Not so funny after all...

Remember #ToriesForCorbyn? A little bit of schadenfreude, we were told, the Tories enjoying the spectacle of a Labour Party leading themselves into the wilderness, disappearing off into the desolate lands of socialism. Apparently Tory entryists were going to sign up as Labour supporters, just so they could lumber us with a dead-weight as a leader.

It doesn't look like it is working out that way.

A new group of Tories have arrived, the unoriginally named #ToriesAgainstCorbyn - because they think a Labour Party led by Corbyn could be a threat to them.

Oh, they still argue there is almost no chance of Corbyn becoming Prime Minister, only to then go on and so how terrible it would be for the UK if any of a strange variety of circumstances meant he was (though, of course, every set of circumstances includes Corbyn winning a general election, which we are told is impossible...). And even if he doesn't become Prime Minister, they still argue it would be bad for the Tories. The guy who started it, Oliver Cooper, writes in The Telegraph:

In short, Labour being Labour, they’ll still have the same platform, no matter how bizarre their leader’s views. The only difference is Corbyn’s views will be more left-wing, so will shift the entire political debate to the left. Long-term, so long as Labour and the Conservatives remain the two major parties in the UK, the only way to make progress is to persuade Labour to accept our position. Our ideas don’t win just when our party does, but when the other party advocates our ideas, too.

The amazing thing about this is it directly attacks the implicit argument of the Anyone But Corbyn campaign, namely that Labour can only win from the centre ground, and that the centre ground is fixed. The Tories know it isn't - after all, they have been dragging the centre ground to the right for years, and, some would argue, so has New Labour. After all, the triangulation used by Labour over the past twenty years has sought to move the party to the existing centre ground, and force the Tories right. It's almost as if it worked too well...

Corbyn has already caused the two other main candidates to shift leftwards, even if it only amounts to a change of rhetoric. Burnham has started advocating noisily for increased taxes for his National Care Service, for graduate taxes, and for not being scared of the Tory press.

Political positions are relative. On the one hand, this can be depressing - the Labour Party, as the main leftwing party in the country, choosing to abstain on welfare cuts, for example. But on the other hand, it is inspiring - we can move the centre of debate leftwards.

Don't get me wrong, it won't be easy. But by presenting clear policies which people support, and explaining them in terms which challenge the current (for want of a better word) neo-liberal consensus, the Labour Party can begin to move the centre ground leftwards again.

Corbyn is already doing this - for example, a focus on investment in education, on the grounds of not only productivity and individual economic success, but because a well educated population is a common good, something we all benefit from. You can include public ownership of railways, Royal Mail, utilities - on the grounds that we all already subsidise them massively through our taxes, so why don't we get the benefits as well?

The arguments are there to be made. The centre ground is always mobile. We need to remember this - and realise that the Tories are worried about these ideas getting a wider airing than they have been.