Flickr/David Holt. Some rights reserved.
So, against all the odds, he did it. Jeremy Corbyn’s victory is already being claimed as an ‘insurgency’ on the scale of the SNP advance in Scotland, and driven by much the same popular discontent with austerity economics and ‘business as usual’ neo-liberal politics. The campaign’s success is being widely interpreted as representing a shift to the Left, not only in the labour movement but in the country, in the wake of the election defeat and also due to the fact that Corbyn was the only candidate not tainted by association with the New Labour regimes of Blair and Brown. But is our existing political geography with its Left, Right and Centre grounds adequate to locate the shifts that have occurred in our ideological landscape? Or is it the case that our received political maps no longer correspond to the new territories of affiliation that are emerging?
I have argued elsewhere that our political culture is characterised by a bi-polar structure of thought and feeling[i]; it oscillates between prophesies of doom and the new dawn, states of chronic depression and manic excitement, cenotaph and jubilee. This may be a subjective correlative of slump and boom economics but it is one which has its own momentum. Certainly, the response to Labour’s election defeat seems to have followed this pattern, from initial shock and disbelief, through an all too brief period of critical introspection and mourning for what had been lost, giving way to a leadership contest in which different wings of the party blamed each other for abandoning core values and then, finally, the moment of transcendence with an upsurge of political will-power affirming a new principle of hope embodied in its chosen leader.
