There have always been two versions of Corbynism: what I’d call ‘actually existing Corbynism’, and a sort of cartoon Corbynism that exists mainly in the minds of its political opponents.
You’ll be familiar with cartoon Corbynism, even if you don’t know it, because it has dominated media discussion of the Labour party for the last five years. They’re top-down state socialists; they just want to nationalise everything; they’re going to take us back to the 1970s (or maybe the 1940s).
Theresa May set the tone in the 2017 election campaign, responding to the leaked Labour manifesto by accusing it of harking “back to the disastrous socialist policies of the 1970s”. But it wasn’t just Tories that peddled this line: many Labour politicians privately and not-so-privately did the same. As it turned out, the electorate didn’t seem to agree, with the manifesto leak later seen as the turning point of a campaign that deprived May of her majority. This inconvenient fact silenced Corbyn’s internal critics for a while, until they found new sticks with which to beat him. Now Labour has finally suffered the resounding defeat that 2017 so unhelpfully failed to produce, cartoon Corbynism is enjoying a comeback.
