Primary Unit

Having written a few things about the Labour Party recently (1, 2, 3), it would be remiss of me not to mark the result.

Obviously I’m very happy. The movement for change represented by Jeremy Corbyn still has a long way to go so it’s good to have fended off the first serious attempt to revert back to the old Establishment party.

I think it’s important to note how widespread support for Corbyn is across the elements that vote for the Labour leader:

This bar chart shows the percentages Corbyn won in each category of voter at the 2015 and 2016 leadership elections, with the total on the right-hand side.

In last year’s vote, Corbyn won a majority of registered (£3) and affiliated (trade union) supporters, but “only” a plurality (49.6%) of full party members.

This year he won a majority of party members (59%). This and the decline in his share of registered supporters (£25 in 2016) may be partially explained by previous registered supporters joining the party as full members after his victory.

So across all three categories, Corbyn has a majority of support. This should (but probably won’t) stop people saying that Corbyn’s victory was only on the back of “£3 Trots”. Already there’s been attempts to slice up the vote in a bid to show the weakness of his support, such as Scotland supposedly going for Owen Smith. (Scottish Labour may have some differences, but that claim’s based on an exit poll of just 51 people.)

There also remains the question of how many people were prevented from voting in the leadership election. Just considering registered supporters — and the problem affected members and affiliates too — Labour said that 183,541 people paid £25 to become registered supporters, yet only 121,517 of them voted in the leadership election.

Now that he’s won, that doesn’t matter in a narrow sense. But two things are clear: support for Jeremy Corbyn is widespread across all parts of the party, and that there was an attempt by the party bureaucracy to drain that off. To do justice to the former, something should be done about the latter.