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David Runciman has done a couple of interesting podcasts or talks about how the main issue in the seats that flipped from red to blue wasn't people switching from Labour to Conservative but Labour voters not voting at all.
Corbyn agreeing to an election would have gone down extremely badly too. Remember the rhetoric around Parliament being a "dead Parliament" and the increasing anger towards politicians? If that had been allowed to continue, and Corbyn had been held responsible for that, it would have got even nastier.
Corbyn was a very poor leader, but he was also in a difficult bind that no Labour leader could have come out of with ease. Would Owen Smith have done a better job at the 2019 election, for example?
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Owen would not have. He's another dullard.
I often wonder what the world would have been like had the Milliband rivalry been resolved the other way? Would he have one? Is he too Blairite?
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I think people focus on vote switchers (as opposed to voters who just didn't vote for 'their' party) because they do double damage - once by losing their party a vote, and another time by gaining their rival party a vote. But the reasons for both (staying home and switching parties) seem broadly consistent:
I do think Brexit generally is a no-win situation for labour, and I agree that Corbyn was faced with some of the worst circumstances possible. But many of those circumstances were avoidable, and I think other leaders would've navigated those challenges better. By the time 2019 came around, I agree, the cards were impossible and no other leader could've done any better. But there were plenty of opportunities to shuffle the deck before then - Corbyn just didn't seem interested.
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The latest Runciman Talking Politics is on Conservative policies taking Labour positions, etc. Worth a listen.
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ReekBlefs
snoops
A clear Brexit position might explain why the Tories won 2019, but it doesn't explain why Labour lost. To do that you need to look at the post-election polling, especially around the voters who deserted the Labour party in droves. And if you do, in poll after poll it becomes clear that Brexit wasn't the main factor, it was the leadership:
Of course, the one feeds into the other - poor leadership on Skripal and antisemitism bled into a perception of poor leadership on Brexit too - and the flip flop from hard Brexit to PV, while clearly the right thing to do at the time, made us pay a corresponding price in trust. That's just one of the reasons we never should've agreed to an election until Brexit was sorted. I'll never understand why Corbyn agreed to it.