1. Jeremy Corbyn's best
hope is to be Jeremy Corbyn
Yes, those on the right
of the party are still pissed off that he won and will leap on him
with glee every time he fails to sing the national anthem, or talks
about nuclear weapons, or wears trousers that don't match his jacket.
So be it.
Jeremy Corbyn's USP is that he isn't part of the political
mainstream, the middle-ground consensus.
Can he win an election from
the left? Almost certainly not. I thought he was a terrible choice for the party and still do. But trying to force him into adopting
a few tokenistic centrist policies, or spending a fortune on spin
doctors to teach him how to walk and talk and dress, will just make him look inauthentic and weak. It would imply
the very thing that made him attractive – his difference, his
idealism – is something he would compromise for a sniff of power.
His only chance is if Britain really has changed as much as the
Labour party. I doubt that very much; but Jeremy Corbyn being Jeremy
Corbyn might at least change the way a few people think about
politics and politicians, stir some passions, frame some important
debates. That matters.
2. Like it or not, David Cameron is a
centrist at heart
It is frankly undeniable that David
Cameron has overseen significant changes in the Conservative party.
Today he got a standing ovation with a passionate plea for religious
tolerance and gender pay-equality. That simply wouldn't have happened
in the pre-Cameron era.
It's easy to forget he won the leadership
election with a positive, eco-friendly, modernising message. It's easy to
believe that lurking behind that message, always, was a true-blue
Thatcherite heart.
And yet, however strategically sensible it might
have been for him to pitch for the centre ground today, he didn't
have to. He has a majority. He is planning to stand down. He
can do what he wants for the next four years.
What he wants to do, I
suspect, is define his legacy. And he wants that legacy to be as a
leader of Britain, not a leader of the Conservatives.
3. Ed Miliband was a
disaster for Labour
Put simply, the party has learned the wrong
lessons from his defeat.
Ed Miliband didn't lose because of the
media. He didn't lose because he was too left wing, or too right
wing. And he didn't lose because he wasn't 'authentic'.
In fact, he
was: authentically Ed Miliband. A well-meaning, nice-enough, slightly
geeky, Islington socialist. A man who had never lived, and didn't
understand, the lives of the very 'hard-working families' he talked
about so much.
He never really spoke about schools and education. He
didn't recognise how much people might want to own their own homes.
Instead he focused on the extremes: the very poor and the very rich.
While plenty of people trying to raise a family on the median wage
(or just below) might think the 'bedroom tax' led to some unfair
outcomes, or that the very rich should contribute more in tax, these
really aren't their main concerns.
That doesn't make them awful
people. Ed Miliband had no intuitive understanding of those concerns.
So they didn't vote for him.
4. Politics is getting
more divisive
Win or lose, Jeremy
Corbyn has already achieved one thing: he has stirred and emboldened
those people on the left who might have thought 'mainstream' politics
deserted them during the Blair years.
The tens of thousands
who marched through Manchester this weekend did so in the belief, the
knowledge, that through the new Labour leadership they are now part
of the debate. Or rather, that their voice will now be heard. Whether
they are interested in listening is another matter.
Either way, the
ranks of the 'noisy disenchanted' will swell; anger will drive more
of the discourse; and it is hard to predict quite how that will
end. It's very easy for older hacks to claim that this is simply the
1980s all over again. But a glance over the border to Scotland should
show just how quickly politics can change in
remarkable ways.
5. The Liberal Democrats
are in serious trouble
The Liberal Democrat
conference seemed to pass by almost unremarked. You'd think Labour
vacating the central ground would present them with a real
opportunity. But no one appears to be talking about the Lib Dems.
That's bad. At least former Lib Dem voters felt something
about Nick Clegg, even if it was anger. Now it seems like a lot of
people don't feel anything about the Lib Dems at all.
Tim Farron is
going to have to work extremely hard simply to get a hearing. Cameron pitching for the centre ground will make things even worse.
It's
actually quite sad, in a way, to see a party which worked so hard to
get a footing – particularly in local government – have to
essentially start again from scratch.
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