounds of the respondents, it’s very difficult to properly analyse the results.  

Most problematic, in my view, is the odious suggestion that the current experience of anti-Semitism in Britain ‘has echoes of the 1930s’. According to CAA, that’s what over half of UK Jews think. Really? Is our community really that lacking in perspective? 1930s anti-Semitism was state sponsored and quotidian. Modern anti-Semitism is challenged by the state and – as evidenced by the JPR’s data on how frequently people actually experience anti-Semitism – is thankfully rare.  

The authors of the CAA survey report purport to convey a community living in fear. But through the hyperbolic headlines they have prompted they are guilty of contributing towards the very climate of fear about which they claim to be so concerned.