Labour Party position on EU is right

It is a common theme of politics coverage that the voters don’t want this election and are apathetic about a lacklustre campaign. This is quite wrong.

When parliament voted for an early election, 50 per cent of people said they supported it, and only 23 per cent opposed. In a poll this week asking, “How important is it to you personally who wins the general election?” 64 per cent said “very important”. This is the highest figure recorded by Ipsos Mori since it started asking this question in 1987.

Some journalists are making the same mistake they always make, of assuming that because they are totally bored with the same political argument over and over again, everyone else must be too.

This is most acute on the subject of Brexit. Yes, the whole nation is fed up with it, but that means different things to different people. Many Leavers are frustrated that it hasn’t happened, three and a half years after they voted for it. Many Remainers are worried that they may fail to prevent what they see as a national disaster.

Both sides care passionately about the outcome. They are fed up not because they are bored but because they fear for the country’s future. It goes beyond Brexit, though. Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters are just as fired up about the hope of building here the socialist Jerusalem as they were last time. My hunch is that there are fewer of them than in the 2017 election, but many of them feel just as strongly.

The partisan cheering of a couple of TV studio audiences may not be the best indicator, but I thought it was notable on Tuesday and last night that this fervour was balanced by Conservatives, loudly supporting Boris Johnson and energised by a determination to stop Corbyn imposing what they see as Marxist state control on them.

Projecting an enthusiasm deficit onto the electorate is part of a larger mistake that we journalists often make. Our problem is that we have been writing about the arguments of this election for months, and the debate about Brexit has been soul-drainingly intense for a whole year now.

Yet it is only now, with less than three weeks to go until polling day, and with postal ballots about to arrive, that most normal people start to pay close attention to politics. This means that not only is there an enthusiasm gap between voters and journalists, but there is an agenda gap too, in that journalists regard the finer points of Labour’s Brexit policy or Tory NHS spending plans as old news at just the time when many voters want to know more about them.

Hence the headline reporting of last night’s BBC Question Time special, which was all about Jeremy Corbyn’s neutral stance in a second EU referendum if there is a Labour government.

This was “new”, in that it was a small but significant shift in Corbyn’s position, but it was hardly the most important thing about the programme for those voters who were tuning in for the first time. Even a recent visitor from a nearby solar system would know that Labour promises another EU referendum, and that Corbyn refuses to say now whether he would vote to leave or remain in that referendum.

The new bit of what Corbyn said last night was that he would maintain that neutrality up to the day of the referendum. Previously, the line had been that the Labour Party would decide its policy at a special conference three months after taking office, before a referendum that would be held within six months.

Corbyn and his advisers seem to have realised the problem with this, which is that Labour members overwhelmingly support staying in the EU, and so the special conference is bound to decide that the party should campaign for Remain. It made no sense for Corbyn to say, during the election campaign: “I’ll answer your question in three months’ time.”

This brought back uncomfortable memories of Neil Kinnock, on the eve of the 1992 election, telling a baying TV studio audience that he had a view on electoral reform but he wasn’t going to tell them what it was.

So it is sensible for Corbyn to say he will be neutral throughout; that he will sit above the biggest decision faced by the country, and let the people decide. You can disagree with it, but you cannot say it’s unclear or that he is not being straight with the voters. closed against them. Neutrality lets Corbyn answer the question and then talk about Labour’s non-Brexit policies.

There are a few problems with some of these. The ones that seem to have cut through to the public are free broadband and the four-day week. Neither is wildly popular, but they have some potential. What Labour probably ought to do is stick to the NHS, schools and nationalising essential services.

These are things that people care deeply about, and they care whether we are in the EU or out of it — rather more than they do about the fine detail of Labour’s “Corbyn neutral” policy. It does our democracy a disservice to suggest that, just because some journalists find the campaign a little dull, the nation is gripped by apathy and indifference.