Anatomy of a Campaign – Jacobin magazine

The leadership campaign, especially the first one, and the general election campaign weve just had, are expressions of the same phenomenon but there are distinct features of each. I think there was a tendency among political commentators to regard what happened in 2015 in the Labour Party as if it was a political nervous breakdown, as if everybody in the Labour Party had lost their minds, or it was a takeover of the party by entryists.

There was no evidence for a takeover, because there werent enough people who came into the Labour Party to outnumber existing members anyway, but the first one persisted. There was this sense that there may be an anti-austerity movement and an antiwar movement that animated people on the left, but this is restricted to a tiny group of people. I remember seeing Julia Hartley-Brewer on Sky News saying everybody who would vote for Jeremy Corbyn was already a member of the Labour Party, this is when we had about five hundred thousand people in the Labour Party.

The general election has completely destroyed that idea. Political analysts, right up even to professors, looked at the Labour Party as if it was some kind of controlled experiment, apart from society, a closed organization in which phenomena can take place where theres no read across. In actual fact, the Labour Party is part of society, predominantly not well-off people, but those who may be in education, or working in the public sector, or who are experiencing pay restraint in the private sector or who are in trouble with housing.

The issues which animated Jeremy Corbyns campaigns, both the general election and the leadership elections, were real ones that affected people in the Labour Party and continue to affect people who arent in the Labour Party. This is actually a generalized phenomenon, millions of people feel the pressures that propelled Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party.

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Anatomy of a Campaign - Jacobin magazine