JEREMY Corbyn, Brexit and indyref2 were the reasons for Labour’s disastrous 2019 General Election result in Scotland, according to a damning new report.
The Labour Together review of last year’s vote, published this morning, says the party’s confused position on constitutional questions has undermined the their "credibility and relevance” and given the “impression that Labour did not know where it stood on the most important questions of the election.”
The report will make grim reading for Keir Starmer and Richard Leonard. It claims that if Labour “does not reverse its fortunes in Scotland in a significant way” and win 15 seats currently held by the SNP, it would need to win big in England, to the point where it could take the Tory stronghold of North East Somerset from Jacob Rees Mogg.
At the last election Labour retained just 51% of its 2017 vote in Scotland, collapsing to its worst ever vote share.
The report says Scots didn’t like Corbyn’s “perceived equivocation on Brexit” and his “political reputation, which alienated more traditional, especially older, Labour voters.”
It also says “apparent disagreements around Labour’s position on a second independence referendum added to the confused message around key election issues.”
The report says: “Criticism that Labour was seeking to avoid the Brexit question went hand-in-hand with Labour’s confused position on a second independence referendum, and the misplaced belief that a pro-second referendum stance would win support back from SNP voters.
“Scottish Labour lost pro-UK and pro-independence Remain voters while the SNP continued to win support from Leave voting independence supporters. In both the independence and Brexit debates, Labour was caught between more forceful voices on either side with a message that, to many, looked confused or evasive.”
Scottish Labour’s position, the report adds, appealed only "to a tiny proportion of the electorate”.
The report’s authors criticise the Scottish Labour organisation for investing few resources in polling and research between the 2017 and 2019 elections.
“Given Scottish politics operates in a totally different context to England or Wales, the lack of any voter research was a failure that essentially meant people were operating without adequate information.”
The party’s lack of research meant “Labour’s identification of potentially winnable seats was not properly evidence-based, for example in Scotland, where insufficient resource was being directed to constituencies which might, under different circumstances, have offered opportunities for advance.”
It also criticises the "high level of churn of staff and teams" in party HQ which had a "destabilising impact on the Scottish Party and meant that new staff, who had never run a national campaign before, were immediately expected to run a General Election campaign."
Ousted East Lothian MP Martin Whitefield told the report: “People are multi-tasking in jobs they are not qualified or experienced to do. A number of press releases have to be re-released. Doesn’t characterise an organisation that is ready for government or indeed second party status.”
Across the UK, it was "unclear who was in charge” of the election campaign, and relationships were soured by years of infighting which had created a “toxic culture”.
It claims that Corbyn’s leadership was a “significant factor” in the 2019 result.
The report says: “‘Stop Jeremy Corbyn’ was a major driver of the Conservatives’ success across all their key groups including previous non-voters, and among all the swing voters Labour lost to the Tories.”
Had Corbyn been as popular in December as he was two years earlier, Labour’s vote share could have been 6 percentage points higher, the analysis finds.
Allies of Corbyn told the Guardian that Brexit – not his leadership – was the overriding factor behind the election result.
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