Fabian, the Labour-supporting think tank said on Tuesday that Britain’s Labour party is currently too weak to win a national election and should look to join with smaller parties in order to regain power.
Andrew Harrop, Fabian’s general secretary, told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme that with opinion polls placing the Labour party consistently ten percentage points behind the Conservatives, Labour would win less than 200 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons for the first time since 1935.
“For the time being Labour has no realistic chance of winning an election outright,” and this is a “pretty terrifying thought” for most Labour supporter, said Harrop.
“The 2015 election led to a huge meltdown in Scottish support and the rise of the SNP and that’s stopping Labour making progress,” he said.
Following the 2015 general election, where Labour gained only one seat in Scotland, Mr Corbyn’s spokesman said it would be a “challenge” to rebuild Labour support in the country, but this was a challenge they would take one: “Labour under Jeremy Corbyn will be taking its case to every part of Britain in the coming months with a radical policy platform.”
“Labour is too strong to be supplanted by another opposition party; and too weak to have any realistic chance of governing alone … The question now is whether the party can move forward, not back?” said Harrop on Tuesday.
The Labour party has been under a lot of pressure this week, with head of Britain’s biggest trade union and Labour’s largest financial backer saying on Monday he did not think Jeremy Corbyn would seek to cling on to power if the party’s opinion poll ratings were “still awful” in 2019.
Len McCluskey later tweeted his “full support”, describing Corbyn as a “genuine, decent man fighting for a fairer Britain”.