Southend West by election win for conservatives in seat of slain mp

This article was originally published in August of 2015.

Jeremy Corbyn, on current polling, is on course to win Labour’s leadership campaign. The latest polling has him 32% ahead of his rivals. This is staggering stuff. But something more than just a new wave protest movement is rumbling on behind all of this. There are several factors behind this – ranging from a refreshing authenticity, an unspun set of messages, ideas and a candidate that is actually willing to come up with a set of ideas.

This is not the politics of simple protest. A powerful grassroots movement is rising behind Corbyn – one in which the chattering classes, Guardianistas, MPs and political hacks fail to comprehend. They have shown a collective failure to understand the shifting sands created by a massive people-led surge towards Corbyn. Labour of all parties should understand this. They previously failed to understand the zeitgeist in Scotland, and it cost them their credibility and most of their MPs. Political tectonic shifts should be observed and acted upon instead of being ignored before it is too late.

Corbyn Labour Leader
The current Blairite failure to grasp a people-led movement against a now discredited system of politics, endlessly recycled by Britain’s political class and media is quite astonishing. Elect Corbyn now, they howl at increasing volume, and Labour can kiss goodbye to power for a generation or more. Really? This is the politics of fear & loathing. It is politics of simplicity borne out of complete fear that events are now pushing away their previously vice-like-grip of being in control of the situation.

The Westminster bubble and mainstream media have been proved wrong about Corbyn’s candidacy. Initially it was a patronising “dear old Jezza, he is going nowhere, but put him up as a token left-wing candidate and we all know he will lose”. Now he has surged ahead, the same patronising voices have turned into quite nasty vicious scaremongers. These people are threatened by what Corbyn stands for. Their own power base is under siege. They are threatened by his threat to their own status quo and his ability to mobilise huge support. All they have left, is the stench of their own bullshit. They only thing left inside of their own vision of the future is negativity – Their last message standing is that Corbyn would be a “disaster” and “he cannot win an election.”

Corbyn Labour Party
Perhaps they should look at themselves and give themselves a badly needed moment of introspection. Perhaps Blairites might just come to the harsh moment of epiphany that their own lack of ideas, busted flush power grabs and vacuous ideology has turned people off and therefore, this complete contempt for what they stand for has pushed people towards Jeremy Corbyn.

I would also argue that the theory in which Corbyn would be an election disaster is fundamentally wrong. We are not living in the imperial phase of Blair from 1997-2002. The world is a very different place in 2015. It is the Blairites who are the dinosaurs not Corbyn. As such, It’s the Labour left, not the right, that can potentially show a path to power.

It’s about tapping into a potential new mood. It is about strategy. It is the strategy of having core principles, then communicating those principles, then getting people to understand and agree with those principles that can eventually lead to power. It is about communicating new ideas that might just allow a penny drop moment across the UK. What Blairites do not get is that their model is now a busted flush of a pursuit for power without any core principles. Miliband lost, not because he “lurched to the left”, Miliband lost for a variety of other reasons – one of which was because people didn’t know what he stood for, and he and Labour didn’t provide effective opposition or a true alternative vision to the Tories.