Corbyn wins

I’ve known about Jeremy Corbyn for years - one of those backbench MPs you’re vaguely aware of because they occasionally pop up voting against their own party on matters of principle. The first time I properly heard him speak was at a Stop the War rally, years ago. He wasn’t the main draw - just one of several speakers - but there was something about the way he spoke that stuck with me.

No rhetoric, no performance, just someone explaining why wars were bad and why we should oppose them with the tone of my old RE teacher going through a lesson plan. The kind of person who gets thirty seconds on News at Ten explaining why they can’t support military intervention, looking slightly uncomfortable in front of the cameras before disappearing back into obscurity. A decent bloke with good politics who’d never be anywhere near power because that’s not how the Party works.

Except apparently it is now, because he just won the leadership election in the first round. Not narrowly - overwhelmingly. Andy Burnham got 19%. Yvette Cooper 17%. Liz Kendall, the Blairite candidate who spent the entire campaign explaining why Labour needed to be more like the Tories, managed 4.5%. It wasn’t even close.

I’m still processing this. When he got on the ballot I assumed it would be the usual story - the left-wing candidate included to make the contest look democratic before one of the sensible centre-ground politicians inevitably won. That’s how these things always go. In 2010 they put Diane Abbott on the ballot to “broaden the debate” and she got 7%. The token left candidate gets their moment to make their argument, everyone nods politely, then the party establishment’s chosen successor wins and politics continues as normal. The left-wing nominee exists to provide the appearance of democracy, not to actually win anything.

But something happened. The more the Labour establishment told people that Corbyn was unelectable, the more people signed up to vote for him. The more the media presented him as a dangerous radical, the more his rallies filled up. The more Tony Blair warned that choosing Corbyn would be suicide, the more attractive the prospect became.

I knew it was over when I watched the Sky News leadership debate and saw Corbyn calmly dismantle Yvette Cooper’s tired old mantras about electability and fiscal responsibility. She was trotting out the same exhausted lines about why Labour needed to be trusted on the economy, the same focus-grouped nonsense about aspiration and hard-working families, and Corbyn just… didn’t engage with it. He talked about what he actually believed instead. And you could see that the old playbook didn’t work anymore.

And then the polling started coming out. Then the rallies started happening - actual crowds of people turning up to hear a politician talk, not because of slick marketing but because he was saying things they actually agreed with. Then the membership numbers started exploding - the party added over 160,000 new members and registered supporters in the space of a few months.

There’s something genuinely strange about watching this unfold. The entire political and media establishment has spent weeks explaining why this is a disaster, why Corbyn is unelectable, why the party is committing suicide. Tony Blair wrote op-eds. Alastair Campbell gave interviews. The Guardian’s comment section became an endless parade of people explaining why voting with your heart was naive and why the only responsible choice was one of the candidates who’d supported austerity and abstained on the welfare bill.

But the new members didn’t care. Or rather, they cared about different things. They cared that here was someone who’d opposed the Iraq War when it mattered. Someone who’d voted against tuition fees. Someone who didn’t think austerity was inevitable or that the solution to losing an election was to be more like the people who beat you.

I’m skeptical - of course I am. I’ve watched the Labour left get crushed too many times to believe that electing one person changes everything. The Parliamentary Labour Party is still full of people who think he’s a disaster. The media will continue to treat him as a joke. The structural problems of trying to build democratic socialism through a parliamentary party designed to prevent democratic socialism don’t disappear because the membership voted for someone who sounds like he might actually want to change things.

But I’m also hopeful?

Which is a weird feeling after the past five years.

There’s something in the air that wasn’t there before. All these new members - students, young people who’ve never voted Labour before, older people coming back after years of disillusionment - they seem to genuinely believe that politics can be different. That you don’t have to accept the consensus that public spending is bad and inequality is inevitable and there’s no alternative to whatever capitalism currently looks like.

The rallies have this bizarre quality to them. People are enthusiastic about a 66-year-old backbencher in a rumpled jacket who keeps banging on about renationalising the railways and building council houses. It shouldn’t work. According to everything we’ve been told about modern politics - the focus groups and the polling and the conventional wisdom about electability - it shouldn’t work at all.

Maybe it won’t. Maybe this is just a moment of optimism before reality reasserts itself and the same old forces grind everything back to how it was. Maybe the establishment is right and you can’t win elections by offering an actual alternative to austerity. Maybe the media assault that’s coming will destroy him. Maybe the Parliamentary Labour Party will make his position untenable.

But right now, today, watching him give his acceptance speech, talking about a “new politics” and being inclusive and kind, while the media frantically tries to figure out how to process the fact that their narrative was completely wrong - I’m allowing myself to feel hopeful.

The party establishment is in shock. The commentariat is in meltdown. Tony Blair is presumably somewhere having a breakdown. And 160,000 people have joined Labour in the past few months because they think politics might actually be able to change things.

I’ve known about Jeremy Corbyn for years. I never thought I’d be writing about him as Leader of the Opposition. I definitely never thought I’d be doing so with something approaching optimism.

Let’s see how long it lasts.