Will Corbyn’s Decision to Back Hard Brexit in Parliament Hurt Labour at the Next Election?

Evidence suggests that the increase in Labour’s vote share at the last election was driven by disgruntled Remainers, that a large fraction of Labour supporters oppose hard Brexit, and that many of these people identify more with Remain than with Labour

[Update: more evidence is available here.]

The pro-Remain Labour MP Chuka Umunna tabled an amendment to the Queen’s Speech that called for Britain to remain in the Single Market and the Customs Union after Brexit. However, Jeremy Corbyn ordered Labour MPs to abstain on the motion by imposing a three-line whip, thereby effectively backing May’s hard Brexit agenda. The amendment was defeated by 322 votes to 101, despite 49 Labour MPs rebelling.

Several lines of evidence suggest that Corbyn’s decision to back hard Brexit in Parliament could hurt Labour at the next election.

First, as I noted in a previous post, evidence suggests that the increase in Labour’s vote share at the last election was driven by disgruntled Remain voters, who voted Labour in order to prevent May proceeding with hard Brexit. Percentage voting Remain is a strong predictor of the difference between the increase in Labour vote share and the increase in Tory vote share across constituencies.

Indeed, The Economist reports that “Brexit was responsible for about half of the national swing from the Tories to Labour”.

As I also noted in that previous post, the vote distribution by age for the 2017 General Election looks a lot more similar to the corresponding distribution for the EU referendum than to the corresponding distribution for the 2015 General Election:

A reasonable response to the preceding evidence is as follows. Maybe most of the young people who voted Labour at the last election did so not because they firmly opposed hard Brexit, but because they simply preferred the Labour manifesto. After all, didn’t the Labour manifesto essentially endorse hard Brexit itself?

While the Labour manifesto did say that free movement would end after Brexit, it seems rather unlikely that most young people who voted Labour were aware of this. Corbyn made a concerted effort to avoid talking about Brexit during the election campaign. Consequently, as a recent YouGov poll reported, Labour was perceived as having the least clear position on Brexit of the four major parties:

Second, evidence from recent opinion polls indicates that the majority of Labour supporters either support soft Brexit or oppose Brexit altogether. A recent Lord Ashcroft poll found that 43% of Labour supporters consider themselves “resistant to Brexit”, whereas only 7% of Conservative supporters consider themselves as such:

A YouGov poll published in May (i.e., before the General Election) found that 40% of people intending to vote Labour were in favour of a second referendum. By contrast, only 5% of those intending to vote Tory were in favour of a second referendum.

A YouGov poll published in June (i.e., after the General Election) found that 64% of those who voted Labour thought Britain was wrong to vote to leave the EU, and 30% supported overturning the referendum result. By contrast, only 25% of those who voted Tory thought the country was wrong to vote to leave the EU, and only 6% supported overturning the referendum result.

That same June YouGov poll found that a 69% of people who voted Labour were in favour of either soft Brexit, a second referendum or abandoning Brexit completely. By contrast, only 27% of those who voted Tory were in favour of one of those positions.

Third, anecdotal evidence from the response to Corbyn’s decision on Twitter indicates that there is a considerable amount of dissatisfaction among liberals and progressives. A particularly representative tweet is this one from Nicola Sturgeon, which has so far received nearly 3.7k retweets:

Young Labour voters may also be somewhat vexed by the fact that Corbyn’s decision to back hard Brexit prompted Nigel Farage to describe the Labour leader as “almost a proper chap”, a statement that has so far received more than 1.6k retweets.

Fourth, a YouGov poll published in May found that people tend to have more in common with those who voted the same was as them in the EU referendum but support a different party than those who voted the opposite way to them in the EU referendum but support the same party. And this was more true for Labour supporters than Conservative supporters. (It should be noted that there were a large number of ‘don’t knows’).

In summary, evidence suggests that: the increase in Labour’s vote share at the last election was driven by disgruntled Remain voters, that a large fraction of Labour supporters oppose hard Brexit, and that many of these people identify more with Remain than with Labour. Consequently, Corbyn’s decision to back hard Brexit in parliament could hurt Labour at the next election.