THREAD: Why Keir is right about the second referendum policy *with data*

TLDR: Most leavers who defected from Lab would have done so anyway. But failing to back a PV would have also lost Labour millions of Remainers and taken us to a worse defeat. 1/11 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/16/labour-leadership-contest-keir-starmer-defends-brexit-policy

This is the polling from 2019, Labour lost a catastrophic % of its vote share between Jan and the summer. At this time Lab was prevaricating; they whipped in favour of Kyle-Wilson but the NEC also refused to unequivocally back a PV. By July some polls had Lab as low as 20%. 2/11

The vast majority of the voters Labour lost between the 2017 election and summer 2019 were *Remainers*. So the fall in support was primarily being driven by Labour not being Remain enough, and not because Leavers thought it was too supportive of Remain. 3/11

After the disastrous European elections Labour moved to support a PV under all circumstances, a policy confirmed by conference in September. During the GE, Lab support started rising as most (but not all) Remainers returned to the party with the LDs seeing a fall in support. 4/11

It is implausible that so many Remainers would have returned to Labour if we had not supported a second referendum. Even *with* the referendum promise, many pollsters estimate that Labour still lost a greater number of Remain voters than Leave voters in the General Election. 5/11

Yet it's also true that 52 out of the 60 seats Labour lost overall voted Leave. But ex-Labour Leave voters did not cite Brexit as their main reason for defecting, instead saying the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn was the biggest factor. 6/11

Corbyn was even more unpopular with Lab Leavers than Labour Remainers *despite* refusing to back Remain in a ref. Even if Lab had adopted a more pro-Brexit position, Corbyn was a huge barrier to Leavers voting Labour for reasons that had nothing to do with Brexit. 7/11

Of course Corbyn was leader in 2017 when Lab came within 2% of the Tories. But in 2017 he was up against the deeply unpopular May. Corbyn's popularity declined from 2017 onwards. Meanwhile in July the Tories elected Johnson and saw an immediate improvement in their polling. 8/11

The gap between Corbyn and May’s popularity in 2017 was tiny. In 2019 the gap between Corbyn and Johnson was huge, Corbyn was the least popular leader going into an election since this data was first recorded. 9/11

Regular reminder: most Labour voters are Remainers. If Lab had not supported a 2nd ref it would have alienated the vast majority of its supporters and crucially, was unlikely to bring back anywhere near enough of its smaller number of Leave supporters to compensate. 10/11

IMO, there was no way for Labour to win GE2019 with Corbyn as leader. But it would have been a lot worse if Keir and others hadn’t pushed Labour towards a second referendum policy. ENDS