After the announcement of Corbyn's astonishing victory, the ABC (Anyone But Corbyn) machine went into a collective meltdown. The Shadow Health Minister - now famously known as 'Jamie Who is he? Is he in our party?' - resigned one minute into Corbyn's victory speech. The rest of the naysayers engaged in a collective head scratch and just looked baffled by the whole affair.
But instead of sitting down and working out why Corbyn had galvanised a movement, they set about preparing the way for a leadership challenge.
The problem with this is a strategy is that the voters are watching. What the average voter sees is two things
They see the well paid political elite using their power to over turn an overwhelming democratic decision. This sends out a very dangerous message to voters and particularly to non voters. It tells people that no matter what they say, noone is listening.
The other thing they see is Labour MPs telling them that Labour is unelectable because they have abandoned the centre ground. The crux of their argument, you see, is that under Corbyn, the party has moved to the 'far left'. Essentially, that means "don't vote for us, vote for some other centre party"
It matters not a jot that Labour on the centre ground hasn't been particularly successful since the heady days of New Labour. Since 1997, our voters have disappeared like snow off a ditch. While Ed did go some way towards winning them back, there are a lot of demoralised, disillusioned non voters, Green voters and worryingly, UKIP voters out there. We lost council seats, EU seats, parliamentary seats but no one seemed to notice til Ed was in charge. He was expected to win, and win big. To some extent he did but not in the places where it mattered.
Those invisible and pretty much disenfranchised former Labour voters will eventually go somewhere. The evidence suggests that they're moving to the kippers. I personally find it hard to believe that the population has swung to bigotry overnight. It seems much more likely to me that UKIP talks about things that the other parties only mention in abstract terms. Bedroom tax (we waffled and prevaricate: kippers will get rid), WCA (we justified its existence: UKIP will get rid), housing (we will look into affordable housing: UKIP will reduce demand by getting rid of immigration and building houses). UKIPs responses are all wrong but they're resonating because no one else is even hearing the rage.
We can either ask the questions and start responding. Or we can stick our fingers in our ears and blame Corbyn when the shit hits the fan.
(04/02/2017)
