Jeremy Corbyn is the new leader of the Labour party. He was elected in the first round of the STV-style race by a thumping margin over his three rivals, each of them a New Labour type of some flavour or another, none of whom ever really threatened his lead. At the outset of the campaign he was seen as a \u201ctoken leftie\u201d, his candidacy a matter of lip service to the party\u2019s left-wing, just as Diane Abbott\u2019s candidacy in 2010 had been. As his lead in the race became clear, Corbyn found himself denounced both within and without the party as a loony leftie, a communist, a friend of terrorists, a throwback, a threat to national security and plenty else besides. Labour\u2019s membership, perhaps convinced of the need for major change by their surprise defeat in the general election, elected him anyway, handing him the greatest mandate a leader of a British political party has ever enjoyed.<\/p>\n
The preferred buzzword of Corbyn\u2019s detractors now is a simple, one-word argument; \u201cunelectable<\/i>\u201d. From New Labourites watching \u201ctheir\u201d party dance from their grasp, to Tories perturbed by a leftward shift in the political landscape, via a news media largely sympathetic to right-wing framing, the word on Corbyn is that he cannot win an election (apart, presumably, from the one he just won). To the New Labour faithful, Corbyn\u2019s presumed unelectability is a matter of bitter despair, which may yet play out in splits or defections. To the Conservatives and the media, \u201cunelectable\u201d is a word spoken half in jeering mockery and half in self-reassurance. <\/p>\n
I\u2019d like to dissect that word and its meaning a little. The implication is that Labour\u2019s supporters (almost a quarter of a million of whom voted for Corbyn) are entirely out of touch with the nation and have elected a leader who will only serve to further alienate the broader electorate. This assumes that the British electorate as a whole is on the political right of Corbyn, are closer ideologically to the Tories\u2019 position, and will therefore reject Labour outright at the next election in 2020. This assumption is based on the Downs model of political decision-making<\/a>; there are some problems with applying that to the UK which I\u2019ll go into momentarily, but first I\u2019d like to address the elephant in the room.<\/p>\n The elephant in question is this; those arguing that Corbyn is \u201cunelectable\u201d today were incapable of predicting the outcome of this year\u2019s general election only hours before it was held. Political opinion polling in the UK is in a state of unimaginable crisis. Its methodologies are broken and the data it produces is junk. This does not mean that in the absence of data we may assume the preferences of the British people to be whatever we feel like; but it does mean that anyone throwing around terms like \u201cunelectable\u201d is uninformed at best, and at worst, an outright charlatan. If predictions of electability in the UK actually held even as much water as a sieve, Ed Miliband would be Prime Minister and you\u2019d never even have heard of Jeremy Corbyn. Perhaps, in time, opinion polling in the UK may elevate itself back to a position of trust, but for now, organisations haughtily proclaiming the likely outcomes of Corbyn\u2019s leadership (or anything else, for that matter) based upon hastily-conducted polls are to be treated with no more respect or gravity than tin-pot prophets, mystic oracles, and grannies with a knack for interpreting tea-leaves.<\/p>\n Coming back to the Downs model, then; the reason some people think Corbyn is unelectable is because the Downs model predicts that in a two-party system, both parties will veer towards a centrist position and their policies will become increasingly similar. This is based on an assumption that two-party systems emerge in nations where the electorate\u2019s political preferences fall roughly on a bell-curve, so that the country is broadly politically homogenous and there\u2019s a big swell of voters in the centre of the graph, for whose votes both parties compete. Supporters of this model would point to New Labour\u2019s abandonment of various Old Labour principles (e.g. Clause IV, its commitment to socialism) and the Conservatives\u2019 move away from core tenets of social conservatism (e.g. dropping support for the homophobic Section 28 and instead supporting equal marriage) as evidence for this process in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n The Downs model, however, is a massive simplification – Downs himself acknowledged that the two-party system he described was an ideal, and that it would never be stable in a country which was not extremely homogenous in political preferences. That\u2019s clearly the case in the UK; the share of the vote enjoyed by the two main parties has fallen steadily in recent decades, and parties such as the Greens, UKIP and the Liberal Democrats (though the latter has been laid low, at least temporarily, by their unpopular participation in coalition government) have seen their vote share rise, even if gains of actual seats have been held back by the archaic First Past the Post electoral system. Turnout in general elections is also fairly disappointing; a third of registered voters don\u2019t bother to cast a vote, implying either apathy or a sense of being poorly represented by the candidates on offer, or most likely, a bit of both. The overall picture is of precisely the lack<\/i> of homogeneity that Downs predicted would cause instability in the two-party model; so boldly basing the claim of Corbyn\u2019s unelectability upon an assumption of a stable two-party system is foolish at best.<\/p>\n Besides; are we truly expected to accept that Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s economic ideas, which are broadly centre-left and would not raise eyebrows in any developed social democracy, are a radical departure from the British political norm, while simultaneously accepting that the present Conservative government\u2019s policies are just business as usual? Those policies include the privatisation of the National Health Service and of major parts of the police, military and education systems, relentless attacks on disability benefit and in-work benefits for low income earners, and the marketisation of third-level education such that higher-ranked universities may charge significantly higher fees to students, none of which seem remotely in line with the post-war political consensus of the UK. Shorn of the millstone around their necks that the Liberal Democrats became in the last parliament, the Conservatives have lurched sharply to the right. In fact, based on a comparison to the centreline of British economic policy in the post-war era, Corbyn\u2019s policies are no more radical, \u201cloopy\u201d, or \u201ccrazy\u201d than those currently pursued by the Conservatives; if anything, they are more centrist.<\/p>\n So Labour goes left; the Conservatives go right. One might equally shout \u201cunelectable\u201d at either one of those parties, for all the valid data we have to go upon. In truth, though, the question of electability is neither here nor there, because there isn\u2019t going to be an election until 2020. Rather, the question that\u2019s playing across the minds of more tactical thinkers in Westminster, I suspect, has everything to do with another political concept – the Overton Window<\/a>. This is a political communications theory which essentially says that the general public, as a consequence of public and media discourse, develops a \u201cwindow of acceptabilty\u201d; any idea or policy which falls outside this window is crazy, insane and dangerous. Crucially, this window moves<\/i>; people change their minds, often surprisingly rapidly. Supporting equal marriage in the USA would have been outside the Overton Window a decade ago; today it\u2019s firmly in the middle. That doesn\u2019t mean everyone agrees with it, but nobody in the mainstream of politics will brand you a radical, insane threat to the nation for supporting it any more.<\/p>\n The triumph of the Tories since the financial crisis of 2008 has been in hauling the Overton Window of UK politics firmly to the right. Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have been complicit in this; both parties essentially supported, or did not challenge, Conservative narratives about overspending prior to 2008 being somehow responsible for the financial crisis, about immigration being a \u201cproblem\u201d, about people on benefits being \u201cscroungers\u201d (an amazingly successful and utterly depressing neo-liberal coinage), and so on. Even with the somewhat left-liberal Ed Miliband in charge, Labour seemed to think that its best chance at returning to government was to align itself broadly with Conservative policy. This caused two problems; firstly, as George Monbiot would have it, many voters seemingly reasoned \u201cwhy vote for the echo when you can vote for the shout?\u201d; secondly, it meant there was no pressure on the Overton Window, which rapidly slid rightwards, supported by the majority of the British news media, which is largely owned and controlled by offshore billionaires with a clear vested interest in right-wing economic policy.<\/p>\n For Corbyn to bring Labour left as the Tories continue to swing right creates, for the first time this millenium, a genuine battle over the direction of the Overton Window. The only way to move that window, after all, is to get out and pull<\/i>; only by proposing, supporting and defending policies in the \u201cloony\u201d space at the edges do you haul the window of political acceptability into your court. Corbyn won\u2019t face election for nearly five years; he has at least three years to drag Britain\u2019s perception of what is acceptable, sane policy back onto ground that is more comfortable for Labour. In the process he will, I hope, ignite genuine debate and give the electorate some sense that there is a genuine choice emerging in British politics. Where we go from there is anyone\u2019s guess; but until we see the results of that process (which will be messy, and bloody, and will get very, very nasty along the way), anything we say about 2020 really is nothing more than a guess. \u201cUnelectable\u201d? Come back and talk about that when there\u2019s an actual election on the way. Until then, Corbyn\u2019s job isn\u2019t to win an election; it\u2019s to change the landscape of British politics so that future elections have any hope of being won from the left again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jeremy Corbyn is the new leader of the Labour party. He was elected in the first round of the STV-style race by a thumping margin over his three rivals, each of them a New Labour type of some flavour or another, none of whom ever really threatened his lead. At the outset of the campaign …<\/p>\n