The horror, the horror. Democracy - that quaint idea of the people actually deciding who leads us, as against having to choose between pre-selected establishment candidates - has broken out in the Labour Party. The Blairites and others who see in Jeremy Corbyn everything they hate about their own party's traditions - honesty, socialism, commitment to principles - must be truly cursing Ed Miliband now for introducing a new democratic system for electing the leader. In the 1990s, the Parliamentary Labour party had half the votes on the leadership of the party. It was a way of making sure grassroots members didn't get above themselves and start thinking it was their party. God and Tony Blair forbid!
At some point, the leader election system was changed again, with a third of votes going to members, a third to affiliated unions, and a third to Labour MPs. That system put Ed Miliband in charge over his brother, whose Blairite record made him a dead duck for the unions.
And now, thanks to Ed, its just one member, one supporter, one union affiliate, one vote. Oh glorious democracy. Getting Corbyn on the ballot was a way of showing how fair minded Labour MPs were in the wake of the shocking defeat in May. But very few ever expected there to be an insurgency of the kind we are now seeing.
They bought into the Tory media line that Miliband lost for being too left wing. What is it about Labour politicians that they believe everything they read in the Sun, Telegraph and Mail? It's as if they lack the capacity for independent thought. They all trot out the same line - the Tories won and Labour lost because we don't 'get' popular right wing sentiments on immigration, welfare, tax etc. Yes, many people do worry about these things, but if you go and ask someone on the doorstep what they feel about these issues, some of them might repeat what they have read in the papers. Gypsies with big families are given five bedroom houses. People enjoying a life of ease on welfare. God forbid that you should challenge the distortions and lies that appear in the papers and point out some other salient facts - the billions in subsidies that go to landlords and businesses to subsidise high rents and low wages. No, no - that would be to suggest you could change these inequities and build a fairer country No, that would be a dangerous raising of expectations. Just keep it vague and aspirational and hope people vote for you out of desperation - maybe stick it on a stone plaque with apple pie promises of sunshine and warm feelings. This then becomes Labour policy.
Then along comes Jeremy Corbyn, squeezed onto the ballot for Labour leader and now leading the pack. I've known Jeremy for years as a peace and solidarity campaigner whose commitment is second to none - he has supported a lot of unfashionable causes, from Diego Garcia, to Palestine, CND, to Colombian trade unionists and the Kurds. Those who sneer should ask themselves what it is about political commitment they find so off-putting.
Corbyn is straight talking and is not burdened with the kind of inflated ego that has been the downfall of other left leaders in the recent past - abrasive personalities who, while charismatic, too often can't live up to the principles they espouse.
Kendal and Blair and all their right-wing media acolytes warn that we might be moving back to the 80s. They seem to be unaware that when the country voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, it was looking for an alternative to the right-wing Thatcherism that had governed the country and raised levels of inequality and poverty in the 80s and 90s. They did not actually vote for Blairism - they voted Labour. A landslide in 97 was almost inevitable. But even more important than this, 2020 is 23 years after 1997. The country has been ruled by a neoliberal regime - with a very short interregnum of Gordon Brown - since 1979. Perhaps only a radical candidate committed to real social change can challenge and bring to a halt this juggernaut that keeps coming back stronger like a zombie we thought we had killed.
Remember 1990 and the end of Thatcher. After that we got Major and the closure of the mines and the rail privatisations. With Blair we got Public Private Partnerships, Iraq, and ever greater security surveillance, plus the micromanagement and farming out of public services.
Neoliberalism comes in different guises, with different faces - but each time the electorate is fooled that it has voted for change, the continuity candidate wins. Even Brown, confronted with the biggest crisis in capitalism in 80 years, bailed out the banks with our money and asked for nothing in return - no radical reform of a financial sector that had become a blood sucking beast on the backs of ordinary people.
Blair reorganised Labour's democratic system so that members no longer had any real say over policy. Miliband began to change that.
So yes, people are desperate for something different. Janus-faced candidates like Burnham and Cooper - who declare love for big business or Israel whenever someone says jump and can't give a straight answer to a question - are not going to do it.
This is why Corbyn has caught the moment, and why Labour's political establishment - and the right-wing and liberal media including the Guardian - are in shock and don't know what's hit them.
Can Corbyn win in 2020? Who knows? And who knows what catastrophes Osborne will have inflicted upon the nation by then. Anything is possible - except the sudden discovery of conviction and principles coming from any of the other three candidates.
And as for the Labour right, the slick-faced elitists like Tristrum Hunt and Chukka Ummuna, they have shamefully exposed their contempt for democracy. After 20 years of managed control of the party in the name of staying rigidly to centrist politics that kill all enthusiasm, they have revealed the very reason millions in Scotland and England no longer want their kind of politics.
There is every chance that if Corbyn wins, they will split the party as happened in 1981 with the Social Democrats. That didn't work out well. However, as European politics has shown, new popular left movements can eclipse traditional social democracy - or at least give it a run for its money. See Spain, Greece, Italy, Holland. Britain needs a left-wing alternative to Ukip and the SNP in Scotland. This could be the beginning of something truly exciting.
