Jeremy Corbyn has done it. Somehow, against the odds, he has been elected the new leader of the Labour party. And Tom Watson has also redeemed himself.
That means all sorts of things. Not the least of which is that the (few) opinion polls and the general reporting of the media was right in their supposition that he would win. Just a few months ago we were all reeling from the inaccuracy of the predictions of a general election, but this time they were spot on. The fewer the polls, the greater the accuracy? Not sure how that works.
I was listening to The Week in Westminster with Steve Richards on Radio 4 as the results were broadcast and once again heard Labour MPs acting as harbingers of doom on the future of the Labour party under a socialist labour. It wasn't just sexism and nylon that was bad in the 80s kids. The left was loony and even Kate Bush lied to me - Ken was not the man that we all needed.
Hang on though, Kate Bush was making brilliant records in the early 80s. Dire Straits were amazing. (Not cool, I admit, but still amazing,) So perhaps there could have been something good? I don't want to get too convoluted here ( although the Kate Bush references could carry on) but John Speller in particular on Radio 4 was promising a disastrous future and 18 years of Tory rule. I was around in the 80s, but many of these new voters were not and most of the people in power in the 80s are not still in power either. The phenomenal level of interest that the Labour leadership election has attracted was first signalled by the number of sympathy joiners to the Liberal Democrat Party in the immediate aftermath of the election. That shocked many people into taking an interest in politics that they hadn't before - perhaps even in a party that wanted electoral reform when they saw how unrepresentative the "first past the post" system could be.
In other words some of these people are new voters. In other words some of these people are not the type of people that John Speller believes are involved. He went so far as to suggest that they were not representative and perhaps even only represented a narrow section of London centric society. (Admittedly another hobby horse of mine, but in this case I am not sure he was right.) He claimed that the new voters in the Labour party were mostly in the south-east and that perhaps that meant that the usual Labour supporters in the North and the Midlands were consequently under- represented in the vote. If the vote had taken place as it did before Ed Milliband change the system in 2012, then Westminster Labour MPs would have had a greater say and he said that they carried the weight of the constituents who had voted for them.
While it is true that we isolate ourself in our own little social media bubbles; surrounding ourselves with like-minded people on our social networks, blocking any of our "stupid" acquaintances who inadvertently share a "Britain First" post, reinforcing our own ideologies because it is nicer to be proved right than wrong; that also means that we perceive ourselves to be equally entitled to a say in the way things happen. It isn't just "X factor" culture that encourages us to vote, it is the breakdown of the social barriers that allows us to believe that we are more important as we write blogs to share our views without an editor to tell us we are being libellous or simply talking rubbish and that we are as important as the celebrities and politicians (Tom Watson again) whose Twitter accounts we follow. We can see their real unmediated words. We expect a say. This makes the electoral system difficult at the moment and means that people noticed when UKIP - for which they had voted, didn't increase its share of seats.
I am Northern and living in the Midlands and I would not have a vote in the leadership election under the old system as my constituency MP is Conservative. I could have had a vote if I had wanted to register as an affiliate member of the Labour Party. There are many voters in Northamptonshire who voted for Labour but who are not represented by their current Conservative Constituency MPs because we do not have a system of PR. There are also many voters in Northamptonshire who were pretty sure that the Tories would get in in Northamptonshire again and chose not to vote for Labour because they were not left wing enough. If your protest vote isn't going to count it doesn't matter who you vote for. So I resent being told that the Labour party which should be my representative; as a working person from working class roots, from Liverpool, growing up in an industrial Lancashire mill town, needs to adapt itself to the electorate in order to win. Stop trying to poach votes from the Tories and start taking back the working people who think that UKIP are the new spokespeople for working people, from the Green party who seem to have taken some of their ideas from the Socialist Workers, from the Liberal Democrats who used to seem a bit apart from two party Punch and Judy Politics. And most importantly of all, do what Corbyn seems to have already done, take votes from the people who up until recently couldn't care less about politics and made sweeping statements about how it didn't matter. More people didn't vote for the Conservatives than voted for the Conservatives, and even more people didn't vote for anyone at all.
I don't know if this is a new dawn for politics in general, but it's nice to feel like we're in the middle of something exciting.
