The task that remains

...the whole history of the Labour Party has been punctuated by verbal victories of the Labour Left which with some few exceptions, have had little impact on the Labour Party's conduct inside or outside the House of Commons, but which have always been of great importance in keeping up the hopes and the morale of the activists              
     Ralph Miliband - Parliamentary Socialism

Miliband was writing in 1961. Little that has happened since gives us cause to question his account of the Labour Left's victories being pyrrhic affairs. The dust has now settled since Jeremy Corbyn's triumph in the leadership election. It is time to ask the hard question: will the election of the most left-wing leader in the Party's history buck the trend of purely nominal high-points for the Left? Or will something of lasting value come out of it? What could that even be?

False hope is a subtle enemy, so let's start by coming down to earth. Things do not look good. The fundamentals haven't changed since May's election defeat: there is not an automatic mass audience out there for the ideas on which Jeremy won the leadership. It simply isn't the case that Labour voters will automatically flock back to the Party now it has a 'proper Labour' person in charge (of course, with a nod to the elder Miliband, we should insist that Corbyn isn't a proper Labour leader; he's much better than that). We need to win the battle of ideas, and that's a job of work. Still less will Corbyn solve Labour's Scottish problem: indeed, the saddening truth is that his attitude towards Scotland has been unionist business-as-usual, an approach which fails to understand either the scale of what happened north of the Border, or the reasons that it happened.

Winning the contest of ideas is not easily done with a substantial proportion of the PLP openly hostile to varying degrees towards Corbyn. Senior MPs are regularly briefing against him, and front-benchers are distancing themselves from policies like nuclear disarmament. The plan is clearly to replace Jeremy as leader before the 2020 general election: I think it's likely the knives will come out as early as next year. Meanwhile, CLPs remain largely in the hands of the right - Corbyn may have won the leadership, his opponents control the party. True, there are thousands of new members who joined to vote for him. But even assuming that their politics are uniformly of the left - a dangerous assumption, I think - they are in the main inexperienced in Labour politics, and their resolve to fight the often brutal, and more often dull, battles that will be a feature of Party life over the next few years is untested. Certainly the failure of Diane Abbott to win the London mayoral candidacy and of the left slate to get elected to the Conference Arrangements Committee shows that we can't simply assume that intra-Party politics will now shift left.

So, two questions. What those on the socialist left of Labour expect from the Corbyn leadership? And how do we go about getting it? Three bullet points in answer to each

• Jeremy for PM! It may be a dream, but it's good to dream, and even better to fight for our dreams. A government based around Corbyn's programme, whilst it would meet with determined resistance from day one, would have great potential to improve the lives of the majority of people in Britain, and to provide a fertile ground for socialism.
• Developing a movement and ideas. The surge of support for Jeremy is a potential new activist base, which could be the foundation of a left movement for the next generation. The established Left can, and should, both learn from it and feed in socialist ideas born through political experience.
• ...which interacts with struggles outside parliament I do not think capitalism can be overcome by parliamentary action alone (there is a danger, which we have to acknowledge, that Corbyn's victory could fuel this illusion). So it's vital that the Corbyn surge feeds back into struggles outside parliament, in workplaces and communities.

Those are the things I think we should aim for. How to get them?

• Get involved in the Party Whether old or new members, we all need to get active in our local Labour Party, support Left candidates in internal elections, and argue for the policies on which Jeremy won. If you're new to the Party, learn about how it works. Join a trade union if you're not a member: unions are crucial to Labour's life, and to the defence of your rights. Subscribe to Labour Briefing which carries, from a Left perspective, news about what's happening inside the Party and how to get involved. Whilst I have concerns about its seemingly top-down nature, I also think it's worth being involved in Momentum, and seeing how it develops.
• Political education The established Left within the Party has to get its act together quickly on this one. We can't lose the new support. In an open and non-patronising way, we urgently need to communicate the nuts and bolts of Labour Party politics as well as putting across our ideas about socialism.  
• Don't ignore extra-parliamentary action. The focus on the Labour Party can't be at the expense of action outside parliament. In particular, the government's attack on trade unions has to be met.

Let's get cracking.