Polarising - In A Good Way: As the British Labour Party's leadership contest drew to a close this week, Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign team estimated he had taken his message, face-to-face, to more than 50,000 people. Literally hundreds-of-thousands more have paid Labour £3 for the right to participate in the leadership vote. The polls predict a Corbyn win on the first ballot.
IN LESS THAN 48 HOURS the world will know whether Jeremy
Corbyn has won or lost. There will be many, still, who scratch their heads and
ask: “Jeremy Who?” And why not? Until the unexpectedly savage defeat of Ed
Miliband’s Labour Party in the recent British General Election, the identity of
the MP for the London seat of Islington North was known to very few people
outside of … well … Islington North. And even among those who have regularly
returned him to Westminster since 1983, only a handful would have picked their
MP – a bewhiskered, 66-year-old, self-proclaimed socialist, by the name of
Jeremy Corbyn – as Ed Miliband’s most likely successor.
That his name appears on the ballot-paper at all is, like so
many other aspects of his candidacy, a virtual accident. Other, better known,
left-wing flagbearers had already been approached, and declined, before Corbyn
said “Yes”. He accepted the nomination in a spirit of honourable
self-sacrifice: the left-wing of the Labour Party had to have someone to vote
for. (And it wasn’t as if there was any chance of him winning!)
Hah!
The Germans would blame it on the Zeitgeist – the Spirit of the Times. Others would say that Corbyn’s
candidacy only took off when Labour’s Interim Leader, Harriet Harman, urged her
colleagues to join the Tories in putting the boot into Britain’s already
bruised and battered beneficiaries. His hard-line left-wing comrades would
merrily opine that there has always been a massive constituency for Jeremy
Corbyn’s simple socialist message, but until he came along no one had quite
mastered the knack of communicating it effectively. Whatever the explanation,
the brute fact of the contest for Miliband’s replacement was indisputable: the moment
Labour audiences saw and heard Jeremy Corbyn, they fell head-over-heels in love
with him.
And no one in the British punditocracy could work out why.
It wasn’t as if Corbyn was especially telegenic. (Dear Lord – that beard!) Nor was he an especially
gifted speaker. And the nonsensical things he was saying: who could possibly
take such antiquated socialist sloganeering seriously? Certainly not his rivals
for the leadership: lynx-eyed Yvette Cooper; bluff and blokey Andy Burnham; the
ambitiously lissom Liz Kendall. Those three all looked completely at home in
the Labour Party Tony Blair had made. The Party that no longer believed in “the
common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. The
Party that had allowed Blair to lead it into the crime that was Iraq.
But that was just it! Corbyn had never swallowed a drop of
the Blairite Kool-Aid. He still believed
in common ownership. He’d voted against
going into Iraq. He was, 32 years after being elected to the House of Commons,
the same unashamed socialist he’d always been. And when the TV interviewers
asked him questions about where he’d like to take Britain, he answered them.
Without the benefit of pollsters, or spin-doctors, he talked about
renationalising the railways, reanimating the trade unions, restoring the NHS.
Cooper, Kendall and Burnham were dumfounded. The pundits were non-plussed. The
Blairite Faction was, very publicly, appalled.
But Labour’s members and supporters just couldn’t get enough.
The people who now find themselves vilified as the opponents
of “Jez we can!” Corbymania should have seen it coming. But, not only did they
fail to grasp the meaning of the emergence of left-wing populist parties across
Europe; they also (and quite wilfully) refused to comprehend the meaning of the
Scottish National Party’s (SNP) near clean-sweep of Labour seats north of the
border.
The SNP ran on an anti-austerity platform, positioning
itself well to the left of Labour. But their crushing victory was about a lot
more than that. By optimistically orienting themselves towards the future, and
promising the Scots that it would be a future they determined, the SNP unleashed that most potent of all
political forces: Hope.
Corbyn’s authenticity and simplicity have encouraged similar
hopefulness among the English. As the leadership contest drew to a close this
week, Corbyn’s campaign team estimated he had taken his message, face-to-face,
to more than 50,000 people. Literally hundreds-of-thousands more have paid
Labour £3 for the right to participate in the leadership vote. The polls
predict a Corbyn win on the first ballot.
If that happens, it will no longer be a case of “Jeremy
Who?” But of “Jeremy – What Now?”
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 September 2015.
