JEREMY Corbyn’s popularity is in crisis and goes down like a “plate of warm sick” in Labour heartlands outside of London, according to a top pollster.
“Jeremy Corbyn is a phenomenon whose popularity seems confined to university graduates, in particular in the south of England,” Chairman of polling firm Savanta ComRes Andrew Hawkins said in an interview with HOAR.
According to a poll by YouGov for The Times last week, the Labour leader was set to lose the election with only 211 seats but a series of surveys over the weekend predicted a Labour was putting a squeeze on Boris Johnson’s lead.
A poll by BMG Research for the Independent on Saturday had Mr Corbyn jumping ahead by 5 points to 33 per cent, leaving only six points of wiggle room between the two parties.
Mr Hawkins said his analysis still had Mr Johnson ahead of Mr Corbyn.
“In seats far-flung from London and the south-east traditional Labour seats, Jeremy Corbyn goes down like a warm plate of sick,” he said.
“Voters absolutely cannot bear him.”
Mr Hawkin’s compared Mr Corbyn’s popularity to hated former British National Party leader Nick Griffin, who was convicted in 1998 of inciting racial hatred after distributing material saying the massacre of six million Jews in the Holocaust was a hoax.
“The only person who goes down as badly with voters is probably Nick Griffin in the run-up to 2010,” Mr Hawkins said.
Mr Hawkins said it wasn’t the Labour party’s far-reaching, big-spending policies that were putting voters off, but the leader himself.
“What’s really interesting is that a lot of his policies are quite popular with that group but Jeremy Corbyn the man seems to be Kryptonite to those voters.”
The party’s ongoing problems with anti-semitism and loss of support from Jewish voters, including the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’ fiery allegations of discrimination at the core of the Labour party, was not translating into a drop in votes from the traditional support base.
“It’s not as if the electorate don’t believe the Labour party has a problem with antisemitism, quite the opposite, they do. It just doesn’t seem to be anything near as much of a vote changer as might be expected.”
“Even the Chief Rabbi’s intervention last week where he described this election campaign as being a battle for the soul of the nation, it just simply doesn’t have the cut through,” the pollster said.
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