Talking to people about the Labour leadership election, a recurrent theme can be summed up as follows: "I'd love to support Jeremy; he's a great guy and I agree with his ideas. But realistically Labour won't win with him in charge, and the most important thing is beating the Tories in 2020". The heart says Corbyn, the head says Kendall.
The thought here seems to be that 'the public' won't accept a Labour Party led from the left. Raymond Williams once observed that there are no such things as masses, only ways of viewing people as masses, and much the same could be said about publics. The public -- this seething undifferentiated mass of reaction -- only exists in the minds of commentators and second-rate sociologists. Utterly staid in its thinking it selects between election candidates like a cliched British tourist abroad choosing from a menu. Unmoved by the prospect of exotic dishes, it maintains a studied indifference between egg and chips and ham and chips. For this way of looking at things, Jeremy Corbyn is the tabbouleh of the leadership context. Activists are not part of the public, on this account, nor are the five million voters lost by Labour since 1997. For that matter, the entire Scottish nation is dubiously public. In fact, the public turns out to look very much like a Progress intern's stereotype of a swing voter in a southern English marginal. It's a rather deflating take on the British population.
Crucial to the head versus heart move is an image of the electorate as passive consumers of political programmes. They are not capable of being convinced, persuaded by argument, inspired by campaigns, or transformed by struggle. If 'the public' thinks x then the only response of a serious politician is to find ways of delivering x to the public. Electoral politics becomes a perpetual sales pitch, a transformation describable in two words: 'New Labour'. Of course, the customer is always right only within limits. To misquote a misquotation of Henry Ford, she can have any colour she likes as long as it's blue. Should she have the audacity to believe in the nationalisation of the railways, as a majority of the British electorate do, she should be kindly ignored and directed towards other political wares. The politics of appeal to 'the public' has always been in fact about the creation of the public, their desires and their perception of political posibilities, by a nexus of media and politicians. It is like a worked example in the theory of ideology.
In any case, it's not as though an alternative way of doing things weren't staring us all in the face; if only mainstream political geography didn't stop at Alnwick. The fact that the SNP won an election in Scotland on the basis of an anti-austerity ticket whilst refusing to join in the mainstream assault on migrants (supposedly a practically inevitable bowing to the 'legitimate concerns' of the public), cannot be explained by Scots being somehow magically more left-wing than the rest of the UK's population (even though some Scottish nationalists and the odd jaded English leftist seem to think this is the case). There is racism in Scotland just as there is England. It's just that a party decided to say something different, to challenge that racism. It didn't, it is fair to say, obviously suffer at the polls as a consequence. And - who knows - some of the public may have changed their minds as a result of exposure to an alternative narrative.
But what if the nay-sayers are right? What if a Corbyn-led Labour Party would be un-electable? I'm reminded here of some words of Tony Benn's,
In Labour Governments we did our best to make capitalism work in a civilised way. And we failed. It never can work. It will always exploit and oppress people.
Those who think that the programme of a Cooper, a Burnham, or -- heaven forbid -- a Kendall could ever be a sufficient balm for humanity's wound could remedy this by watching the news, or even by leaving their house occasionally. The homeless on our streets, to whom we have disgustingly become accustomed as though they were part of the scenery, as natural as the trees; the lives eeked out in poverty; the migrants dying in the sea; the creativity and talent sucked dry in jobs with no social purpose beyond the production of profit; the accelerating destruction of the environment -- these are not ills that can be set right by a little tinkering with the system here and there. The only strategy that stands a chance of addressing them -- let alone the context of international injustice and inequality within which they sit -- is a socialist and internationalist one. Jeremy Corbyn at least begins to understand this.
For that reason alone -- for the hard-nosed pragmatic reason that only Corbyn sees the world as it is and recognises the immensity of transformation we need -- Jeremy deserves your vote. He is, contrary to the received wisdom, the only realist amongst the line-up. Because this is about so much more than 2020. This is about the future, about hope, and about socialism. It is the politics of the heart and of the head.
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