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Like any institution anywhere, the British Labour Party has a narrative of its own history that could be called the “official story,” or at least the orthodox view. The party lost power in 1979 due to poor economic management and overmighty unions; it reached a nadir because it turned to hard-left politics under Michael Foot, its leader from 1980 to 1983; and then endured a long march to the centre under the three leaders who followed him until, having ascended from the Slough of Despond to the Electable City, they returned to power in 1997.
So it is unsurprising that many people in Labour are concerned about the sudden popularity of Jeremy Corbyn, a left-winger of the old school, who was found to be leading in a July 21st poll by YouGov. It would be hard for any person with a sense of history to avoid comparisons between Foot and Corbyn, or to notice that many of his young supporters would have no memory of the long, dark tunnel Labour passed through in the 1980s. And many figures on the left have taken to condemning Corbyn’s supporters as unserious, uninterested in power or mere poseurs. Helen Lewis, writing in The New Statesman, equates their support with “virtue signalling” on social media – “showing off to your friends about how right on you are” – an egotistical form of “purity leftism” concerned with individual progressive cred and not with social change. Jonathan Freedland, in The Guardian, also analyzes the Corbyn phenomenon as one of individual self-expression, of voters “being true to yourself” rather than caring about electability like supporters of the more centrist Liz Kendall. “They are [supporting Corbyn] not because they believe the 66-year-old can win in 2020, but for the same reason people retweet images of same-sex wedding ceremonies”. Tony Blair, more pungently, put it thus: “If your heart’s with Jeremy Corbyn, get a heart transplant.”
