Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader with a mandate which dwarfs that given to Tony Blair 21 years ago is the most extraordinary event in the 45 years I have been a party member. To say it is a victory for hope may sound trite and cliched, but it is really the only explanation for what has occurred. This sweeping victory in all parts of the Labour electorate – including the full party members – is, I believe, three parts optimism and one part repudiation of the “New Labour” past.
That is where all the talk of Labour heading back to the 1980s is so misplaced. The hundreds of young people who thronged Unite headquarters every evening during the campaign to phonebank for Corbyn have no great interest in that now distant decade.
The times they recall with a shudder are more recent – the Iraq war Blair led us into and which many of them marched against while still in school; and the economic crash of 2008 caused by the bankers and City institutions New Labour so recklessly indulged. The line from New Labour nostalgics that “we won three elections” misses the point for millions. For all the positive reforms, it is a past no one wants to return to. This much is beyond doubt – Blairism is dead and unmourned.
But mostly the tens of thousands flocking to engage with Labour are concerned about the future. Corbyn’s message – one they have never heard from a frontline politician in their lives – speaks to their hopes and aspirations.
He offers an alternative both in style and substance. Mainstream politics has for a generation been conducted in terms of a managerial minimalism within tightly drawn parameters. It has become almost democratically impermissible to advance ideas that buck the free-market, deregulation, privatisation and austerity consensus.
The Corbyn campaign has thus been an oasis in the desert of neoliberal politics – which is why the establishment, including the Labour party establishment, have been so vicious in their attacks. The task now is to re-fertilise the surrounding landscape.
Many of Corbyn’s policies have an appeal that reach out far beyond the left. To those who don’t understand why the poor should pay for the bankers’ blunders and believe the tax burden should be more fairly distributed. Or that a rebalanced economy less dependent on financial services – offered by all parties but delivered by none – makes sense.
Railway renationalisation draws enormous support. And a politician whose foreign policy does not involve immediate recourse to Bomber Command, but treats refugees as humans, speaks for many more people than the attacks on Corbyn would indicate.
True, he has a mountain to climb. The Tories are out to remake politics for good by dismantling the Labour movement. Their trade union bill, to be debated tomorrow, aims to make strikes impossible, reduce trade unions through a byzantine system of regulations to some sort of industrial advisory bodies and marginalise our involvement in politics, starving the official opposition of funds as they do so.
They are so intent on this agenda that the most basic rights, including free speech and freedom of association, are imperilled. Everything the Tories can do to rig the political system – more appointed peers, fewer elected MPs, constituencies redrawn on the basis of an electoral register missing millions of the young and the poorest – will be attempted.
This is the enemy the reborn Labour party is facing. The intensity and severity of David Cameron’s authoritarian attack will, I believe, help Corbyn in one respect. It will push all elements of the Labour movement and all parts of the party together in the face of the common enemy. I am convinced that there will be no purges or witch-hunts, contrary to alarmist media speculation. Not only would that be against Corbyn’s nature, it also runs counter to his intention to democratise Labour policymaking, and include members and supporters more closely in determining the party’s priorities.
That is indeed a new kind of politics. The age of the conviction politician willing to offer socialist alternatives to the status quo, and confident enough to say we don’t have to take our broken society as an immutable given, is breaking. It may not be the French revolution, but it is a blissful dawn to greet.