Shortly after the general election I posted about the need for a resurgence in the Left of British politics of a more socialist kind of Leftism. Those who have been following the news recently will no doubt be aware of the ongoing Labour party leadership contest, and the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn, by all accounts very much on the Leftmost side of things, as a strong contender; and he is of course more or less exactly the sort of person who might bring Labour back to the sort of genuine alternative that I was calling for.
Nearly everyone at all to the Right of the far Left thinks that he would be a disaster for the country as well as a disaster for Labour; his economic ideas certainly do go against the consensus of what is good for a country (obviously, from a socialist!). I am not sure that he would be a disaster for Labour; the press points out that with the loss of Scotland to the SNP a prospective Labour government must make huge inroads into Conservative southern regions. This is intended as an argument that Labour must shift back to the Centre, to try and repeat the electoral success of the Blair days. I think however that we should not forget that there are a great many old Labour voters who grew disenchanted with Blair for not being a genuine leftist, as well as other non-Labour leftists in the country - perhaps many of these voted for Miliband, or would vote for an even more leftist leader, but would not vote for a return of New Labour: in other words a shift to the Right could do Labour just as much damage as to the Left.
We may also be looking at the question of whether Labour can hope (or should attempt) to be "more Tory than the Tories". With the Conservatives having co-operated on liberal and centrist issues like gay marriage, and having adopted (kidnapped?) some Liberal Democrat policies such as taking people on the minimum wage out of tax (and the Liberal Democrats themselves, if they are not yet to be consigned to the history books, while obliterated in the House of Commons, seeming oddly optimistic of an eventual rebound), it is already crowded in the Centre. We may wonder if the Tories have not in fact won there, for the present, and that Labour can do just as well to try to win disenchanted leftist non-voters on its other extreme.
But if Labour could reclaim the centre-ground, is that in fact what this country needs? While a "Third-Way" Labour may seem in simplistic terms little different from a socially-centrist Conservatives, one could argue that the differences that do exist between the two are what are really important: Labour's more progressive attitudes on actively progressive policies on equality, for instance, and at least a rhetoric which draws attention to things like homelessness, hunger and cost of living.
I think that the Liberal Democrats could, possibly, still return to fill that role. To my mind, and it is of course only an opinion, and not a terribly well-informed one, Labour's more natural place is more to the Left, where it began, in real economic socialism; the position of progressive party with centrist economics seems more naturally to belong to the Lib Dems. I am envisioning, really, a return to the trilateral politics that seemed, briefly, to be emerging at the 2010 general election, when in terms of vote share the Liberal Democrats were climbing almost to a par with Labour and the Conservatives. If that had been maintained we might have begun to see a system where people got used to the idea of having two opposition parties - which on the face of it seems not so terribly unreasonable. So while I am far from sure I would ever like to risk Jeremy Corbyn running the country, from the perspective of democratic representation I do think he may be the right leader for Labour.
