“Send David Cameron a message”: Corbyn’s biggest test opens against a stormy backdrop

Jeremy Corbyn faces his biggest electoral test as party leader today with Labour activists buoyed by David Cameron’s climbdown over child refugees but disheartened over the impact of the anti-Semitism row.

Corbyn hopes to win in London but the picture outside the capital appears less rosy amid rumours English councillors could make a move against the leader within the next week, if results prove poor, while a new poll puts Labour on third place in Scotland.

After a bruising encounter at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, in which he was repeatedly pressed over his description of Hamas as “friends” – Corbyn says he was trying to broker peaceful discussions between two sides – the Labour leader can point to a significant u-turn by Cameron over his previous refusal to accept more child refugees to Britain.

“Send David Cameron and the Conservatives a message today”, Corbyn wrote on Twitter this morning as he went to vote in North London. The message repeated one of Corbyn’s core campaign slogans which he also featured in a video published yesterday.

The challenges facing Corbyn were underlined when a Survation poll for the Jewish Chronicle showed support for Labour in the Jewish community has dropped from 18 per cent last year to 8.5 per cent.

Meanwhile a new poll showed the SNP are expected to romp home in Scotland with the Conservatives edging out Labour for second place. The nationalists are set to win 69 seats, matching its performance in 2011, with the Tories on 24 MSPs and Kezia Dugdale’s team on 21, according to the YouGov poll for The Times.

Corbyn’s triumph in the Labour leadership election on an anti-austerity ticket had raised hopes of a Labour recovery in Scotland, where there is fierce opposition to Tory spending cuts, but a breakthrough now appears some way off.

“[The] elections are the perfect test of Jeremy Corbyn’s theory that anti-austerity politics and mobilising non-voters is the key to winning elections,” said James Morris, former pollster to Ed Miliband, in an article for LabourList yesterday.

“In Scotland, we have an anti-austerity electorate and in the English local elections, we have millions of habitual non-voters ready to be mobilised. Scots favour slower spending cuts by a margin of two to one, while in England, two thirds of voters stayed home the last time these council seats were up for grabs.”

It comes as Corbyn’s team tried to move away from the leader’s claim this week that Labour will not lose any council seats. A spokesman said Corbyn had intended merely to say that Labour is “not in the business of losing seats”.

Despite a stormy backdrop for the party, yesterday MPs, peers and activists claimed a major victory as Cameron was forced to perform a u-turn over child refugees.

Cameron agreed Britain would take more unaccompanied Syrian children from within Europe – although stopped short of naming a figure. Ministers will discuss numbers with council leaders but Labour’s Lord Dubs had been demanding places for 3,000.