British politicians tend to avoid December elections. Darkness falls early, the weather is bad, and optimism is hard to come by. The last one was in 1923, when the recently installed Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, called an election four years earlier than necessary, in order to rally the country behind a contentious trade policy that he was pursuing. It was a terrible idea. The Conservatives lost power and the Labour Party formed a government for the first time. In theory, it’s not hard to imagine something similar happening to Boris Johnson, on December 12th. Like Baldwin, Johnson wants the upcoming contest to have a single focus—his Brexit deal—but he and the Tories have other things to answer for.
Conservative Prime Ministers have led Britain since 2010. During that time, the Party’s signature policy has been a program of austerity that has protected the country’s finances at an immense human cost. Crime has risen, schools have suffered, and poverty is increasing. Patients arriving in the emergency rooms of the National Health Service are facing the longest waiting times since 2004. Average wages in Britain, unlike in the U.S., are yet to recover to their level before the financial crisis. And that’s before you even get to the soul-grinding shit show that is Brexit, which has been a Tory production from start to finish, except that it hasn’t finished yet. Under vaguely normal political conditions, the Conservatives wouldn’t stand a chance in next month’s election. Johnson has his talents but he is hardly a flawless candidate. It might not tell you everything about a Prime Minister if he won’t tell you how many children he has, but it must tell you something. Last week, during the first televised debate of the campaign, Johnson was asked whether the truth mattered. “I think it does,” he replied. “I think it’s very important.” The audience burst out laughing.
But these are not vaguely normal conditions. Johnson’s main opponent is Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party. Since he was elected to the post, four years ago, Corbyn, a seventy-year-old socialist Member of Parliament, has remained almost uniquely unimaginable as a British Prime Minister. Most voters look at Corbyn and simply can’t picture him doing the things that Prime Ministers do: living in Downing Street, hobnobbing with the Queen, taking charge in an emergency. Corbyn is more your guy for a rally or a picket line, or a chat at the bus stop. This hasn’t always counted against him. In the spring of 2017, Theresa May, who was every inch an orthodox Prime Minister, gambled that she could crush Corbyn in a general election. Early in the campaign, Labour was twenty points behind in the polls. But Corbyn’s underdog status—combined with some popular left-wing policies, like nationalizing the railways and providing free college tuition, which seemed both radical and achievable—turned him into a low-risk, feel-good alternative for many voters. There was a chant, “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn,” to the tune of “Seven Nation Army,” by the White Stripes. There was a Stormzy meme. Corbyn is relatable; he seems to care. May was stilted and dour. Labour gained thirty seats and the election ended in a hung Parliament. May’s authority—and her command of Brexit—never recovered.
Since Johnson called an election, last month, the question has been whether Corbyn and Labour can pull off a similar performance. But the past two years have been awful for almost every well-known British politician, caught up in the inertia and viciousness of Brexit. When I wrote a profile of Corbyn, shortly before the Brexit vote, he was still riding a bicycle to appointments and knocking around in mismatched jackets and pants. These days, he is mostly crammed into a dark-blue suit. Since the spring, he has worn a pair of corrective glasses for muscle tiredness in his right eye. One of Corbyn’s telling characteristics is his seeming passiveness, his tendency to shrink at vital moments. Earlier this month, at a campaign stop in Blackpool, in the north of England, John Crace, the Guardian’s parliamentary sketch-writer, was struck by Corbyn’s lifelessness. “He could barely keep his eyes open as he introduced a showcase programme for lifelong education that should be at the heart of his party’s manifesto,” Crace wrote. “It was almost as if he was punch-drunk. Years of being the underdog, of disproving the doubters, of always bouncing back, have finally taken their toll. Now it looked as if he had had enough.” In recent weeks, most national polls have had the Conservatives ahead by at least ten per cent. On November 14th, John Curtice, a professor at the University of Strathclyde who is regarded as Britain’s preëminent polling expert, described the chances of Labour winning a majority in December as “as close to zero as one can safely say.” While Johnson’s net approval rating hovers around zero, Corbyn’s is minus sixty.
Last week, I went to Birmingham to see Corbyn launch the Labour Party’s election manifesto. The event took place in the atrium of a faculty building at Birmingham City University, overlooking a construction site for HS2—an eighty-billion-pound high-speed-rail project championed by the Conservatives. Unlike May, who was fiscally cautious, Johnson is promising voters both tax cuts and higher public spending, which gives the campaign the feel of competing Christmas lists, after years of gruel. Corbyn appeared on the stage, which was decked out in clashing pinks and reds, just after 11 A.M. Students peered down from the floors above and he raised two thumbs up to greet them. At his best, Corbyn is personable and direct, possessed of moral certainty. He held up a copy of the Labour manifesto, a red booklet marked with “For the Many, Not the Few,” the Party’s slogan under his leadership. “Labour’s manifesto is a manifesto for hope,” Corbyn told the audience. “But you can’t have it.” He paused for effect. “At least, that’s what the most powerful people in Britain and their supporters want you to believe.”
To take on Johnson’s Conservatives—who raised £5.67 million in the first week of the election campaign, twenty-six times the £218,500 raised by Labour—Corbyn has adopted a newly confrontational tone toward Britain’s élites. At the beginning of his speech, he assailed “the tax dodgers, the bad bosses, the big polluters,” and the “billionaire-owned” media. He quoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred,” he said. And then Corbyn outlined a plan, in his words, to “rewrite the rules” of the British economy. In 2017, Labour’s electoral promises implied an extra seventy billion pounds of public spending—around a ten-per-cent increase in the government budget. Last week, Corbyn doubled down, with proposals that would come to more than a hundred and thirty billion pounds a year. There was truly something for everyone: thirty hours a week of free child care for two- to four-year-olds; more nurses for the N.H.S.; a hefty increase in the minimum wage; more generous pensions and a halt to a rising retirement age; free college (again); free fibre-optic broadband; free music lessons for children; a “green industrial revolution,” promising a million new jobs; partial re-nationalization of the nation’s railways, post office, and energy suppliers; and a reinstatement of trade-union rights. “Ignore the wealthy and powerful who tell you that’s not possible. The future is ours to make, together,” Corbyn said. He quoted Pablo Neruda. “You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.”
In the mouth of a different candidate—an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or an Elizabeth Warren—Corbyn’s agenda could sound very different, even transformative. Labour’s plans are meant to address inequality and to undertake a British equivalent of the Green New Deal. Even Corbyn’s much-derided Brexit policy—negotiate yet another deal and put it to the British public for a vote—isn’t much crazier than Johnson’s promise to secure a new trade deal with the E.U. by the end of 2020. But the messenger matters, and Corbyn is Corbyn. He and John McDonnell, Labour’s shadow Chancellor and the architect of its economic policies, are veterans of strikes and internecine Labour disputes about wealth creation and the role of the state that go back to the early seventies. Unfairly or not, whenever Corbyn speaks about setting up a new “National Education Service” for adult learning, or bringing utility companies into public ownership, he evokes an age of high taxation, inefficient bureaucracy, and national stagnation.
“These are vast numbers, enormous, colossal,” Paul Johnson, the director of the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, said, of Labour’s declared spending plans. Johnson described Corbyn’s claim that its policies could be funded by tax increases on the richest five per cent of the population as “simply not credible.” Beyond the economy, the inclusiveness of Labour’s policies—toward migrants, disabled people, and other minorities—is undermined by Corbyn’s continuing failure to disentangle anti-Semitism from the Party’s left-wing turn under his leadership. Earlier this month, two Labour parliamentary candidates were forced to withdraw from the election, one for using the term “Shylock” during a council meeting, the other for claiming that allegations of anti-Semitism within Labour were “orchestrated by the wealthy establishment.” This week, Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, described the anxiety felt by many Jews about the prospect of Corbyn becoming Prime Minister. “A new poison—sanctioned from the top—has taken root in the Labour Party,” he wrote in the Times of London, warning voters that the “the very soul of our nation is at stake.” Whenever Corbyn is challenged about the most troubling aspect of his record, he adopts a more or less rote response. He raises his voice and declares angrily that the scourge of racism and anti-Semitism is unacceptable in all walks of life. And then it happens again.
During Corbyn’s first months as leader of the Labour Party, people in Westminster used to compare him to Chauncey Gardiner, a character in the 1979 film “Being There,” in which a homely gardener (played by Peter Sellers) is almost accidentally elevated to the U.S. Presidency. He was a blank, seemingly genial man on whom it was possible to project all kinds of things. In the past four years, the public sense of Corbyn has narrowed, while the scale of his job has grown. Holding together the Labour vote in Britain—and growing it sufficiently to dislodge the Conservatives—is not dissimilar from the challenge facing the Democratic Party, as it tries to muster a coalition to defeat Donald Trump in 2020. The Party is increasingly torn between its younger, more diverse urban voters and its traditional working-class base, in the Midlands and the North. The Brexit vote made Labour’s internal tensions explicit. In 2016, around a third of Labour voters chose to leave the E.U. (Corbyn himself is a long-term Euroskeptic.) In the election next month, some sixty per cent of Labour-controlled constituencies will have a majority of Brexit voters. The big story of British politics recently has been about how the main parties have adapted to the new, tribal identities of Leave and Remain and how they go about amassing those voters into a parliamentary majority. Under Johnson, the Conservatives are now an unambiguously pro-Brexit party. Under Corbyn, Labour has attempted to make room for everybody, which is either unifying or a disastrous misjudgment, depending on your point of view.
In late October, political analysts described the figure of “Workington Man” as vital to both parties’ chances. Workington is a seaside town in Cumbria, on England’s northwest coast, which has voted Labour in every general election since 1918. This spring, however, the Brexit Party won the European parliamentary election. “Workington Man” is a white, male voter, older than forty-five, with a high-school education, who voted for Brexit and is hesitant about sticking with Labour under Corbyn. The term was coined by Onward, a center-right think tank, and expresses a hope, pursued by the Tories in recent years, that the Labour coalition is about to collapse. “Brexit has unlocked a load of voters for the first time,” Will Tanner, Onward’s director, told me. “If you look at some of the Labour Party’s policies and, specifically, their tone, they are clearly focussing quite heavily on a socially liberal, probably metropolitan-dwelling, probably not very old socialist. It’s not about working-class politics at all.” Tanner used to be one of May’s senior advisers and witnessed her failure, close up, to win those voters. But Johnson is a more adept and vigorous campaigner. The day before Corbyn’s manifesto launch, the Prime Minister was in Teeside, a historically Labour-voting region in the country’s industrial northeast, accidentally letting slip a tax cut that will benefit lower earners.
The truth is that both of the main parties are going to find it very difficult to win in December. The more that Johnson looks like a populist Brexiteer, the more he risks alienating traditional, middle-class Conservative voters, of whom about four and a half million voted Remain. The Liberal Democrats, who want to cancel Brexit altogether, are chasing those votes in the South and the West of England. The reach of Corbyn’s state-building radicalism, meanwhile, may have found its natural limit. Last week, in the first round of polls after the manifesto launch, Labour’s share of the vote barely moved, leaving the Conservatives still some twelve points ahead. But unstable loyalties around Brexit and the oddities of the British electoral system mean that it is almost impossible to translate national polls into an accurate prediction of seats in the House of Commons. “There are lots of dynamics at play which should make the Conservatives worry or at least be very careful,” Tanner said. One of those dynamics is that, if Johnson falls short of an outright majority, Corbyn would be strongly placed to lead a loose coalition, made up of Labour, the Scottish National Party, and the Liberal Democrats—all opposed to Brexit in one form or another. It would be an unusual way for a veteran socialist to enter Downing Street, but nothing stranger than what happened at Britain’s previous December election. Tanner brought up what happened in 1923. “The Conservatives throwing away a majority and the first Labour government ever being ushered in with the support of the Liberals,” he said. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.”
