With only ten days to go until the new Labour leader is announced, left-winger Jeremy Corbyn continues to hold a seemingly unassailable lead in the polls. This is the candidate who only managed to get into the race at the very last minute, by ‘borrowing’ nominations from fellow MPs who wanted to broaden the debate during the selection process. Many of these MPs have publicly backed one of the other candidates – Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper – since lending their nomination to Corbyn, and will surely be red faced of all if the polls are correct, and Corbyn is announced leader on the September 12th.
If Corbyn does prevail, one person he should thank is previous leader Ed Miliband. It was his change to the rules of how the Labour party elects it’s leader that is making a Corbyn victory a real possibility. In the previous system, the voting was split evenly between three different groups: Labour MPs/MEPs, Labour Party members, and affiliated members. Each of these three groups contributed 33.33% of the vote, which meant that the vote of one MP or MEP was worth the same as 477 party members, or 794 affiliated members. This gave significantly more power in the choice of leader to the MPs and MEPs than regular supporters, which of course produced a more establishment based party leader. The new rules, introduced by Ed Miliband, give all members of the Labour party one vote – be that an MP, a member of the public, or someone signed up through their trade union – which are all counted equally. This change has reduced the power of the MPs to choose their next leader and made the choice more representative of party members as a whole. Without this change, Jeremy Corbyn would not have a chance of winning.
A number of so-called heavyweights from the New Labour era such as Peter Mandelson, Alan Johnson and both former Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, have all warned that a Jeremy Corbyn leadership would be disastrous for the party, taking it back to the 1980s. Tony Blair went as far to say that if your heart is with Corbyn, you should “get a transplant, because that’s just daft.” This negative rhetoric towards Jeremy Corbyn has been a feature of the leadership campaign, and the media have been quick to take him out of context to produce catchy headlines such as “Jeremy Corbyn calls death of Osama Bin Laden a ‘tragedy’” and “Jeremy Corbyn accused of inaction over paedophile scandal”. Corbyn has tried to stay above this type of negative campaigning and rather focus on explaining his policy positions and plans for the United Kingdom as a whole, which so far has proved to be successful.
If Jeremy Corbyn does become Labour leader in ten days time, one thing will be for certain: the party will be taken in a wholly different direction from the last twenty years and David Cameron will be facing an opposition he never thought he would be up against. For many people, a Corbyn win will mean the end of Labour as a credible and election winning party, but for others Jeremy Corbyn is the leader who will reinvigorate Labour, taking them back to the principles and values that the party was created to fight for.
