AN EARLY exchange at the Edinburgh Fringe exposes this government’s inability to read the public mood — underlining how real a threat to it a new Jeremy Corbyn-led movement is.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves denied being complacent about the Your Party initiative launched by Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, but her bland dismissal of its prospects oozed complacency.

Oddly. Since Reeves had just stated that Labour’s main rival was not the Conservative Party — which she derided as “irrelevant” — but a new party of the right, Reform UK. And she was replying specifically to her host asking whether Your Party could become a “Reform of the left.”

Opinion polls suggest it could, though it is unlikely to bask in the approval of the billionaire press or receive the season tickets to BBC Question Time Nigel Farage’s projects enjoy. Movements intended to “take on the rich and powerful,” as Corbyn says a new left party would, face Establishment and state obstruction of a different order. However, that was not among Reeves’s reasons for belittling it.

No, the Chancellor disputes the idea that a project with 700,000 sign-ups is popular at all. She casts doubt on the figures, saying her sister received an email telling her she’d signed up when she hadn’t.

Such errors might occur. And enthusiasts for a new party can read too much into the stats: they are expressions of interest only, many will be in existing parties, and saying you want to be added to an email list does not imply the commitment of paid-up membership. But Reeves, in insinuating the mass appeal of Your Party is an illusion, doth protest too much.

That is not credible. Nor should the enthusiasm surprise anyone. Nobody disputes that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was a much larger party than it is today, peaking at over 600,000 members.

Reeves has herself acknowledged its shrinking under Keir Starmer, stating while in opposition that “membership in my constituency is falling and that’s a good thing” (because people supposedly alien to Labour values were leaving).

Her words then expressed a delusion common to the political and media elite: that the mass membership of Corbyn’s Labour didn’t reflect any wider political shift and, in diluting the influence of the professionals, somehow weakened the party.

Reeves echoed that in Edinburgh at the weekend, claiming that Corbyn “tried to destroy my party” between 2015-20 — a claim belied not just by its huge increase in membership under him, but by it winning its biggest vote-share increase in 70 years in 2017 and even in 2019 comfortably outpolling Starmer’s 2024 showing.

Labour was not just bigger and more energised under Corbyn — it was more closely attuned to public opinion, which in polls regularly backs Corbyn policies from higher taxes on the rich to public ownership of utilities. Recent polls showing Reform voters prefer Corbyn to Starmer on most metrics underline, again, the fundamental fault line between insurgent and Establishment politics.

Reeves is blinded to that by Treasury and Westminster groupthink, and the comforting illusion that Labour’s sandcastle majority reflects public support.

She should wise up. The biggest ever Liberal majority in the Commons, that of 1906, was also their last.

The Tory-Labour duopoly was firmly established only after World War II, resting on a social-democratic post-war consensus that no longer exists; across Europe, economic stagnation and declining living standards are eroding the foundations of politics as usual.

Labour, still the largest party in Britain, is not finished; it is even, despite its leadership’s best efforts, still the party to which more socialists belong than any other.

But if anything is designed to entrench its dismal polling, encourage a member exodus to a new left party and unmoor it from what remains of its social base, it is the wilful blindness to the popular clamour for radical change exhibited by Reeves.