For a very large number people, Jeremy Corbyn’s win was a moment of hope. Many of the young people that voted for him felt connected to a political system that so far hasn’t seemed to work for them. While it seems a shame to piss on their parade right away by focussing only on the next general election, the question for the party remains, what now?
Amongst the Blairite faction (most of whom are typified as being vacuous, image-obsessed, and indulging in spin) there’s a lot of thinking to be done about why such a left wing candidate won. Partly, it’s down to the kind of Owen Jones analysis that there was no positive, visionary alternative. He’s right. There wasn’t. Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham’s campaigns were bland, even towards the end, and the centrist candidate, Liz Kendall, was automatically boxed off and pegged as the Tory option.
It’s also down to the fact there’s a lot of energy surrounding a reconnection to social movements and emerging heterodox thinking on banking, housing and workplace rights. But according to Mathew Lawrence, research fellow at IPPR, it is going to be very hard for the Labour Party to translate this support into votes at the next election. “Organisationally, the big challenge will be to convert the three pound supporters, who overwhelmingly backed Corbyn, to join and become foot-soldiers out door-knocking for the party. And in order to win there is the longer term electoral challenge of converting the young, the non-voting, the working class Ukippers back to Labour. The one thing we know about non-voters politically is that they don’t tend to vote.”
Another concern is that these new voters are likely to be London or urban based. These affluent young dreamers are not the working class men or woman in Nuneaton, or the other key seats the Labour Party need to win an election. As one former Blairite special advisor explained: “I’d be interested to know in which seats these new people came from. I bet they came from Hackney, Manchester, central seats like that. They’re not in north west Somerset, which we need to win, they’re not in or Plymouth. They’re in urban, wealthy and economically quite dynamic seats that tend to be Labour anyway. Are we gonna win back the seats we need to? No.”
He added: “Are these new people going to be out on the doorsteps, in the rain, in the sun, in the snow knocking on doors solving people’s problems? No way. They’re gonna be in bed with a hangover, drinking fancy coffee. They’re not gonna be getting the train to fucking Thurrock.”
Another worry is that now Corbyn is taking decisions, he will be judged, not just by the people that didn’t vote for him but also by the people that did. They didn’t vote for the compromising candidate, they voted for the opposite of that. They won’t like the dirty politics of sitting in a room and agreeing with the enemy, they will want purity of principle and it’s unlikely that’s what they’ll be given. So, already, the reckoning is that he’ll lose some people and they’ll say he’s a traitor. Second, third, fourth, fifth and you quickly start to realise he won on the basis of aspiring to the impossible which will ultimately fall apart. The concern is that the vast majority of new supporters will just drift away.
In spite of the challenges ahead, many people in the party are optimistic. “What’s not to like from this new wave of energy drawn to the Labour movement?” says Maryam Eslamdoust Labour councillor for Kilburn. “This is the most exciting political surge in decades. We’d be stupid not ride that wave. Of course we should want as many of the new supporters to get involved as possible – but these stale structures and processes need to be overhauled.”
She’s right. These new voters deserve change and they want equality but despite Corbyn appointing the most gender equal shadow cabinet (or cabinet) ever, the Labour Party have ended up still giving it’s biggest jobs to men: having Sadiq Khan as its mayoral candidate, fine, the son of a bus driver but still a man, Tom Watson, white man, and Jeremy Corbyn, white man. Is this really the great new dawn?