Sunday 13th September

The consensus Media view is that by electing Jeremy Corbyn as the Leader of the Labour Party they are committing suicide.  It has been likened to electing Michael Foot as leader back in the early eighties, but of course it is far more serious than that.  And I say serious, because this was actually Democracy.  This is the first leader to have ever been elected on a one-member-one-vote basis, and despite the problem of a degree of infiltration by both left-wingers and possible Tory voters he has won by such a huge landslide that the most certain thing you can say is that he has been elected undisputed and wholeheartedly by the vast majority of Labour supporters.  In the old days Michael Foot and others were elected by fellow M.P.s.  Then it was broadened out to include Trade Unions and Labour Party members while the M.P.s still retained a third of the vote.

So, what are we to make of Jeremy’s victory?  Forget what the Tory press will say, as they would have crucified whoever was Labour leader unless like Blair they were so Tory-lite as to be indistinguishable from the real thing.  My feeling is that there may well be a handful of M.P.s and other ‘Big Beasts’ in th Labour movement who will complain, a few may even refuse to serve under him, though I very much doubt there will be any defections to the Tories, or a new party formed or any of the other nonsense spouted during the last three months.  I believe and sincerely hope that Jeremy’s first task will be to unite the party and to be inclusive, both in personnel and in ideas.  If he doesn’t he will surely fail and be replaced.  But I suspect that things will settle down a bit and the Labour party will slowly work out the sort of policies and priorities that most working people will understand and support.  One of the misconceptions is that Labour at the election retreated to its traditional working class heartlands.  In fact Labour largely abandoned these traditional Labour voters and lost them in droves; it was the middle classes who voted Labour, especially in London.  The first real test will be how much Labour can begin to pull back voters in Scotland who decamped to the far more Socialist sounding SNP at the last election.  It will be an interesting few months, but I wish the man well, he has run a brilliant campaign, largely by refusing to criticize his fellow contenders, but simply to present an alternative view and to show himself as both open to new ideas and a thoroughly decent man.  Maybe it is in fact that honesty and decency that is seen by his opponents as his most dangerous weapon, which is why they will do their damnedest to destroy him.  We will see….