Touchy-feely

My last few posts have been about the technical and professional political arguments against Corbyn, for want of a better way of phrasing it. These have either been attempts at rebuttal, or setting out an alternative view of issues around electability, and so forth.

But, of course, politics isn't really about the technical or professional side - they are just tools to be used. After all, while there may be a few thousand professional politicians in the country, a general election is about asking the millions of people who don't live in that world to cast a vote.

And that is what I'd like to address in this post. It is policy light - I've already posted about the main policy reason I voted for Corbyn - and instead looks at the softer side, the image, perception, and, for want of a better term, the mood music around Corbyn throughout this campaign.

Let's get the obvious bit out of the way: hope. Corbyn's campaign has been about hope. In the early days, it was the unrealistic hope of the Labour left, volunteering for the campaign while everyone was writing Jeremy off, not really believing ourselves that we would achieve anything more than a mild ripple in the contest.

But then something curious happened - the gentle patronising of the other candidates didn't work. Usually, that would crush the hope in all but the die-hards, but instead other people started to listen. The mocking reports of Corbyn's throwback policies, like progressive taxation, and abolishing tuition fees, weren't doing what was expected - people were actually starting to agree with them, instead of calling them naive. (OK, OK, sometimes they did both, but they didn't give up straight away.)

Corbyn expressed the idea that we could build a better society, together. While the other candidates also tried to say this, they were too technocratic, hedged their remarks, demanded we accept small steps, tiny victories. They were facing someone calling for decent homes, better jobs, fairer taxes, an end to cuts. Simple themes, touching the concerns of many who didn't feel they were benefiting from economic recovery, but that Labour hadn't been offering them a better alternative to the Conservatives.

(Favourite snippet from IPPR research on the election? Of those who felt they had not, and would not, benefit from economic recovery, less than half voted Labour. "Rather than a failure to win over the support of relatively affluent, more 'aspirational' middle-class voters, the Achilles' heel of Labour's campaign appears to have been a failure to convince those who were sceptical about the Conservatives' economic record that Labour offered an attractive alternative." - John 'Exit Poll' Curtice.)

We all hope for a good job, and a decent home. But what I think the other candidates, and the PLP as a group, failed to grasp is how out of reach those things have come to seem for very many people - not just young people, but people my age. Anecdotally, the majority of my friends do not feel secure in their jobs. I know people who work at places that seem to go through a reorganisation every year - and make sure their staff know everyone's position is on the line. Owning a home feels out of reach for very many, certainly without support from parents, and buying with a partner. Instead, they live with family, or in precarious rented accommodation, while working at jobs that feel like they could disappear tomorrow.

Corbyn spoke to this group. He argued against zero-hour contracts. He argued for a massive house-building programme. He argued for fairness and justice at work for all. He argued for a world where money wasn't the winning argument, and lack of it wasn't a ticket to failure.

Yes, he inspired hope. But I think he has also inspired a new awareness, a more open-minded viewing of society. He has made it possible for a lot of people to hear, for the first time, someone arguing that the world doesn't have to be like this, that the structure of society isn't immutable, but can be changed.

And Corbyn has had an effect I think we won't fully appreciate until later. He has been attacked pretty relentlessly, once it became clear he wasn't failing as scripted. Newspapers on the right and the left have attacked him for being a dinosaur, for being unrealistic, for being a disaster for the Labour party. Members of the Labour establishment have denounced him. The BBC has run a hatchet job on him.

But he's still been popular. As John Harris put it in one of his videos from a Corbyn event, the interesting thing was that the room was packed with people who, despite all the establishment (for want of a better term) attacks on him, had still turned up. It was packed with people who weren't doing what they were told.

The usual tools to limit the debate, to decide on the acceptable boundaries of thought, aren't working at the moment. If this lack of faith in the main media vehicles continues, we could be set for interesting times. Will it continue outside of the, uh, 'excitement' of a leadership election? I really don't know. But it will be interesting to find out.

Finally, he's been explicit about something I think more politicians needs to be: morality. He has argued, for example, that for a country as rich as ours to have people reliant on food banks is immoral. Too often this kind of argument gets bogged down in numbers, and costs, and equivocations. Sometimes, however, things are just wrong.

That means you have to work against them. Yes, that means donating to food banks, but it doesn't mean claiming the growth in their numbers is a good thing. It means working not only to relieve the symptoms of hunger, but to root out the causes.

Look, I get that not everyone is going to agree with my moral judgement. I get that others could make strong moral arguments for the other side. That's fine - but we need to have that argument. Instead we let people get away with shrugging their shoulders at the sad inevitability of people starving in Britain - but it isn't inevitable. It is the result of choices people have made, and we need to start making people justify them. Politics is, amongst other things, a moral argument, but we often seem scared of framing it in those terms.

So. Hope, awareness, (very civil) disobedience, and morality. Those are the effects I think Corbyn brought to this campaign, and I think we're better for it, regardless of the final result tomorr... uh, later today.

Yeah, I'm kind of nervous about it. I'm going to go and try to get some sleep.