A Corbyn government will end the misery of austerity

Eight MPs have left the Labour Party (at time of writing) and joined with 3 Conservative MPs to form a new party. This is clearly a rejection of Jeremy Corbyn and left-wing direction he has taken the party in. With the party splitting, it’s more important than ever to remind ourselves of why it is important to support Labour.

In my view, this can be summed up in one word: change.

It’s obvious that things aren’t going well for many people in Britain right now. This isn’t a flux of nature or a product of global economics beyond our control. It’s because of the deliberate policies of the Tory government. We Labour supporters know that things can be better if the government enacted some genuine left-wing policies.

There are awful tragedies that we see unfolding every day in Britain that the government can do something about. Homelessness has exploded since the Tories came to power and the number of people sleeping rough has increased every year for the last seven years. We can see the effects of austerity in every town and high street across the country as people are denied basic human dignities like a roof over their head.

Food banks and Victorian diseases

Even if people have a home, many of them can’t afford to heat it or eat. Around 560,000 people used a Food Bank each year and one in four parents have had to skip meals as they prioritise giving what little food they have to their children. A Corbyn government can help the poorest and most in need people in the country. People who have been abandoned by a Tory government that doesn’t care for them.

A Corbyn government can make a real difference to children who are being failed by society. Victorian diseases that we thought had been eradicated over a century ago are back, such as Rickets and TB. Schools are in such bad condition that in some parts of the country pupils are forced to bring in their own toilet paper. 128,000 children are living in temporary accommodation, where entire families are forced to share a single room and the facilities are not fit for animals, let alone during childrens’ important formative years. In one of the richest countries in the world, this is an outrage.

The NHS must be a priority for the next Labour government. Our national health system is groaning under the pressures of an aging society and years of under-investment by the Tories. Protecting the NHS and making sure our health service is fit for the 21st century must be a top priority for Corbyn when he is Prime Minister.

Britain is falling apart around us. The welfare of ordinary people has been neglected over the last nine years as the Tories have priorities tax cuts to the rich. Our high streets are full of boarded-up shops, our schools are crumbling and children are growing up in shoebox-sized temporary accommodation.

Corbyn can change this

Corbyn can change this. Splitting off to form a new centrist party will not help the millions of people suffering under a Tory government. We need to remember what Labour stands for right now - a helping hand to poor and the needy.

A general election could happen at any minute. With the government in chaos and the public fed up with the state of the country, Labour has a real shot at winning. We could be a matter of weeks away from Jeremy Corbyn becoming the next Prime Minister. We could finally get a government that cares about the welfare of everyone. 

Our country is crumbling under a neglectful Tory government. A new party will only split the left vote and allow the Tories to continue in power. The neediest, the most vulnerable, the poorest and children are suffering under this heartless government. We need a Corbyn government to help those who need it the most.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

What is the struggle for?

One of the most successful political movements on the 20th Century was the Civil Rights movement. It brought together millions of Americans, with different views and backgrounds to address a specific injustice. The movement had tangible outcomes in the form of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

We can learn from this when building a left wing movement in the UK. For example, having a clear goal that can unite people. This is one reason why the campaign to make Jeremy Corbyn leader of the Labour Party worked so well; having a specific goal brought together people with a range of distinct and indistinct political opinions.

The Corbyn campaign was supported by people who felt left wing and wanted a broader change in society. Corbyn was able to unite this desire (a desire for people disagreed on many details of politics) around a specific outcome: becoming Labour leader.

Completing this goal is not the end of the struggle. We have a long way to go before any meaningful social change in enacted. This leads me to ask: "what is Corbyn Labour and the wider left wing movement behind it trying to achieve?" What is the struggle for? It's not enough to say "make Corbyn Prime Minister," what do we want him to do after that? What are the tangible outcomes?

The end of neoliberalism

One answer is to end neoliberalism, the political ideology that believes free markets bring about the optimum allocation of resources and that it is government's role to make markets freer. Getting rid of neoliberalism is a good idea, but what ideology do we want to replace neoliberalism with?

Socialism has become a byword for opposition to neoliberalism. Do you want to nationalise the railways, spend more on the NHS, increase benefits, beef-up trade unions and invest more in economic development of poorer areas? Then you're probably a socialist. However, being someone who is more economically left wing than Tony Blair is not what socialism used to be.

What I described above is Keynesian economics and fairly timid Keynesianism at that. From what I can see, the economic program of a future Corbyn government would be to return to the policies of Harold Wilson's Labour government. This would make a Corbyn's government the third most radically left wing Labour government out of five. That is not what I thought was being offered when Corbyn stood to be party leader.

Corbyn clearly wants to change Britain's foreign policy, or more accurately the entire way that Britain acts in the world. During his years on the backbenches, foreign policy is where Corbyn concentrated his efforts, mainly through solidarity with various oppressed groups around the world.

Foreign policy

Certainly a Corbyn government would have a radically different foreign policy to any previous British government. Britain is not the international heavyweight it once was and now we  have lost our ability to influence EU foreign policy our influence is diminished further. I am not sure what global impact the Corbyn government will have, beyond a greater capacity to make gestures of solidarity. If Corbyn was PM would he be able to stop the Syrian Civil War?

A focus on foreign policy would overlook the crucial role of domestic politics. What will a Corbyn government do to fix the problems in Britain? I am worried that the objectives of socialism has become changing the people at the top of the machinery of state to be nice people and then let them fix social problems with said machinery. This ignores the fact that the machinery itself is part of the problem, no matter who is in charge of it. We need to change society, not just put Corbyn at the top of it.

The stated aim of a socialist government should be creating the conditions to transition our economy to a post-capitalist one, providing a minimum standard of living to all its citizens, reducing inequality in all its forms, addressing climate change and diminish in the power of the state wherever possible. This is what socialism should be about.

This will require radical new policies that go beyond nationalising the railways, spending more on the NHS or even introducing Universal Basic Income. There are many areas we need to think about, such as how taxation, housing, unions, health, transport and work. We need to ask questions, such as who has social power, and how do we measure values?

Change society, not the Prime Minister

A lot of this can't be done at the Westminster level and will need a broader movement aimed at changing society instead of just changing who is PM. I am sure that Corbyn is a nice guy, but what we need to achieve is bigger than him, bigger than any person or political party. Party and government are tools to help us change society, but we need to also build new tools that are more suited to the task of improving people’s lives.

We can look at the Civil Rights Movement and how we are a much more racially tolerant society now than we were in the 1960s as proof that broad social movements can change society.

The photo of Corbyn at a CND event was taken by Garry Knight and is used under creative commons.

Taking stock of Corbyn so far

I used to think that it was impossible for an overtly socialist politician to be leader of the Labour Party. The idea is completely antithetical to how the Labour was run for all of my adult life. Everything I knew about politics told me that it would be impossible for Jeremy Corbyn to have gotten as far as he has. Not only becoming Labour Party leader and being popular with the members, but also having a decent chance of becoming Prime Minister at the next election.

I used to think that radicalism was separate from mainstream politics. Maybe a small, local campaign somewhere could come up with an interesting policy idea that might possibly be more widely adopted after it had been watered down a bit and stripped of its radical context. There was no way that the Labour Party as a whole would be heading in a radical direction. Yet here we find ourselves.

The result in last year's general election was incredible. To go from being so far behind in the polls to improving Labour's position was an enormous achievement. One that came from the hard work of activists across the country. This shows that left wing policies can be popular when offered to the electorate and disproves the New Labour idea that Labour must tack towards the centre to win power.

Brexit and small towns

One year on from the election seems like a good moment to pause and to take stock of the Corbyn project so far. We shouldn't be complacent; there is still a long way to go before Labour can form a government. So a frank assessment of where we are now will give us some insights in what we should do next.

Brexit is a real threat to Corbyn's chances of becoming Prime Minister. The country remains divided between Leave and Remain camps and has settled down to a grudging acceptance that Brexit must go ahead. As a Remain voter, it’s painful to admit that it's tactically suicidal for Labour to oppose Brexit at this point. Becoming the party of Remain voters will not gain Labour the votes it needs to form a government. Neither will halfway measures such as offering a referendum on the final deal. There are a lot of pitfalls for Labour to avoid, on this issue.

There is also the problem that Labour is not making enough gains in small towns. It is clear that there was not enough liberal metropolitan voters in the county for Labour to form a government. Labour needs to win over more voters in small towns to gain power. An economically redistributive policy offer will help here, but more needs to be done to bridge the vast cultural gap opening up between the Labour Party and those who live in small towns.

If Labour can address these two crucial issues then the possibilities are staggering. Not only a return to power for Labour, but the chance to pass reforms that will address the big problems facing the country. What I want to see from the party is more radicalism in the face of these challenges, an openness to the far reaching reforms that are needed.

Radical reforms

These radical reforms will need to think about more than how much we spend on schools and hospitals, although these are important. We need to ask questions about how we relate to the state, how we participate in democracy, how we think about value and how we save the natural environment.

We need to ask ourselves: what is that we want to achieve? It’s not enough to get Corbyn into power, we need to know what we will do when he gets there. All the tactical thinking over Brexit will be for nothing it if we don't know what we’re fighting for.

Is the plan undoing neoliberalism and the damage that cold ideology has done to this country? An end to austerity and giving a lifeline to those who have suffered through years of cuts? Is it the rebirth of Keynesianism and idea that there is a role for the state to play in curbing the worst excesses of markets. Is it Universal Basic Income and giving a minimum standard of living to everyone? Is it something else more radical and more powerful?

We need something concrete to build the movement that can win the next election. Something that we are offering everyone in this country. Something that will transform their lives for the better. I believe that we can do this. We can change the country.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

The truth about local election results

Hundreds of Labour activists across the country made a huge effort in this week's local elections. It was great to see so many people inspired by Jeremy Corbyn to get out on the doorstep and make the case for Labour directly to the electorate.

The results arrived over Thursday night and Friday morning and it looked like the hard work had paid off. Labour won 2,350 councillors to the Conservatives’ 1,332. Labour also took control of Plymouth Council and became the largest party in Trafford, meaning that the Tories no longer control any councils in Greater Manchester.

However, the view from the commentariat is that these results were not good for Labour. The general consensus is that this election was a draw between Labour and Tories, which seems unfair to Labour who won more councillors. 

False equivalence

Why would anyone claim this? False equivalence is certainly a factor here. Due to the BBC's hardwired neutrality, when both Labour and the Tories claim victory the BBC decides it was a draw rather than making a judgement that could be viewed as partisan. The issue is that this desire to be neutral can itself be interpreted as partisan when one party has won many more councillors than the other.

Another factor is that it is possible to read these results as positive for both parties. This might sound strange, as Labour won more elections than the Tories, but bear with me here.

Labour won more councillors, but didn't do as well as they wanted to. They failed to take Westminster and Wandsworth councils. The Tories on the other hand did better than was expected, winning Barnet and Redditch. As local elections are primarily seen as an indicator of how people will vote in a general election, this fits into a narrative of Labour's performance declining from year's general election (where Labour did well, but failed to gain a majority) and the Tories support increasing from last year (where they did poorly, but stayed in power).

Labour did well in the great cities of England, but the Tories did well in towns. The UKIP vote collapsed, but the Lib Dems did better than expected. There is no clear path to a majority for either main party. Certainly not while the country remains polarised between Leave and Remain groups and Labour is forced to do an awkward dance to appeal to both camps simultaneously.

Divided country

Labour's vote is becoming more metropolitan and the Tories is becoming more focused on small towns. There are not enough voters in either place for either party to win a majority so something must change, or we will be stuck with weak minority governments for a long time. Anyone who supports Corbyn’s vision of radical change to this country is hoping for a sizeable Labour majority after the next election.

The truth is that Labour did well in the local elections and were the clear winner. However, it is also true that the elections were a disappointment for Labour if they want to win the next general election. The good news is that the election is still likely to be years away and there is plenty of time to Labour to learn and get better.

Labour's performance over the last year and a bit has been inspiring, but we need to do more to win the next general election. Loads of people are being drawn into the Labour Party and many of them are out canvassing and making the case for Labour, which is really inspiring to see. With this energy we can go far.

Inspiration

The Party needs to grow this momentum (if you'll pardon the pun) to get rid of the Tories. Remember this is the party that has presided over a huge rise in child poverty and homelessness and brought the NHS to the brink of collapse. It's vital that Labour kick them out of power at the next general election and to do that we all need to work harder and win more.

We can do this. We can get more people involved. We can get more people out making the case for Labour, not just in the great cities but in the towns and suburbs that the Tories have forgotten. Places that need the change that Labour offers. We can spread the word further and get more Labour voters. I believe Labour can win the next general election.

Polling station image taken by Rachel H and used under creative commons.

The Corbyn spy story is typical fake news

As a writer and reader of politics blogs whose views are somewhat outside the mainstream, I am always depressed by the prevalence of conspiracy theories or blatant untruths that can be found on independent news sites (sorry pals, please continue to invite me to the monthly craft beer and pulled pork meet ups). Sometimes I worry that those of us on the radical left have watched too many seasons of 24 and believe that the world is controlled by a shadowy group whose existence can be exposed in a day with a bit of gumption.

Imagine my surprise this week when I saw that the mainstream media had just as much of an appetite for silly spy stories and secret conspiracies. The accusation that Jeremy Corbyn “gave information to a communist spy during the cold war” is just as crazy as the notion that the moon landing was faked or that Portland Communications had a role in the revolt of Labour MPs against Corbyn in 2016. I expected conspiracy theories from blogs written in bedrooms by hobbyists, not from national newspapers.

As the mainstream media is moving in on the crazy conspiracy theory space, on behalf of independent blogs I am moving into the serious analysis space with a few thoughts. First of all, the spreading of this story looks a lot like the spreading of the fake news that played a role in the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump.

This story has been shared on social media platforms by people who instinctively believe that it has to be true. The accusation that Corbyn was passing information to a Communist government fits so naturally with certain people’s worldview that they don’t check if this story is complete horseshit before hitting the share button. This is no different from sharing stories about Hillary Clinton secretly having cancer or the Pope endorsing Trump.

This story really matters to a group of people who really hate Corbyn and not only will they believe anything bad about him, but the more outlandish the accusation, the more likely they are to believe it. The spreading of this story has been helped by the filter bubbles of social media platforms that create an information space isolated from content that challenges their views.

All this allows a story that is obviously stupid to spread as the algorithms that run social media platforms show the story to people who are likely to be believe it without question. If the filter bubble means that you are never shown a challenging opinion about the Labour leader then you can believe anything you want, including that he played a minor role in a James Bond film.

It goes without saying that in the real world (not the fantasy land of anti-Corbyn fake news) this story is completely untrue, has been wildly debunked and a Tory MP who accused Corbyn of “selling British secrets to communist spies” has had been forced to apologise. However, many of the people who have a high propensity to consume anti-Corbyn fake news won’t see the retractions, or if they do will choose to ignore them. Probably blaming an independent media establishment that is hushing up the truth.

If the mainstream media is going to undermine the value of objective truth, to exploit people’s willingness to believe stories that aren’t true, but fit their worldview, and to use the design flaws of social media platforms to spread disinformation, then it’s up to the independent media to address this. We simply cannot allow the good name of stories posted on Facebook to be dragged through the mud by large news organisations.

It’s telling that Corbyn used a YouTube video shared on Twitter to debunk this bollocks instead of an editorial in a national newspaper. The system that spread the fake news is now being used to counter it.

I am aware that I sound a little like Trump, denouncing the lies of the mainstream media, but this story has been shown to be false and when the mainstream media plays fast and lose with the truth, whether to score political points or to get social media clicks and sell advertising, then it is the concept of democracy driven by an informed electorate that ultimately suffers.

Labour has moved ahead in the polls following this pantomime, which shows that the average voter is not someone who so unthinkingly hates Corbyn that they will believe any rubbish written about him even if it sounds like the rejected plot of a shit British remake of Homeland (this time with an American as the leading man, putting on a British accent).

People care more about the issues they are facing in their lives - such as the rising cost of living, the public sector pay freeze, the increased reliance on food banks or being unable to afford a home - than who said what to a Communist spy 30 years ago. The average voter has bigger things to worry about than conspiracy theories about Corbyn.

If the right wing portion of the mainstream media thinks they can distract voters from the problems of their lives with third-rate spy stories and fake news then they have completely lost touch with the concerns of ordinary people. The people hate-sharing Corbyn spy stories are not representative of the average voter, whose concerns are being spoken to by Corbyn.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

Don't dismiss the concerns of Corbyn supporters

This is a meme:

Amongst UK 16-24 year olds:

50% have never heard of Lenin.
70% have never heard of Mao.
72% have never heard of Pol Pot.

I think this helps explain why so many are prepared to back those (including Corbyn) who have flirted with the totalitarian far-left.

— James Bickerton (@JBickertonUK) November 23, 2017

This isn’t the only place online it appears. By a meme, I mean it’s an idea. An idea that says the reason why young people are supporting Jeremy Corbyn is because they don’t know how bad Chairman Mao or Pol Pot were.

It leads to ridiculous suggestions, like Britain should open a museum of Communist Terror, which was floated in the Spectator. Presumably to stop young people voting Labour, which I guess is what Tories think museums are for. That and recasting Britain’s colonial history as glorious.

That was a meme, but here are some truths: wages are stagnant, young people can’t afford to get on the housing ladder, nurses and teachers are using food banks to survive, the sick and injured are waiting hours for treatment in A&E. The only party leader who had serious suggestions for tackling these problems in the 2017 election was Corbyn. He wasn’t saying he wanted to seize the means of production and hand them over to worker controlled Soviets.

Let’s not forget that 40-45 year olds mainly voted Labour last year. These are people who grew up during the Cold War and voted for Tony Blair in 1997, 2001 and 2005 before supporting Corbyn now.

SnapChat socialists

Of course the writers above didn’t mean people in their 40s. They mean young people sharing Sassy Socialist Memes on Facebook. People too young to remember the Cold War. The entire implication is these SnapChat socialists don’t understand what they are supporting.

The economy right now really isn’t working for young people. Houses are too expensive. Rented homes are too expensive, insecure and are frequently in poor condition. Work is also insecure and poorly paid. Costs of living are rising while wages are stagnant. This is what a lot of young people want to change and they have found the symbol of that change in Corbyn. They don’t support him because they don’t know what the Killing Fields were.

Opponents of Corbyn are quick to say that they have sympathy with his supporters’ problems, but their proposals are that they should support politicians who are not offering solutions to them, and in some cases were in power for years whilst these problems got worse. What they are certain about is that what young people really mustn't do is vote for politicians who are offering solutions to these problems.

Dismissing concerns

It’s not a good long term strategy for centrists or conservatives to dismiss the concerns of young people like this. It shows how out of touch they are when they say that the reason for Corbyn’s surge in the polls is that young people don’t know about Stalin’s purges or his collectivisation of the farms.

Communism is not suddenly about to break out in the UK. Support for paying nurses and teachers more, building more affordable homes and bringing the railways into public ownership (as they are in almost every other European country - Germany is hardly a Communist country) were not policies of The Khmer Rouge.

Being out of touch with the pressures on young people and dismissing their concerns is what has led to the rise of politicians such as Corbyn and, in America, Sanders. If centrists or conservatives want to win back the support of the young (young people voted overwhelmingly for Thatcher in 1983) then not dismissing their concerns as the product of ignorance is a good place to start.

It is simply not true to compare raising taxes on the richest 5%, or wanting to tackle the rise in child poverty, or the growing dependency on food banks to Communism. Corbyn is not going to be a British Pol Pot and his opponents should stop sharing daft memes that imply that he is.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

Why Corbyn is right about the future of work

Why don’t we strive for more free time? Free time is great. You can watch the latest bleak Nordic crime thriller on Walter Presents or you can head to your local bookshop/café/art gallery for a gingerbread latte, a look at a 21st century take on surrealist painting and a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go or head to a pub for what I assume is everyone’s favourite past time: a pint of locally brewed craft beer and a pulled pork sandwich made with sourdough bread. Why wouldn’t you strive for life to be like this all the time?

Most people don’t strive for more free time to do these things. We strike for more money. Money helps you do these things and having more of it means you can do them more often, so we work harder and try to get promoted so that we have more money and can do more of the things we like. This ignores the fact that more work means less time for the things we like. That doesn’t matter. More money, not more free time, is the route to happiness.

How we get our money is fundamental to how we construct our identity. When someone asks me: “what do you do?” I don’t say: “I lie away at night worrying about the future of an internationalist left-wing movement in an age of increasing nationalism”. I say that I work in marketing, but both are true.

Our jobs, or where we get our money from, define us. We spend more waking time with our colleagues than with our loved ones. Many people spend more time at work than with their children. Much has been made of the social and personal value of work and that it provides dignity. There are certainly powerful political implications of people losing their jobs. The economic impact on places where there is less work is also self-evident. Work is important.

The nature of work in the West has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Manufacturing industries have declined and have been replaced by call centres and warehouses that pay less. Many industries have moved production overseas where costs are lower. Stripping away workers’ rights and crushing the power of trade unions (coupled with inflation) has put downward pressure on wages. It has also meant that the jobs that are available are less secure.

Automation is partly responsible for this. Jobs that used to be done by hand can now be done more efficiently by machines. The machines are also getting smarter, which means that they can do more jobs. Automation has taken the jobs of those making cars or staffing checkouts, but it is entirely possible that before long automation can be taking the jobs of translators or accountants. How long before it takes the jobs of doctors or copywriters? (okay, that last one is just my anxiety).

Last year the Bank of England said that as many as 15 million British jobs could be lost to machines. The growth in online shopping has already caused the loss of 62,000 job losses in the retail sector. The situation calls for radical thinking now - and not when all the jobs are gone, the tax base has collapsed and a few corporations who make the machines have all the money.

If automation continues at the predicted rate it will fundamentally change our society, because it will break the link between work and reward that has dominated the West since the industrial revolution. In the future, there will be no reward for work as there won’t be any work. All the reward will go to a few rentiers (please note that rentiers are different to renters as the former makes money off the later, usually without doing much).

There are policy proposals that could tackle this looming crisis. There is basic income, which should be explored vigorously. At the recent Labour conference, Jeremy Corbyn made it clear that Labour will be devising policy to tackle the problems of jobs lost to automation. It is certainly encouraging to see radical thinking on this issue from a party that could be in power soon. However, even a policy as radical as basic income does not go far enough in tackling the challenge of a fully automated world.

If money is the only thing we value and work is the only way most can attain money (this is a good 18-word summary of human civilian, apart from Bhutan, maybe, where they really like happiness) then when there is no work no one will create anything of value. There will be a lot of free time, but we don’t value free time. We value work. Basic income removes the need for work, which will be useful if there is no work, but it doesn’t tackle the fact everything of value comes from work. It doesn’t solve the problem of how do you have dignify in a world without work?

To tackle this, we need to get dignity from sources other than work. We need to find value in all the things we do when we’re not working. We need to find a way to explain the value of free time or creativity as self-evidently as the value of money. We need a system that rewards people (not necessarily financially) for painting or writing or playing with their children or going to a café or drinking pint of salted caramel stout.

The changes our society faces as machines do more and more of the work are beyond our ability to understand them if the only lense through which we can see the world is one of jobs, work and wages. Tony Judt wrote in his book Ill Fairs The Land about the need to think about cost and benefit of actions or policies not just in money terms but in social, moral and artistic terms. This is broad outline of the challenge we need to confront.

A simple wage economy and profit motive won't explain the world of the future. We need to think about other things we value. We need change how we think about jobs and money. Then maybe we can get to a place where we strive for more free time and not more money.

Robot arm image from Pixabay

Doubt and politics

Politics has always been an emotional subject for me. Some people view politics through a logical prism. My politics has always been about a yearning for things to be better than they are. This is reflected in the blogs I write and the campaigns I support. Those who know me might be surprised to know that I spend a lot of time doubting my beliefs. That’s because I believe it is important to be self-critical. Even if my feelings about politics are emotional, it’s important to re-examine your thinking every so often.

I was busy re-examining my thinking around at about 7am on Friday the 8th of May 2015. Some of this was fuelled by being awake for more than 24 hours staying up all night to watch the election results. The night had started badly with the exit polls and had gone downhill from there. I was worried about the future and what the first Tory majority budget in 18 years would mean for friends who were disabled, unemployed or needed care.

Beyond this worry was an anxiety that the way I saw the world was fundamentally different from the majority of people. I had thought that the electorate would take a look at the pain that five years of coalition austerity had caused and would vote David Cameron out of office. The opposite was true. The voters had taken a look at five years of cuts to essential services that people relied on and decided we needed more of the same.

Plagued by the doubt that what I wanted from politics was radically different to what most people wanted, I was in need of some hope. This hope arrived in the form of Jeremy Corbyn running for Labour leader. I had a strong feeling that the Corbyn was the change the Labour Party needed. I joined Facebook groups that were passionately pro-Corbyn and followed Corbyn-supporting Twitter feeds. Ordinary people were connecting online, drawn together by someone that they felt could change politics for the better. I wasn’t out of touch with people at all.

There are few news publications I read regularly (the Guardian, New Statesman, BBC – metropolitan, lefty stuff), but generally when I have a free moment I go to Twitter or Facebook. Soon I was regularly checking these pro-Corbyn Facebook and Twitter pages as it helped with the worry that my views were out touch with regular people. It’s worth noting that most of what I was reading didn’t come from people I knew personally, but from like pages, groups and feeds that social media sites suggested to me based on my politics. These sites convinced me I was connecting with ordinary people

Expect I wasn’t connecting with them, I was lurking. I was inhaling the interactions of others without leaving any mark on these pages. At the time I was fine with this, it was exhilarating to find people who felt about Corbyn as I did. Lurking or passive usage of social media sites can “can harm your emotional well-being” according to a story on Mashable.com that sites a study from the University of Copenhagen. According to Mashable the study stated that: “if one uses Facebook passively, one should reduce this kind of behaviour.” So it wasn’t good for my sense of certainty.

I’ll spare you the recent history recap, but 2016 was not a good year for the politics I support. The EU referendum, the unstoppable rise of Donald Trump, the Labour leadership election, all revived my doubt that the political changes I yearned for were not what other people wanted.

The political upsets of last year caused huge division on the social networking sites that I lurked on. The memes and new items posted by in Facebook became accusatory, the comments deseeded into harsh exchanges. Twitter users compressed as much rage as they could into 140 characters and fired them at their political enemies.

I felt that the collapse of Labour was my fault for wanting politics to change. My doubt in my beliefs, led me to try seek out different Facebook groups to lurk in. Ones where people were angry about Brexit and blamed Corbyn for his lack of an enthusiastic defence of the EU. I consumed angry tirades on how Brexit was Corbyn’s fault and how the Tories would be in power for decades. I also lurked in groups that continually denounced “Blairites” and those trying to sabotage the Labour leader. It was a vicious time in Labour social spaces and I drank it all in, trying to figure out what was right.

I couldn’t escape the fear that the problem was that I doubted. I doubted that Corbyn was the right man for the job. I doubted that Owen Smith would do any better. Everyone online seemed so certain, but I didn’t know what to do, so I voted for neither candidate in the leadership election.

The decisions facing the Labour Party and every party member had huge implications, which made my worry that I didn’t know what was right worse. Should Brexit be accepted as a democratic result or fought as economic folly? Was Corbyn taking Labour away from the centre ground and leading the party into the electoral wilderness? Or was he changing Labour to avoid the defeats suffered by Hillary Clinton, Benoît Hamon and Labour Party in the Netherlands? The centre-left didn’t have a solution to the crisis other than getting rid of Corbyn, but Corbyn himself was polling terribly and looked unlikely to be able to implement any policies.

There was so much certainty on each side, but all I had were doubts. Was there something wrong with me? Why couldn’t I see the way out of this mess as clearly as everyone else?

Fortunately, 2017 has been a better year. The predicted huge Tory majority failed to materialise in the general election. The future is still very uncertain and I still have doubts about what is right, but I have learned to accept these doubts. It may sound strange for someone who runs a political blog to say that they have doubts, but having an open mind is important as is caring about finding the right answers to the problems we face collectively.

Politics will always have a degree of subjectivity. Those who know what they believe and never doubt have a religious belief that can lead to serious errors.

This is not argument against belief, weak or strong, radical or conservative. This is not an argument for or against Corbyn, or Brexit, or anything else that has happened recently. This is an argument that politics is emotional. It is subjective and there is room for doubt along with belief. Your doubts don't have to lead to an existential crisis and the conviction of others is not weakness on your part. There's a place in politics for those who question.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

The fall of debate on the far left

In political terms 2007 feels like eons ago. Tony Blair was still Prime Minister and the financial crash just the crazy predictions of a few anti-free market reactionaries. At the time I was still a student and one of the things I did with myself (aside from a pub crawl Lancaster’s twelve best pubs, which was overly ambitious to say the least) was join a Marxist discussion group.

In this group I learned a lot about radical left wing politics. I also saw first-hand the left’s Judean People’s Front-like tendencies, as SWP and SPGB members argued passionately about the finer points of exactly what Trotsky did when. I have affection for these men - and they were all men, all over 50, all with bushy grey beards, all drinking real ale in a tiny room above a community theatre - who seemed to genuinely believe that the world would be a better place if everyone memorised Das Kapital. Despite this affection, I knew they were not the radical left I wanted to see.

I felt you could be to the left of everyone in Tony Blair’s or Gordon Brown’s cabinet, but you didn’t have to join the SWP and read the Morning Star. I had the powerful feeling that there was an ideology out there, in the space to the left of mainstream politics. One that did not require encyclopaedic knowledge of the Russian Revolution; that spoke to the experiences of more than just handful of old men. This is still something that I am trying to articulate today.

In 2007 I felt that being left wing meant being as suspicious of the Socialist Worker as of the mainstream media. It was important to be critical of fellow travellers on the far left and open debate was an essential part of this. Ours was an ideology that involved reading a lot of books, so discussion was key to what we believed.

There were big issues that we engaged with, both in the aforementioned discussion group and out of it. If I can achieve one thing, then it would be encourage more serious debate on the left. The world faces huge challenges and we need to grapple with these big questions. How are we to plug the NHS funding gap? What do we do about the refugee crisis? What do we do about climate change? These issues require serious thoughts and an open mind.

In the ten years that have passed since 2007 I feel that the far left as a movement has lost the desire to debate the big questions. The 2017 Labour Manifesto offered little on the issue of tackling an imminent global climate based apocalypse. Debate should not conducted only by those who have memorised the Communist Manifesto, but we could talk more about what we want to achieve now that we are closer to power.

There has also been an increase in unquestioning support for anyone else on the far left or anyone who offers a narrative that the far left supports. In pro-Corbyn, or anti-Tory, Facebook groups I have seen people sharing articles from such dubious sources such as Russia Today, Iran’s Press TV and even David Icke. As well as a rise in coded anti-semitism through the use of terms such as “Zio”. This material is shared enthusiastically if it’s critical of our enemies.

This change amongst those outside the mainstream left has several causes, many of which can be traced the first time Jeremy Corbyn stood for Labour leader. Corbyn offered something different to the other candidates. Not only did his campaign bring new people into the Labour Party, it also brought many new people into the broader spectrum of the far left. These were people who are generally dissatisfied with the direction of politics. They knew that things were wrong, that things were getting worse - and that Corbyn was the person to do something about it.

Related to this was the very hostile reaction to Corbyn from many of the established bugles of the left. This hostility went deeper than the centre left reaction against the surge in popularity for its long term opponent. Even writers whose opinions are generally outside that centre left reacted negatively to Corbyn. Or, at least, showed a stunning lack of curiosity in what motivated his supporters, coupled with an easy of dismissal of them as the dangerous indulgences of a child. Their curiosity extended to supporters of the far right, but not to the far left. Had the emotional concerns that many people had about society at least been acknowledged, then we could have avoided the divisions on the left we have today.

It is easy to mistake this lack of curiosity for a coordinated campaign to stamp out opinions that differ from the narrow band of centrism approved by the establishment. The Guardian, for example, publish a huge range of different opinions. Jonathan Freeland, Gary Young, Polly Toynbee, Simon Jenkins, Dawn Foster, Aditya Chakrabortty, Nick Cohen, Frances Ryan and George Monbiot don’t all have the same opinions. They cover a huge range of opinion, pro and anti-Corbyn, subtle and overt. What we saw was a difference of opinion, not the targeted oppression of one side or the other.

Unfortunately, most people with a general dissatisfaction with the way the country is heading are not strange people like me to who make sure to read a wide variety of the different opinions published by left wing writers. They focus in on the pieces critical of what they believe and extrapolate from there.

A lot of political debate is engaged with in peer to peer discussions inside Facebook groups and on Twitter, which have a bubble effect. People join the groups or follow the feed that reinforce their opinions and ignore ones critical of their principals. Facebook and Twitter are designed to accelerate this process by using algorithms to filter back to you what you like and filter out things you don’t.

The effect of this is to push together those who believe something passionate (such as Corbyn is not being given a fair hearing) into a tightly knit tribe of homogeneous opinion. It stifles debate, and encourages and seals off the tribe from the rest of the broader movement. Corbyn supporters feel they have more in common with other Corbyn supporters (whatever else they believe) than the rest of the left. This has prevented Corbyn supporters of being critical of each other.

Ten years ago we didn’t accuse someone on the left of being a centrist or Blairite because they were critical of the SWP. You could be critical of Blair and the SWP at the same time. We could engage with someone from outside our narrow tribe and discuss the bigger ideas that affect society.

This has changed. Now we look at anyone with similar opinions our as our friend - regardless of what other opinions they hold. We have lost our ability to be critical of ourselves, and to paraphrase RuPaul: “If you don’t criticise yourself, how the hell are going to criticise somebody else? Can I get an amen?

The photo of Corbyn at a CND event was taken by Garry Knight and is used under creative commons.

My disappointment with Corbyn

These are strange political times we are living through. The Tories are actively going against the wishes of big business. The Lib Dems are making a resurgence. Corbynistas on Facebook are arguing that we should be pragmatic and accept Brexit as what the voters want, while Corbyn-sceptics on Facebook are arguing that the party should ignore what voters want because it goes against Labour's core values. Politics has been turned completely on its head and I am finding it hard to make sense of it all.

The outlook for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour is not good. Many people in the party are not happy with his pro-Brexit stance and we just lost the Copeland by-election, which suggests that the chances of a wipe out at the next general election are high. If the country follows Copeland’s 6.7% swing to the Tories, then they will have a majority of 114, which fills me with terror.

Personally, I am really disappointed with Corbyn. When I voted for him in 2015 (which seems like a lifetime ago now) I hoped that this would be the beginning of a better Labour Party. Corbyn gave me hope not just because he is a lifelong socialist and anti-war campaigner, he also gave me hope because he was not like other politicians. Everything that was soulless and managerial about New Labour was coming to end and we would have a leader who is passionate and principled. The public was clear about its dislike of normal politics and here we were, offering something different.

In 2015 I went to see Corbyn give a speech at the Camden Town Hall in London. It was a free event and the queue was so long that it wrapped around the building twice. I remember being stunned that this many people had turned up to see a politician speak. Not even the Prime Minister could draw such crowds and the atmosphere was more like a concert than a campaign rally. I thought this was utterly surprising in our cynical and apathetic age; this could be the beginning of something, dare I say it, revolutionary.

Maybe I was naive for thinking that things could be different. Maybe I was stupid for putting my trust in Corbyn. The simple fact is that I did and it hurts when I see that the Tories are up 18% on Labour in opinion polls and are likely to be in government for years to come. I feel responsible for this because I dared to hope that things could be different.

This experience has not changed my politics much. I am a stubborn creature who keeps odd bits of tech in a drawer in my bedroom, because they might be useful one day. My politics are an odd collection of different ideas: a bit Marxist, a bit anarchist, a bit modernist, a bit internationalist, a bit environmentalist, a bit woke and a lot of the time they don't make sense even to me. (If anyone wants to know more buy me a pint and I will happily bend your ear.) In 2015 they aligned to Corbyn more than to the other three candidates.

I still want a left wing Labour Party, but Corbyn himself is too tainted by bad leadership. The way I think of it is like this: in the 2015 Labour leadership election was four people competing to be the captain of a ship. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall wanted to take the ship to Spain. Corbyn said we could sail all the way to India. At first we were not certain, but he made a good case and for a while we believed that we could make it to India and that the only obstacle was that we didn't believe that we could do it. Then Corbyn starts sailing and we ram into the Isle of Wight. India is a great destination, but at this point it is starting to look like we should have gone with Spain if it were achievable. (I look forward to people expanding on this metaphor in Facebook comments.)

The area where I am most disillusioned with Corbyn is over Brexit. I may have been naive to trust a politician who voted against even the nice EU treaties, the ones that protect workers’ rights, to defend Britain's role as positive member of the EU. To put it mildly, I am not happy with Corbyn's complete lack of opposition to the government (although surprise is my main emotional response). The government, supported by Labour, is following hard Brexit and many party members oppose it.

This is where the complex mess of thing I believe comes into play. Although I am anti-Brexit, I am wary about opposing it, because of the damage this could do to the Labour Party, which is still the best vehicle to achieve what I want from politics - or to at least stop the horror show that is the current Tory government (sorry Greens, fuck you Lib Dems).

I am not convinced that there is a clear electoral strategy around opposing Brexit. It won a referendum, which gives it legitimacy even in the eyes of people who voted Remain. There is also the thorny issue that people do not like elections and most people - even those who voted Remain - are a) consigned to the result; and b) want immigration to come down and are happy to get this from Brexit.

At the very least, most peoples’ attitude (judging from all my conversation with people and a wide spectrum of media from left/right and remain/leave) is that they do not want to be asked again, do not want more elections any time soon and want the government to get on with Brexit. I see no evidence that a second referendum would go any differently than the first. In fact, it would probably return the same result only more so (like Corbyn vs. Owen Smith) because people hate being asked the same question twice.

None of this answers the question of what direction Labour should take. There is no consensus or even good ideas. Oppose Brexit and we might as well batter ourselves and serve ourselves to the Tories in a chippy. Go hard Brexit and Lib Dems will pull us apart like pulled pork in a London craft beer establishment. Some combination of both? Well in the words of Harry Perkins, the fictional PM in Chris Mullin’s novel A Very British Coup: "I tried going down the middle of the road. I was hit by the traffic in both directions".

I still want a radical left-wing agenda, but I do not see the Labour Party rushing to embrace anarcho-syndicalism. So I am willing to compromise to get some of what I want done. To support Liz Kendall would be a huge climb down for me, but I would take her as PM over Theresa May in a heartbeat. The only problem is I am not sure if there are good compromises out there. No one has any good ideas. Corbyn has shat the bed. The great hopes of Lisa Nandy or Tom Watson look as befuddled as everyone else. What does the right of the party have to offer besides their usual plan of moving to where the country is (which is what Corbyn is already doing on Brexit)? A friend tried to convince me that despite the poor leadership, Corbyn has opened the possibility that things can be different. Can they now be different in a good way? I feel like attaching my hopes to Rebecca Long-Bailey, but, you know, everything I have written above.

One thing I a certain of is that we need a new direction. We do not need a 80s throwback. Also we don’t need a 90s throwback who tries to recapture the Blair glory years. We need leadership that is engaged with the problems of today and tomorrow, not refighting the battles of yesterday.

We need some decent leadership more than anything else. We also need to address a few issues while we're at it. Labour is clearly disconnected with its base in working class areas, from what I have been told by people who know more about this than me and who I respect. However, Labour is also disconnected with its base in metropolitan areas. Round my way, as people are fond of saying, the party's stance on Brexit has gone down like a cup of cold sick, but so has Corbyn's refusal to talk about electoral reform or his lack of support for decent new ideas like basic income. Why aren't we talking about mutualisation? Why aren't we talking about non-market solutions to problems?

Bigger than all this, we need an answer to the question of: “what does Labour stand for?” in one sentence. It sounds glib, but this is the real estate that politics takes place on. The only way to do this is with a leadership election where the different answers to this question can compete with each other, and I mean all the different answers. Including those from factions of the party that I disagree with. The outcome will only be legitimate if it is comprehensive. I do not mind if the party turns around to me and says: "we don't want your metropolitan, craft beer drinking, two-meme T-shirt wearing, New Statesman reading, Kraken podcast listening sort in our party". I reserve the right to leave such a party (sorry for the mean things I said above Greens), but if the party genuinely decided that this was the direction it should go in then I would be fine with that.

Right now no one is happy with the Labour Party. I have come to terms with the fact that I will never get exactly what I want from any party, because a party that did everything I wanted would receive the vote of precisely one person, i.e. me. I am willing to compromise because above all I hate the Tories and want them given a bloody nose. I will always hope for George Orwell to be Labour Party leader, but I am resolved to the fact that it is not going happen. What we do need is some kind of change; and change that the members believe is legitimate, if not one they agree with.

The alternative, as I see it, is the biggest Tory electoral victory ever, followed by 10-15 years of pain meted out to everyone who is not a tabloid newspaper owner, then followed by a Labour government running on a platform similar to David Cameron in 2010 (which by that point will be considered a left wing alternative). This is what I fear most and I cannot escape the realisation that this is what we are racing towards.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

Who are the Corbyn-sceptics?

Between Jeremy Corbyn’s first leadership victory and his second, the issue of bad behaviour by his supporters has never been far from the news. The situation calls for two responses: condemnation, and an attempt to work out its root causes.

At Red Train we haven’t shied away from calling out bad behaviour on the left. Online abuse, anti-Semitism and misogyny is never acceptable, and nothing in this article condones or excuses it.

On the second point, not enough has been done to try and understand where the anger on the Left that sometimes spills over into unacceptable behaviour is coming from. Contrast this with the constant assertion amongst the political establishment that the surge in support for UKIP’s anti-immigration and xenophobic sentiments means we must pander to it. When the disaffected direct their anger towards political engagement of the UKIP variety – of intolerance and fear of change –politician fall over each other to ‘listen’ to them and ‘addressing their concerns’. When the same people turn towards the left and Corbyn, they’re usually ridiculed or dismissed as irrelevant.

This willingness on the Corbyn-sceptic side of the Labour Party to write-off Corbyn’s supporters is one of their greatest failings. Not only does it entrench the love of Corbyn, now at hero-worship level amongst his most ardent fans, but it also contributes to a misleading, one-sided narrative in which Corbyn supporters are always the perpetrators, and ‘moderate’ Labour MPs the victims. The problem with this narrative isn’t that it’s untrue, it’s that it’s incomplete.

It isn’t just a case of left-wing supporters bullying and intimidating a moderate PLP. Take Diane Abbott for example. She has received as much online abuse and hate-mail as practically anyone else in Parliament. Yet we’ve heard a lot more in the media about the abuse received by anti-Corbyn MP Jess Phillips.

Now, I certainly don’t agree with much of what Phillips says; her (as yet unfulfilled) threat to quit the party if Corbyn was re-elected was needlessly daft and divisive, but that in no way justifies the abuse she’s received. Why, though, is it any less worthy of coverage when directed at Abbott? This suspicion that the media and anti-Corbynites have colluded to encourage a simplistic narrative is one of the factors fanning the flames of anger on the left.

Some might say that the crucial difference is that those abusing Philips are Labour or Momentum members, whereas Abbott’s abusers are just the usual trolls that being a black woman in a prominent position makes her a magnet for. No-one is suggesting Corbyn-sceptic MPs are responsible for this in any way; everyone is willing to accept there are plenty of nutters out there, but is it really fair to heap blame on Corbyn for the actions of anyone and everyone who professes support for him? Especially when there’s no similar assumption of responsibility when the traffic is flowing the other way?

This unbalanced narrative extends beyond just the Labour party and the left. We’ve just spent a year discussing the rise of anti-Semitism on the left, and rightly so, but Theresa May can give a speech at Tory conference actively courting xenophobia, and receive widespread praise.

To be clear, the abuse and bullying we’ve seen amongst Corbyn supporters is unacceptable and, whilst he has condemned it, I’d like to see Corbyn try to do more to combat it. But let’s not contribute to a narrative that would have us believe that the bad behaviour has been completely one-sided. Much of the Corbyn-sceptic PLP has acted pretty appallingly over the last year, and this shouldn’t be ignored either. It’s what has fuelled the grievance and sense of foul play amongst Corbyn supporters.

Politics can be a dirty business and the validity of some of the PLP’s actions are debateable, but others are not. Trying to prevent members from voting in the recent leadership election, in many cases for the most arbitrary reasons, was simply wrong and undemocratic. I can’t see how initiating an attempted leadership coup in the immediate aftermath of Brexit can possibly have been a good idea; allowing, as it did, a willing media to refocus on Labour’s internal problems rather than holding the Tories to account over the mess that they’d caused.

Corbyn has often accused of being partisan; in fairness, he sometimes appears at his most animated when fighting political opponents within, rather than outside of, the party. However, in what way is Peter Mandelson suggesting that he’d like to see a Conservative election victory as a way of ousting Corbyn any less worthy of criticism?

Granted, none of this amounts to death-threats of the kind received by Jess Phillips, but it’s hardly comradely behaviour either. Labour, as it is often said, is a broad church. It needs to remain one now that the Left is nominally in charge, and that means compromise from Corbyn and his team. However, it also means that the other wings of the party need to accept that Corbyn won, and has a mandate. Much of the PLP’s behaviour has been bad for party cohesion, and feeds the unhealthy notion amongst some Corbynistas that it’s all an establishment conspiracy.

The point is that bad behaviour on either side doesn’t justify more bad behaviour from the other. In fact, what it tends to do is breed even more bad behaviour, and we’ve all seen the toxic outcome this creates. I sincerely hope that this is a lesson that all wings of the party have learnt from the past year – left and right, supporters of Corbyn or not.

Today, I was gratified to see that Corbyn seems to have made a real effort to put together a diverse shadow cabinet, which includes some of his critics, and appears to be doing his best to make peace with Tom Watson. They, for their part, have agreed to serve in it. I can only hope this is a positive sign of things to come.

Despite everything that has happened over the last year, conciliation now needs to be placed front and centre. The party is still on a knife edge. Pull together now and Labour might still have a chance of recovery; carry on fomenting discontent, and we can all forget about it.

The Case For (And Against) Voting Owen Smith

Love him or loathe him, Jeremy Corbyn was necessary – that’s my view. I say this because Labour’s 2015 result didn’t feel like the narrow defeat it should have done. It felt like an existential crisis. The party didn’t know what it stood for anymore. Even Yvette Cooper, who could have been a formidable leader in different circumstances, came across as bland and insubstantial in last year’s leadership election. Having hollowed out the party’s soul, the PR-driven politics of the New Labour era had decisively run out of road.

When I voted for Corbyn in 2015, I knew that Labour – whoever led it – was a long way from power. But I believed that more of the same wouldn’t address the underlying issues of the 2010 and 2015 defeats. What we needed was someone who’d rebuild the party’s grass roots, to lead a debate about what the Labour Party is for. I didn’t see Corbyn as a natural leader, but that seemed academic in the context.

My assumption (shared by Owen Jones, amongst others) was that, once he’d got this soul-searching process underway, he’d step aside in 2018 or so, to make way for someone who shared his left-wing principals, but was younger and more ambitious – more leader-material, basically. Someone who’d then fight the 2020 General Election and win. Clearly, Brexit and Labour’s own infighting have rendered that hope irrelevant.

We’re faced once again with a ballot paper, and the threat of a snap election remains prescient. My disdain for the way Corbyn has been plotted against, and for those on the right of the party who refused to work with him from the start, should be taken as read – because of this, my instinctive position is to vote for Corbyn again. But I also feel that Owen Smith, despite some of the daft name calling (which, in fairness, is very much a two-way street at the moment), isn’t the real enemy. He’s no Blairite, and deserves a fair hearing.

On the ‘Blairite’ point, it seems fair to point out that, whilst plenty of actual Blairites support Smith, they’re doing so by default – the ‘anyone but Corbyn’ candidate. I’m less interested in their views than I am of the increasing number of non-Blairites who are backing him, or at least doubting whether Corbyn remaining in charge is the best course of action. Tom Watson and Sadiq Kahn, for example, may not be perfect, but they cannot fairly be described as on the right of the party. In the blogosphere, writer Owen Jones recently wrote a piece outlining his worries about Corbyn’s performance – and was promptly accused of being a Blairite stooge. The reality is that plenty of decent left-of-centre people are seriously agonising over the way forward, and I’m one of them.

The case for voting Owen Smith centres on his claim that he’ll be as radical as Corbyn, but actually deliver by winning elections. The first part of this claim doesn’t sound far off the mark: Smith is talking about reversing austerity and investing for prosperity. He’s doing so in a way that would have been unthinkable a year ago, when Burnham and Cooper were banging on about ‘aspiration’ and so on. Corbyn seems to have shifted the conversation to the left, which I’m grateful for. But now that he has done, Smith argues he’d be a surer pair of hands at the wheel.

The claim that he’s more electable is debateable. As stated above, Labour’s problems started way before Corbyn’s leadership. But he is certainly much more skilled in handling the media. He seems to know how to marshal it in a way Corbyn just doesn’t seem to attempt, performing well on Radio 4’s combative Today programme. Even his minor gaffes (Theresa May’s heels and all that) arguably lend him human relatability; no-one wants media-savviness to lapse into Blair-era slickly choreographed insincerity.

In contrast, one of my primary frustrations with Corbyn is that he doesn’t seem to have a media strategy it all. He and his team should have focussed strongly on deflecting and anticipating the inevitably-thrown muck, and countering it with a strong, consistent, and most importantly, relentlessly repeated message. That’s all Farage really did – the ever-available rent-a-gob – and it largely worked.

Unfortunately, there’s still a significant case against voting for Smith. It has nothing to do with fanclub-like adoration of Corbyn (a phenomenon which is overstated amyway). Smith’s refusal to work with Corbyn, if he wins, is childish. If there’s any hope of making Labour vaguely functional after this contest, it’s incumbent on all factions, left and right, to start building bridges. Owen Smith ought to be leading by example on this.

Policy-wise, I can overlook his pro-Trident stance, even though I disagree with it. The decision’s already been made. But his position on Brexit is frankly odd. Whilst I voted Remain, it’s clear to me that the result must be honoured. Smith’s second referendum would look too much like the political establishment sneering at the majority who voted Leave, insisting on re-running the contest until the ‘correct’ decision is reached. That’s not a good image for a ‘man of the people’.

But for me, the main reason against voting for Smith is that I’m not convinced he really gets it. Why so many members voted Corbyn in 2015. We’ve heard a lot about SWP entryists, anti-semitism, death-threat sending thugs and so on. But whilst these things are real and condemnable (although the bad behaviour cuts both ways), most Labour members have nothing to do with any of it.

Smith isn’t doing enough to talk to people like me: pragmatic socialists who, contrary to some accusations, really do want Labour to win elections whilst retaining its core values. People who don’t want Labour to be some kind of left-wing cult, but are tired of twenty-plus years of comprehensive marginalisation. He needs to acknowledge these people and prove he understands why we voted Corbyn last time.

I also don’t like the feeling that a vote for Smith would be playing into the hands of those who’ve spent the year plotting a coup. But we are where we are, and I won’t let that alone influence my decision. My ballot paper still lies, unopened, on my desk. My vote is essentially there for the taking – but Owen Smith doesn’t seem bothered to do so.

What is the appeal of Jeremy Corbyn to Labour voters?

No one expected Jeremy Corbyn to become leader of the Labour Party when he narrowly scraped onto the list of nominees. Diane Abbott - the previous left-wing candidate to stand for Labour leader - came last, with only 6% of the vote. It was expected that Corbyn would only do slightly better.  A year later, Labour is on course for electoral disaster: the Tories’ poll lead is far greater than it was at any point under Ed Miliband's leadership. However, Corbyn remains popular amongst his fans and party members. This defies political logic and has caused some consternation.

There have been articles claiming Corbyn followers are paranoid or a cult. Uncritical support for your own side and disregard for anyone else's opinion is fine when discussing football, but not when it isolates Labour Party members from electoral reality. So what is going on here? Has the Labour Party gone mad?

There is definitely delusional and cult-like behaviour from Corbyn supporters on Facebook and Twitter. I have been told, repeatedly, by Corbyn supporters that he would win a general election or that the only obstacles to him winning is the opposition of the PLP. This is simply not true. Many people inspired by Corbyn are unwilling to accept how deeply unpopular he is and how badly Labour is going to be crushed by the Tories at the next election.

There are many people who are inspired by Corbyn, his long history opposing the Tories and the fact that he is different from most politicians. People who have complained for years that they do not see a difference between Labour and the Tories are drawn to Corbyn. Many of these people are disenfranchised by politics or have been supporters of fringe left wing parties. These voters are inspired by Corbyn personally not necessarily his policies. It is these people who are most vocal in their support for Corbyn and these who are the most convinced that he can win a general election. However these people are not the majority of the Labour Party.

Last year, Corbyn won the support of the majority of existing Labour Party members (his election as leader did not depend on the new registered supporters), and he still has wide support amongst long-standing party members. I do not think that the Labour Party has gone insane or has been taken over by Trotskyists. Realistically, I doubt that there are 180,000 Trotskyists in all of Britain, yet that many people have joined the Labour Party recently. Not everyone who supports Corbyn is delusional about his chances of becoming Prime Minister. Many Labour members are aware of the danger facing the party, but continue to support Corbyn. Why do people who care about how electable Labour is support Corbyn?

Corbyn did not become Labour leader because of a sudden enthusiasm for Socialism. It was a shock when Labour lost the 2015 election, and the party was unwilling to examine why it lost. Miliband's soft left, liberal vision of Britain was rejected by voters, despite a Tory government that had brought rising child poverty, rising cost of living and stagnant wage growth, and had returned the country to a recession. The Labour Party did not want to do the hard work to find a vision for liberalism that would appeal to enough voters. How does Labour find a policy platform that appeals to both middle-class voters in the south-east and working-class voters in the former industrial north? This is not easy, and the party decided not to do the hard work of questioning itself and why it had become so unpopular.

As Martin Robbins said in the article cited above: “Unable to accept that Labour had simply lost arguments over austerity, immigration and the economy, people began constructing their own reality”. Corbyn became party leader because Labour had lost faith in the soft left of Miliband and Brown, and was unwilling to find a way to make the policies of the soft left work. A new direction was called for.

Lots of Labour Party members were worried about rightward drift in the party, now that the soft left consensus had gone. Party members (who are mainly metropolitan liberals) did not want a Labour Party that was critical of benefits claimants and immigrants, whilst encouraging neoliberal, anything-goes capitalism. However, it looked like that was the party they would get, when Andy Burnham said Labour must distance itself from “people who want something for nothing”.

People who find discussion of immigration inherently uncomfortable do not want to hear the rhetoric of UKIP coming from their leaders. Many Labour member disliked Miliband’s attempts to address voters’ concerns over immigration - I even met people who voted Green in 2015 because of it. Labour Party members were willing to hold their noses and vote for Blair, but not for a party that was anti-immigration and anti-benefits, which is what Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall were offering to different degrees.

There are many good reasons to oppose this rightward drift within Labour. Using the rhetoric of anti-immigration at best serves the Tories (who are always viewed as better on immigration than Labour), and at worst plays into the hands of the far right. In this new age of political chaos and uncertainty, reheated neoliberalism will not win Labour an election. No one was convinced of the ability of Burnham, Cooper or Kendall to win a general election. Labour Party members had good reasons for voting for Corbyn, even though his leadership is doing serious damage to the party.

The continuing high level of support for Corbyn is not the product of widespread delusions or cult-like thinking within the Labour Party - although this is certainly present in some of Corbyn's more ardent supporters. Middle-class metropolitan liberals have rallied to Corbyn because there is a real fear that after the Brexit vote aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric could become Labour Party policy.

Owen Smith has done much to encourage this fear. His statements on immigration make Labour Party members uneasy. He has done more than Corbyn himself to perpetuate the suspicion of many metropolitan liberals that a vote for anyone other than Corbyn is a vote for an anti-immigration, anti-benefits, neoliberal Labour Party. The average Labour Party member is not as left wing as Corbyn, but they are sufficiently left wing not to want a neoliberal, anti-immigration Labour Party.

Personally, I do not want a Labour Party that adopts the language of anti-immigration and the policies of letting business do whatever it wants, because this is somehow in our best interest - the 2008 financial crisis shows that this idea is moronic. The problem is that Labour is heading for a crushing defeat under Corbyn. Some vocal Corbyn supporters are in denial about this, but most are fully aware of it. They refuse to compromise, and these middle-class metropolitan liberals are not the ones who will suffer under years of Tory rule. They will get the party they want but it will lose badly. I do not see how the cause of being against the scapegoating of immigrants and those on benefits is served by the complete destruction of the Labour Party.

Corbyn will not be beaten in a leadership election until the PLP realise that the members do not want a neoliberal, anti-benefits, anti-immigration Labour Party. A compromise for party unity would have to involve the new leader accepting this, in order to convince those who are going to give up their evenings and weekend to make him or her Prime Minster that they share common values. The Labour activists will not work hard persuading the country to embrace anti-immigration rhetoric that they do not believe in or think is actively poisonous.

As the factions within Labour become more pronounced, I do not see a compromise happening. That leaves only the looming certainty of electoral defeat, possibility in the next several general elections. Personally, I do not want a Labour Party that cynically exploits the public’s fear of immigration for power. I also do not want a Labour Party that is heavily defeated in elections and unable to offer meaningful opposition in parliament. This leaves me at an impasse from which I have no idea how to proceed.

It is worth remembering that those who support Corbyn do so not because of the delusion that he will become Prime Minister, but because there is no alternative that they can accept. It also worth remembering how bad Labour's current polling is, and how bad for country a crushing defeat for Labour would be.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

Why I am depressed about the future of the Labour Party

On a recent episode of the Guardian's Politics Weekly podcast, Nick Cohen claimed that Labour supporters were not sufficiently scared. The writer and journalist suggested that members engaged in internecine fighting were not frightened enough of prolonged Tory rule. Let me to tell you, Nick, as a Labour Party member I am very frightened right now. Probably more frightened than I have been at any point in my adult life.

I cannot see any way out of mess the party has found itself in. The Labour Party seems more divided than the country as a whole, and the prospect of a permanent split is greater than at any point in the last 30 years. Whatever path it chooses, I only see ruin in its future.

The most likely short term outcome is that Jeremy Corbyn survives the current attempt to remove him as leader (or he is replaced by someone who also does not hold the confidence of the PLP, like John McDonnell). Any leader not from the Corbyn faction would have to win over the party membership, who are firmly pro-Corbyn.

So Corbyn stays and Labour mostly likely splits into two parties directly in competition with each other for the same voters. Due to First Past The Post, they would both fare poorly in a general election and the total number of left wing MPs would fall considerably. Labour's loss is the Tories’ gain. What follows is 15-20 years of Conservative rule, as Nick Cohen suggested in his podcast. In order to get back into power Labour (or what survived of it) would probably stand on a platform similar to what David Cameron offered in 2015 as a moderate alternative.

As a Corbyn supporter, I would be willing to accept a compromise to avoid this. The last thing I want to see is permanent split in the party - remember how well that went in the early 80s? This compromise would need a clear plan of how the party is to progress towards winning an election. As I have said before, “put Dan Jarvis in charge” is not a plan.

Suppose for a moment that the less likely short term outcome does occur, and an alternative to Corbyn succeeds in becoming party leader. This new leader would have to crush the left wing of the party to secure their authority, losing thousands of party members. We would go back to the days of senior party figures saying that Labour had been too soft on disabled and unemployed people who want some kind of quality of lifeand being intensely relaxed about the rich avoiding their taxes.

Voters want politicians they view as genuine. The Labour Party does not have on their front bench any communicator as talented as David Cameron. Still, despite his obvious skill in using the media and presenting his arguments, Cameron has struggled to build a consensus behind his premiership, because he seen as inauthentic. Do the Labour moderates feel that any of their pale Cameron imitators will do any better in convincing voters that they genuinely care about their lives? The Labour Party has lost the ability to communicate with sections of its core support, and I do not see Hilary Benn or Chuka Umunna doing any better.

Would deposing Corbyn herald a change from a party of protest to a government in waiting? This overlooks the obvious lack talent on the party’s right who cannot even execute a coup properly. With Scotland out of play, any Labour leader would need to win as big in England and Wales as Tony Blair did in 1997, and I do not see any front bench Labour politician who can achieve this.

This hypothetical Labour leader would need to be both a conviction and a consensus politician; media savvy yet authentic. Able to appease the party’s left and right. Anyone who thinks that person is Dan Javis or Tristram Hunt is wildly overestimating their abilities as politicians. If the moderates take back the party we will be lucky if we return to Ed Miliband levels of competency.

Even if the Labour moderates did retake the party and unite its disparate factions, they would then have to face the Tories in a general election AND deal with the fallout from the EU referendum. They have no means of responding to Brexit’s victory; they are pro-EU but confused by elections that they do not win. They have only one analysis for defeat: we were too left wing, we must become more right wing.

The Labour Party is faced with an impossible blind, as writer and journalist Laurie Pennyrecently said, "we have a choice between riots now and riots later". A general election will be called soon and it will be fought over the Brexit vote. The Labour Party would most likely stand on a pro EU, pro freedom of movement platform and lose the election after alienating 52% of voters, many of whom are its former core supporters. UKIP would pick up a lot of former Labour voters and the country would be led by a radically right wing coalition.

Possibly even worse is the prospect Labour could win that election, keep Britain in the EU or negotiate a Norwegian form of Brexit that protects freedom of movement. This would be seen as a betrayal of the 17 million voters who voted for Brexit mainly because they opposed immigration. Many of these Brexit voters are already very alienated from mainstream politics. If even 0.5% of these people are motivated to violence by this betrayal then the country could descend into race riots, the flames fanned by ongoing austerity.

What if Labour opposes freedom of movement, and backs ‘full Brexit’ in a cynical attempt to win over those 17 million voters? This involves the party supporting a campaign based on racism and xenophobia, as well as causing a huge recession, thus making the Labour Party very unpopular and probably leading to rising violence as sudden falls in GDP are related to civil unrest. Hence as Laurie Penny said, violence now from betraying the Brexit vote or violence later from a recession.

The future for Labour looks bleak. I am really depressed about the situation Labour is in and I cannot see any way forwards. The Tories are in a complete shambles, still divided over Europe and with no plan to implement Brexit. Many senior Tories are directly responsible for a divisive and racist EU referendum campaign, but still Labour cannot find a way to capitalise on Tory woes. It is infuriating to watch.

The country needs the Labour Party to unite and become an effective opposition because this brief spell of Tory infighting will end and then they will return, united and committed to a radically right wing vision of Britain. Labour need to get their act together now for the sake of the future.

I cannot see any chance of this happening. Even if Labour survives the current spate of internecine fighting then the problems of the Brexit vote and the lack of a clear plan to win a general election means the long term future of the party is awful to contemplate. We could be looking at the end of the Labour Party as a meaningful political force. So, Nick Cohen, yes I am very scared right now. Scared, and with a pronounced sense of hopelessness.

Labour Party picture taken by Andrew Skudder and used under creative commons.

It is madness to get rid of Corbyn now

The Blairites have made no secret of the fact that they have wanted Jeremy Corbyn removed as Labour leader since he was elected last September with a huge mandate from party members. Now they are in open rebellion against Corbyn, trying to force him to resign. The timing is perfect for the Blairites. The mainstream media is distracted by the fallout from EU referendum vote, the Prime Minister has resigned and the pound is tumbling in value – it’s the perfect opportunity to move against Corbyn. His enemies are hoping for a quick palace coup before anyone notices and have chosen now as their moment to strike.

However the so called "moderates’" plan is remarkably short sighted. They can force a vote of no confidence in the party leader (which is likely to pass) but then they will face a leadership election. The party membership is firmly behind Corbyn and there is nothing to stop him standing again for leader and winning. Eventually the Labour moderates will have to come to terms with the fact that they are deeply unpopular with the grass roots of the party. Their plan is not that well thought through.

Even if they were able to take control of the party and install Chuka Umunna or Tristram Hunt as leader, then what? Under Corbyn the party had a clear direction. What will the new direction be? Have the moderates considered what they would do with power? Remember, a general election is probably going to be called soon, so whoever leads the party needs a plan to face the electorate.

Just so that we are clear. Here are some things that are not plans:

• Anyone but Corbyn for leader

• Step 1: Make Tristram Hunt the leader

• Step 2: Er...

• Step 3: Win general election

• Surf into power on the back of the huge popular recognition of and support for Dan Jarvis based purely on the fact that he used to be in the army. People like soldiers, right?

• A commitment to austerity and controls on immigration. Just like Ed Miliband, proposed.

• Whatever the Sun says the plan is, that’s the plan.

Labour Party is facing a lot of external challenges right now. Challenges that predate Corbyn’s selection as leader. UKIP is gaining support in the former industrial North. The Tories are eating into its middle class support. Scotland is firmly off the table as a source of Labour MPs to form a majority government. Disillusionment with professional, media trained politicians is turning voters away from the large parties. The country is divided, between those gaining and losing out from globalisation, while politicians lack a narrative to bring it together unity. All of these will be important factors for Labour in a future election. So, what‘s the platform the moderates will offer to tackle these issues and win an election? What is the plan for solving the nation's problems?

Under Corbyn's leadership the party has grown in members. People now know what Labour stands for, whereas under Ed Miliband it was unclear. The public are responding well to Corbyn's authenticity, the fact that he is clearly different from inauthentic media trained politicians, and that he has clear principles. Policy is being developed from a range international economists including Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis. It is better to stick with the current platform and leader than to face the country with nothing expect a new leader who no one outside the Westminster bubble has heard of.

This sudden change in leadership being pressed for by the Blairites is a bad idea, especially if the new Tory Prime Minister calls an early election. It is a really bad idea to get rid of Corbyn now and replace him with uncertainty and lack of policy. The actions we have seen from Labour's moderates over the last few days do not indicate that they have a well thought through plan. This is just a reckless attempt to divide the party.

 Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

Labour need a better strategy

Now that the dust has settled on "Super Thursday" we can critically examine Jeremy Corbyn’s first big electoral test as leader of the Labour Party. The results are very mixed. The Labour Party had some successes, most notably Sadiq Khan’s election as Mayor of London ending the Tories’ eight-year occupation of that office. Elsewhere Labour did not fare so well, losing overall control of the Welsh Assembly and slipping to third place in the Scottish elections.

The severe trouble that Scottish Labour finds itself in predates Corbyn’s election as Labour leader; he cannot take much blame for it. However the real problem comes from the wider test of Corbyn's electability, the council elections. Last Thursday the Labour Party became the first opposition party to lose council seats in mid-term local elections since 1985. The Labour Party picked up fewer councilors than Ed Miliband's Labour in 2012 or William Hague’s Conservatives in 1998 - both of which went on to electoral defeats.

This does not necessarily mean Labour is doomed to a landslide defeat in 2020. It is almost impossible to accurately predict the outcome of an election four years in the future. However with Tories, Lib Dems and UKIP eating into Labour’s support and no clear path back to electability in Scotland, the outlook for Labour is not so good.

In many ways the Corbyn leadership is going badly. There have been a series of unprofessional disasters including John McDonnell waving around Chairman Mao's Little Red Book and Ken Livingston opening on Hitler a week before a critical election. The Conservatives are maneuvering on the centre ground of British politics and increasing their electoral support. At the same time, accusations of rising anti-Semitism are proving difficult to refute.

The ultimate question for Labour is what alternative is there? Corbyn's three leadership rivals were dismissed by party members not because of sudden love of socialism, but because they offered no chance of winning an election. The simple truth is that there is currently no alternative plan to get Labour back into government. Moderates talk about Dan Jarvis as a replacement leader, however, I do not understand what happens after Jarvis (or any other moderate) replaces Corbyn. What is the moderates' strategy for winning back voters and getting Labour into power?

In order for Labour to win the 2020 general election the party needs a platform that is radically different to what Gordon Brown offered in 2010, Miliband offered in 2015 and what the Tories are offering now. Repeating the failed 2010 or 2015 approach will not work in 2020. I do not see a direction that the moderates would take Labour in that would be different enough from the mistakes of the past and the current Tory government.

Those who argue for a return to Blair’s triangulation strategy miss the point. Rather than a cohesive coalition between working and middle class voters, the 1997 landslide relied on chasing ‘aspirational’ Middle England, safe in the knowledge that working class core voters could be relied on to vote Labour anyway. Endemic political alienation since then, along with the financial crash, means re-running New Labour is not the answer either.

Labour is under attack from all sides. Centrist middle class voters are defecting to the Tories; working class and northern voters are being wooed by UKIP. Scotland is off the table, for now. The strategy that the moderates would adopt to win back centrist, middle class voters is likely to drive working class voters to UKIP, and left leaning, metropolitan liberals to the Greens. There no is guarantee that Labour would fare any better under a different leader.

It is not enough to simply write off victory in 2020, as I fear both Corbyn and the Labour moderates have done. Labour needs a plan to return it to government. This criticism applies to both Corbyn, and to the moderates: fighting over control of the party does not matter if the party loses 100 seats in the next election. There has to be a clear strategy to win, and "make Dan Jarvis party leader” is not a plan, it is barely even the beginning of one.

Labour cannot spend the next 4 years squabbling and hand the Tories a landslide victory in 2020. Labour needs a clear, workable strategy to win the general election. Now is not the time for complacency. Now is the time for action.

Why Corbyn needs to be a positive defender of Britain in the EU

There are plenty of papers covering the "he said, she said" of the EU referendum. I want to take a step back and look at the campaign as a whole. As well the referendum being an important decision for the future of the country, it is an important political opportunity for Labour. As such, it is important that Labour shows a united front and that they take advantage of Tory divisions over Britain’s EU membership.

So far the Tories have kept their disagreements over the EU private because the Labour poll ratings have been so dire. Parties facing defeat show much less unity, for example the Tories in early 90s. There is currently a strong incentive for Tory MPs to stay in the good books of the leadership, i.e. being rewarded with government jobs in the 2020s.

However the mask of Tory unity is slipping. Boris Johnson is dividing the party by giving some credibility and popularity to the No campaign. This a careerist move from Boris, who views this as his last chance to become Tory leader and thus Prime Minister. Barbed words have already been exchanged between Boris and David Cameron, and the rift will only grow as Boris and George Osborn battle it out to be the heir apparent when Cameron steps down.

Labour's own divisions make it difficult to take advantage of the Tory split. This is why it is important for Labour to show a united front in the EU referendum. However, this is made harder by the fact that Labour's leader is not convinced of the benefit of EU membership. There are a lot of problems with the EU from a left wing perspective (TTIP is the tip of the iceberg) but the only way that the Labour Party can achieve socialist goals is through working with other left wing parties in a united Europe. Labour need to get behind the EU.

The left wing vote is needed for Britain to stay in the EU. This is why Alan Johnson is leading the passionately pro EU Labour In campaign. It is this positive approach to Europe that the country needs, not a scare campaign based on jobs and security that Britain Stronger in Europe will offer. Labour In is needed because if the left stay home on referendum day, the leave vote will win. Labour In is a great chance for the party to be the decisive element in British politics.

Corbyn and the Labour left need to take the upper hand if they want to stay in control of the party. There have been too many headlines about in-fighting and arguments between the Labour leadership and the PLP. The Tories are trying to maximise the divisions in Labour by moving forward the vote on renewing Trident. Labour need to do likewise, by making Tory divisions over Europe as big as possible, while putting on a well organised and united campaign to stay. If Corbyn can organise a united Labour Party, on the side of what most people want, against a divided and unpopular mid-term government, then he can turn the tide of bad headlines around.

This is a huge opportunity for Labour and Corbyn. A passionate, positive defence of the EU against a divided Tory party will show the public that Labour under Corbyn can be an effective opposition. People will believe Corbyn if he campaigns to stay in the EU. It plays to his strengths, namely that people think he is honest and believe what he has to say, which is unlike most politicians or his PLP rivals. He can even present his earlier wavering to his advantage - he considered both options sensibly, like the rest of us, before making an informed, balanced decision. Corbyn needs to take this opportunity to do what only he can do, show the county how Labour are different from the Tories.

Labour must be well disciplined, on the side of the voters and against a divided government. Above all, they must be positive, avoiding a mirror image of Farage’s knee-jerk rhetoric or the scare tactics of Cameron's stay in campaign. This will not only win the EU referendum for remain, but will also win back control of the headlines. Corbyn needs to seize this opportunity to start winning.

2015 a year in review - Jeremy Corbyn

This is a review of the political events of 2015. Read my summary of the general election here.

If the election was a surprise than what happened afterwards was a shock. Jeremy Corbyn was given odds of 800 to 1 when he was nominated to stand for Labour leader but he won with nearly 60% of the membership backing him. Corbyn won a huge victory across all ages, demographics and types of Labour members, but all has not gone well since then. Corbyn’s victory has exposed huge divisions in the Labour party.

I voted for Corbyn, and his politics are the closest to mine of any Labour leader during my lifetime. It has been painful to read the writings of many left-wing journalists I respect, trashing him at every opportunity. There are certainly legitimate criticisms of Corbyn – I will come to these – but I feel many journalists made up their minds early on that they did not like him and nothing he can do will change this. This is because the election of Corbyn as Labour leader goes beyond what you think of Corbyn personally, his voting record, or even his policies. It is a question of what Labour stands for and what it should aim to be.

The division opening up across the Labour movement is a division between those who want radical change to our politics and our society, and those who want liberal reform to our current system. It is the difference between those who want capitalism with the worst excesses removed or those who want our entire relationship with capitalism reformed. I feel this divide is unbridgeable, by Corbyn or anyone else.

Corbyn’s victory is partly down to having an ideology at all in an ideologically bankrupt Labour, and partly down to inspiring young voters and many alienated leftists and Greens. But it is mainly because the rival Blairite and Brownite candidates were awful. None of them looked like they could win a general election so the party members preferred to make a principled stand, rather than choose a Prime Minister in waiting. The Blairite and Brownite factions need to take a hard look at themselves to work out why they lost so massively to the left of the party. They have nothing to offer apart from indigent cries of “it’s our party, we should be in charge”. Since Corbyn’s election they have continued down this route, doubtlessly helping keep Corbyn popular among Labour Party members.

Labour wins big when it can unite the working class trade-union supporting voters, the liberal metropolitan middle class voters and the aspirational voters who think they will be better off under Labour. Under Miliband, UKIP ate away at the first group, the Greens at the second and the Tories took a huge bite of out the third. Corbyn is losing the third group, but he has stopped the exodus of the second group and a question mark remains over his appeal to the first. In Oldham UKIP heavily targeted this group, hoping that accusing Corbyn of not being patriotic could win over these voters. It did not work, because of the issues with UKIP discussed above. The Tories are trying the same tactic on a bigger scale and that is where the real threat to Labour lies.

If the Tories can win over group 1 and 3, while holding onto their core support, they will win big in 2020. However I do not see a Labour front bench figure who can win over all three groups and Labour need all three. Yvette Cooper gets group 2 and 3, but loses group 1. Liz Kendall gets group 1 and 3, but loses 2. Stella Creasy gets group 2 and 3, but loses 1. David Miliband gets group 3, but loses 1 and 2. The only possibilities would be Lisa Nandy or Jess Phillips but they are not exposed enough for us to accurately judge how well they would do as party leader.

Corbyn and his new shadow cabinet have made some mistakes. Certainly having John McDonnell waving around Chairman Mao's Little Red Book was a bad idea, however over four years away from a general election these mistakes matter little to most voters. The few victories Corbyn has had have been the most widely noted, mainly Labour stopping Tory plans to cut working tax credits, which interim Labour leader Harriet Harman supported.

Then came a terrorist attack on Paris and the excuse Cameron had been looking for to start bombing Syria. This is a terrible idea and Corbyn was right to oppose it. However, parliament thought otherwise and a few in the Labour Party seized this as an opportunity to embarrass Corbyn; showing once and for all that Blairities care more about being proved right than they do about the Syrian civilians we will inevitably kill and how this will encourage others to flock to ISIS.

Even so, the Syria vote is a major defeat for Corbyn. I think ultimately he will be proved right and that this military intervention in Syria (and Iraq) will only increase support for ISIS. Unfortunately at the point when this becomes apparent everyone will have forgotten Corbyn’s stance on the issue as we will be focusing on a new political crisis. Sometimes it looks as if Corbyn cannot win whatever he does.

Parliament and party politics were more interesting this year than for a long time, but there were important trends outside the Westminster bubble. Read my summary of trends in 2015 and what to epxect in 2016 here.

The Corbyn train wreck

Something which no one anticipated has happened – there has been a major shake up in the Labour leadership contest, and it looks likely that Jeremy Corbyn will win a landslide victory. This has come as a shock to everyone, including Corbyn himself, but on some level it was inevitable. The surge in support for the Greens, the SNP and UKIP over the last parliament shows that voters are fed up with carefully-tailored, spin-doctor-managed politicians who talk a lot and say nothing of value.

Corbyn's success is partly because the other Labour leadership candidates are all so hopeless. However, Corbyn's success is also partly because he has a narrative that members have engaged with, a narrative that Labour can return to its traditional socialist values rather than drift to the right.

Having a successful narrative is essential to politics. Labour lost the election because the electorate did not trust them with the economy. This could be more accurately phrased as the electorate bought the Conservatives’ narrative that Labour over-spending caused the recession and the Tories are sorting the problem out. This is why, despite Labour's spending lock and commitment to austerity, voters still felt they were not economically credible.

Corbyn has given the party hope that politics can change society for the better. His narrative of what is wrong with the country has engaged people with Labour politics on a scale not seen since the halcyon days of Blair. I greatly admire the way in which Corbyn has engaged so many people alienated by politics in general and the Labour Party in particular.

Corbyn's narrative is a radical departure from what senior Labour Party figures have been saying for a long time, and it conflicts directly with the narrative which both the Blarities and the Conservatives are putting forward as to why Labour lost the general election. This is one reason why so many Labour bigwigs have lined up to warn party members not to support him in the leadership election.

A narrative of a return to socialist values speaks to a lot of people about what they think is wrong with society – namely, that there is too much focus on wealth creation and not enough on inequality, and there is too much privatisation driven by ideology and not enough public ownership. It appeals to people who think there are too many benefit cuts and too much blaming the poor for being poor. We are becoming a less caring, meaner and more selfish society under the Tory government, and a narrative that is counter to this is engaging many people.

Corbyn is the only candidate saying we should not blame all of our social problems on immigrants and benefit claimants. Corbyn is the only candidate saying we need to tackle our environmental problems and invest in infrastructure. Corbyn’s narrative is based on values Labour should remember and that the Blarities have tried their hardest to forget. It is a narrative that has changed the leadership election and could become the narrative of the Labour party as a whole.

This new narrative does not fix all of the Labour Party's problems. The main issue with it is that it is a fundamentally backwards-looking narrative. Corbyn's policies are traditional old Labour socialism: nationalisation, higher taxes, more spending, re-opening the coalmines, and withdrawal from NATO. All of these, apart from the last one, are policies I support but they need to be accompanied by a narrative that looks to the future and not the past.

What the left needs right now is powerful narrative about the sort of society we want to create in the future. Ideas like redistribution, basic income, and solutions to the crises being faced in health, education and housing. The left needs to think about how capitalism will change, how to protect the environment and how to protect a minimum standard of living in a world where machines now threaten to take away middle class jobs. The left needs a narrative that brings old Labour values into a current context.

None of the other Labour leadership candidates have any form of narrative, which is one reason why Corbyn is so far ahead in the polls. The other candidates have no means to explain what is wrong with society and how they could change it for the better. Corbyn's narrative of going back to the past is better than the empty sound bites that the other candidates offer.

However, Corbyn’s narrative could cost Labour the 2020 election. Labour wins big when it has a vision for the future and is forward looking. What Labour needs right now is a "white heat of technology" moment, a narrative which describes current circumstances and how society will progress under a Labour government. Corbyn is not offering this.

There is another issue with the Corbyn campaign, and that is the messenger and not the message. Corbyn has supported a number of unpopular causes over the years, including the IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah. Many of the groups he has supported have become legitimate political forces, such as the ANC, but some are still considered enemies of Britain by many voters. Regardless of how good his narrative is, it could fall on deaf ears because of his history and the hammering that he will get in the right wing press, In the end, Corbyn could alienate as many people from the Labour Party as he attracts.

Corbyn's opponents argue that his leadership could be a train wreck. The combination of a backward-looking narrative and a messenger who will be painted as a sympathizer of terrorists could alienate moderate voters and drive them straight to the Tories. If the Tories win in 2020, they will continue their plan to demolish the welfare state and privatize the NHS with a zeal we cannot imagine right now. The people who need an effective opposition the most will be the ones who lose out.

That is one possible train wreck narrative of the future. The other is the train wreck of signing up to the Tory narrative or of having no narrative – these are functionally the same, and are what the other candidates offer. Labour cannot help the people most hurt by the Conservative government by agreeing with benefit cuts, austerity and the mass transfer of assets from the poor to the rich. The Tories have the demographics locked down who support austerity and controls on immigration, and if Labour agrees with them it only makes the Tories look more credible to these people. The Tories could not win under Blair by matching his narrative of spending and Labour cannot win by agreeing with the Tory narrative – it needs to present an alternative.

I do not know which of these two outcomes is more likely. So far, Corbyn's narrative has worked very effectively for him. In just eight weeks he has gone from a no hope candidate to almost certain victory. Will he be able to repeat this on a larger scale over the next five years?

Personally, I feel that the greater trap is not having a narrative or accepting the Tory narrative, which is what cost Ed Miliband the election. A lot of voters want change from the direction the country has gone in over the last 30 years, and Corbyn's message of a return to traditional socialist values seems to be working.

The other candidates’ complete lack of a challenging narrative is a major problem. It will hand electoral victory to the Tories. Over Blair, Brown and Miliband years I have seen too many people of principal alienated by a Labour Party that is walked over by big business and the rich, while failing to stand up for the most disadvantaged people in society. Corbyn is offering a narrative that can change this. Will it be strong enough to counter the muck the right wing press will throw at him? That remains to be seen.

Maybe Corbyn can use his narrative to shift the support of the electorate in his favour. I hope he can. Make no mistake, the chances of a train wreck are high if he fails - but the chances of a train wreck are also high if we do not let him try.

It isn’t the ‘80s anymore

It isn’t the ‘80s any more. I can tell because I’m not writing this whilst listening to a New Order LP and chain-smoking Player’s No. 6, not to mention that I’m doing so on a home computer connected to the internet. Oh, and politics might have changed a bit, as well. With that in mind, the endless comparisons of Jeremy Corbyn to ‘unelectable’ former Labour leader Michael Foot are tiresome and irrelevant.

If we must keep banging on about Labour’s catastrophic 1983 election defeat, at least let’s dispense with the selective memory. Yes, Labour were badly beaten and yes, alright, they did so whilst standing on a left-wing manifesto (albeit a manifesto which was, in some ways, a logical progression from the victorious 1945 one). But there was a lot more at play than that. Thatcher – deeply unpopular in Ghost-Town Britain only a couple of years before – was riding high on patriotic euphoria following the Falklands War. Not only that, but the Lab-SDP split had just occurred, with the breakaway party taking a chunk of Labour votes with them , Labour were lucky to avoid coming third in ’83.

Both of these things, I’d argue, had at least as much to do with the defeat as their manifesto. Whilst the Tories may yet be lucky enough to fight an opposition riven by an SDP-style split in 2020, they’re unlikely – given their currently tiny majority – to have the good fortune of a quick, victorious, popular war to draw votes.

Granted, Foot was an imperfect leader who had the misfortune to take the helm in the choppiest of waters. But he was also a kind, intelligent man, who was treated with appalling cruelty by the press (Milliband’s bacon sandwich episode doesn’t even compare). In the early ‘80s, the newspapers were at the height of their opinion-forming powers. But there’s no way they wield that level of influence now, in the era of the internet and 24-hour news. Social media in particular – for all its faults, not least its tendency to act as an echo chamber for opinions you already hold – has arguably democratised the way we consume news. Never again will that copy of The Sun someone left in the canteen be your sole source of current affairs coverage for the day, however casually you consume your news.

The other factor that’s changed since then is that inequality has increased along many lines, not least generationally. The apathy of the current generation of young people is being killed off in death by a thousand cuts. Already disadvantaged compared to their parents by university tuition fees (thanks to Blair), ridiculous housing costs and fewer job opportunities, they’re now – like a bloke who’s just been beaten up having his wallet nicked by a passing mugger – being deprived the same benefits and minimum wage that over-25s get. Is it any surprise that a major part of the surge in support for Corbyn is amongst young people?

Every generation can be said to live, to some degree, in the shadow of the previous one (or two). But it’s especially acute for the current generation of young people. Structurally disadvantaged and discriminated against in so many ways, they’re also being collectively told by their elders not to bother with all that idealistic, let’s change the world stuff. We already tried it, say the older generation, and take it from us, it doesn’t work. We learned to get with the programme (and create New Labour). Now, I don’t know about you, but that isn’t the most inspiring message to me. And if there’s one thing no-one likes, it’s being told to grow up and get real (least of all by Tony Blair).

These young people have no emotional affinity with the Labour Party. And why should they? The focus-group driven New Labour, with its slick PR, seemed to actively discourage a grass-roots movement. Whereas some old lefties may lament for a time when this wasn’t the case, today’s young people have never known it any different. They don’t give a toss what happened in the ‘80s. But they are getting fired up by Corbyn’s message. This is also why the accusations of ‘80s Militant Tendendy-style ‘entryism’ – an organised attempt to infiltrate, and change, the party - don’t ring true. If ‘entryism’ (if we must call it that) is indeed happening, in that people are signing up for the first time in order to vote Corbyn. I’d argue it’s primarily people who were previously too disengaged with mainstream parties to want to be involved.

Admittedly, some of Corbyn’s policies (unilateral nuclear disarmament, for example) have always been divisive, both within and outside of the Labour Party. But how have we been hoodwinked into believing that universal free education – in place for decades in Britain prior to Blair - is a radical, hard-left position? I think a lot of young people are wondering why, and finding the political establishment wanting.

The tuition fees issue is symptomatic, because the terms of the debate surrounding it all too often both contribute to, and reflect, the rampant, selfish individualism so prevalent and unchallenged in society. Someone has to pay for universities, the Right argue, and it’ll either have to be those who go – or those who don’t go. Whatever happened to the idea, once held on the right as well as the left, that wide access to higher education was beneficial to society as a whole?

Look at Corbyn, by contrast, and the way he talks to the public on the assumption that people care about how society gets on in general, care about other people. The other candidates talk to the public as separate, self-interested individuals, and play to their assumed individual aspirations for themselves. This, for me, is one of the clearest dividing lines between Corbyn and the other candidates, who indirectly seem to take for granted the Thatcherite myth that there really is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families. Only Corbyn is seriously challenging this. Without his presence in the race, there’d barely even be a debate.

On a personal note, after the last election, I’d begun to come to terms with the fact that a more compassionate, kinder politics simply wasn’t what most people wanted. But the unexpected rising tide of support for Corbyn – especially amongst young people, who’ve been given the message that the Left is beaten, marginalised and irrelevant their whole lives – gives me hope. Meanwhile, the Blairites tell us that electing Corbyn would consign Labour to merely becomming a protest movement to oppose Tory cuts. Well, as the old joke goes, it would be a start though, wouldn’t it? Perhaps it’s the necessary first step on the long road toward towards becoming relevant again, and rebuilding a movement that people can connect with and relate to.