The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader ends a long period of cross-party consensus at Westminster. It has often been disguised by the noisy clash of adversarial politics but for the past 25 years differences between the two front benches have generally been a matter of nuance and emphasis rather than of underlying principle on economics, social policy and international affairs.
With Labour now led by an old-school socialist and dominated, at least for a while, by the outer fringes of the trade union and globalist left, the political atmosphere will become more shouty and aggressive and Corbyn will give a new lease of life to extra parliamentary protest of all kinds.
But there is no evidence that his election represents any significant shift in political opinion—a British version of Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain is not emerging. Corbyn’s hostility to the very gradual deficit reduction being pursued by this government does have some support in the country as does his support for the renationalisation of some utilities, especially railways, where public opinion remains unusually left-wing.
His worldview is a rare mix of economic statism and radical egalitarianism and a rather extreme version of the metropolitan liberalism that is generally hostile to tradition and suspicious of national borders. These views are shared by a tiny proportion of the voting public. (My own former accountant Richard Murphy is one of them: the tax/economics adviser to Corbyn is a middle class radical in a conservative profession who liked to represent artists and writers.)
And the young people who are flocking to the Corbyn banner seem to be mainly middle class, university educated idealists. They are not representative of British young people in general who are increasingly liberal on race, gender and sexuality but, if anything, shifting to the right on welfare issues and economics. The middle class youth also have very different concerns from the rump of the trade union left, which is Corbyn’s other main support group. This could be an interesting emerging tension in the Corbyn alliance. The youth have little sympathy for traditional working class concerns for community, place and family but can comfortably talk the language of identity politics and global rights.
Read more on Corbyn's victory:
How Corbynomics could work
Jeremy Corbyn needs to take Scotland seriously
Seven things we learned from Labour's leadership race
In any case, Corbyn leads the Labour Party not as a result of any leftward shift in public opinion but because of a quirk of internal Labour politics at the end of the Blair/Brown era and the utterly uninspiring alternatives. A cleansing was long overdue but instead the party has indulged itself in a sort of Oedipal spasm chucking out not only the sterility and pragmatism of the New Labour era but the very idea of professional democratic politics itself.
Normal service will presumably be restored at some point though given the magnitude of his victory it is hard to see when. A semi-alien group of leftists now sit astride the party and will be able to direct its day-to-day positions in parliament and in responding to events but they will have to live with much of the policy inheritance from more centrist times. Some senior figures and activists may drift away in desperation to the Liberal Democrats but most will stay and fight, providing a permanent media story of internal Labour division.
At some point a new more electable leader will emerge for the non-Corbynites to rally around—Dan Jarvis maybe?—who will be able to triangulate his way to victory in the party and perhaps eventually in the country too (though it is hard to see that happening before 2025).
In the meantime does it matter if the main centre-left party is unelectable for almost a generation? There are, of course, other reasons for Labour’s predicament than Jeremy Corbyn, indeed his election is a symptom of the withering of mainstream social democracy experienced across all rich countries.
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This decline has been well documented and has essentially three causes. First—and most visible—the changing class and industrial structure has largely eliminated the old industrial working class. Second, as touched on earlier, centre left parties have become increasingly divided between low income voters who often have quite traditional views on cultural matters and the increasingly dominant liberal middle class (public sector professionals and Guardian readers in the newspaper shorthand) who occupy the other end of the values spectrum on many of the biggest issues of the day such as immigration, welfare, Europe, family. This divided base is one of the reasons why so few Labour politicians have been able to speak with any conviction in recent years. Corbyn has not resolved the conflict he simply ignores it.
Third, and least discussed, is the notion that social democracy has been a victim of its own success. Social democratic ideas have become completely mainstream and, indeed, many have been adopted by the Conservative party: tough regulation of markets and industrial/regional policy is back in fashion after the financial crisis; support for a decent social safety net and free at the point of use NHS is shared across the spectrum (with some differences of emphasis); race, gender and sexuality equality is supported across the spectrum as, more recently, is support for reducing income inequality.
Ideas associated with the centre left will remain an important current in British public life even without Labour to implement them—consider the recent Conservative plans for a living wage and an apprenticeship levy on big companies. Centre left ideas are also institutionally entrenched in British society in much of the public sector, in the education system, in parts of the media.
The idea that without Labour as a contender for office to defend social democracy the malevolent Tories will grind the faces of the poor is just the sort of blinkered, tribal, self-regarding assumption that lost Labour the last general election and elected Jeremy Corbyn. It is true that an unelectable Labour party could strengthen the hand of the right wing inside the Conservative party but it may also strengthen the “one nation” left which could argue that the party has an even greater responsibility to try to speak for the whole country.
Finally, much has already been written about how Corbyn and his mainly wrong-headed ideas were able to seize the second great party of state only because of the failure of the hollowed-out Blair/Brown mainstream. That is undoubtedly true but there is something else that has helped Corbyn into the Labour leadership—the liberal baby-boomer student activist fallacy of activism being a good in itself.
One of the cliches of British political life in recent years is that it is in crisis due to low levels of participation. And it is that assumption that lay behind Labour’s eccentric decision to open its leadership election to anyone who paid £3 and agreed with the party’s values. As it happens, Corbyn would have won anyway, even without the registered supporters vote, but they gave him momentum and without them his victory would have been narrower.
It is true political parties have far fewer members and election turnout has been falling, though there seems to be a turnout floor of around 65 per cent. But British political culture is in rude health: consider the rise in recent years of the SNP and Ukip, the evolution of the Tory Party, the rise of mayors, a noisy and opinionated media. Politics may not have been good at solving problems—such as the Scotland/England relationship—but it is not clear that we need a “new” politics for that. And just consider the recent Assisted Dying bill debate: a country-wide discussion on a complex issue, hundreds of thousands of voices mobilised on both sides, a parliamentary decision and one which apparently goes against public opinion, suggesting the issue will be returned to in coming years.
One final observation. The great British public are due an apology from me and everyone else who writes about politics: we did not notice the complete transformation of the second largest political party in the country. If the figure given by Tom Baldwin (a leading adviser to Ed Miliband) is correct then only 10 per cent of the electorate who voted in the 2010 leadership election, were also eligible to vote in the 2015 election. This is remarkable and represents a significant failure of the commentariat.
I am even a member of the Labour party in Islington North, the constituency that elects Jeremy Corbyn to parliament every few years, and I did not have the first inkling that the Labour Party had become such a different creature in the last two or three years. But in mitigation: I am proud to say I did not vote for him at the general election.
