Let's be honest, it was basically a cult of personality, bizarrely around a man that doesn't have much. A blank canvas to project onto.
I agree it mobilised a lot of idealistic, utopian young people, students and middle-class rebels, and political engagement is a good thing, but it also regurgitated a significant amount of the clichés, naivety and errors that Labour and the Left made during the 80s (partially because, behind the youth really lay the dead hand of many of those disenfranchised old souls).
As in the 80s, it all went tits up because the far Left has some bizarre beliefs and contradictions and prejudices that look pretty rank once you get them into the light (they never seem to realise this as they're forever convinced they're the good guys), and eventually render them... unelectable.
I know you think this is still excuse-making, but I promise you that this is coming from a place of sincere concern about substance versus bullshit in politics. It's not a tribal position - this impacts the right just as much, even if the specific terminology isn't always the same.
"Electability" means nothing because it isn't actually about elections. It's about
predicting elections - or, more accurately, conjuring a self-fulfilling prophecy.
To use your example as an illustration: You cannot point to "mistakes the left made in the 80s" as if those things happened in a vacuum. What "mistakes"? Who defined them as mistakes? You couldn't open a newspaper in the 80s without some new reports on "the Loony Left" and their wacky ideas, but obviously "the left" was never a unified thing. You can see the same tactics being tried out now with the "political wing of Just Stop Oil" nonsense - everybody on the left being rolled together, so that the more extreme activists can be used to cast aspersions on mainstream politicians. In the 80s, "the Loony Left" was said to include stuff like...
- Campaigning against apartheid
- Anti-racism campaigns
- Investment in cultural institutions
- Social housing subsidies
- LGBT rights campaigns
- Union solidarity campaigns
- Soviet Union "exchanges"
- Paedophile rights campaigns
- Crank antisemitism
- Bombing animal testing labs
It's a complete jumble of stuff, all rolled together into one neat label - and it worked extremely well. Don't have to go over how tilted rightwards the media is in the UK. But I think it's important to note that the first deployments of "Loony Left" as an attack were directed at
elected Labour politicians in local authorities, and especially the GLC under Ken Livingstone. The Tories hated that that wing of the left wasn't just interested in winning elections, but kept winning - so they abolished the GLC. At the same time, with a straight face, they kept banging on about how the "Loony Left" wasn't interested in winning elections, was just a bunch of grotty hippies wanting to expropriate the nukes to the Soviet Union, move a black man in next door to your gran, etc etc.
Left politicians consistently get hit with this. Have done for decades. Doesn't matter that they keep running in elections - they have no interest in being elected. Doesn't matter that they do, sometimes, win elections too - they're "unelectable". It's not about what they actually say or do, because what's more important is casting them as illegitimate within the confines of the democratic system.
Instead of focusing on elections in isolation, we can see that so much of what that elected Loony Left - and activist groups too for that matter - were trying to do in the 80s was either morally just, actually popular, or simply not that radical. That's not to cast them as saints who we must all bow down and worship, but rather to point out that there was a complete disconnect between what "the left" as a big lump was being portrayed as within the media and by its political opponents, and the massive divergences within that same group in political beliefs, policy ideas, campaigns, etc. (I mean c'mon, if there's one thing the left loves above anything else, it's a schism.)
That's how "electability" as a concept works for those in power who deploy it:
- It maintains a strict border around what is and isn't allowed in politics, keeping debate within bounds that advantage them
- It maintains the idea that even
trying to change the terms of political debate outside of Westminster/the establishment media is illegitimate
- It disregards any attempts to effect political change outside of politics as meaningless (which, as noted with the Farage example, is just incredibly ahistorical; elected politicians passing new laws, on left or right, is usually the
end of the process of change, not the beginning)
And I do want to emphasise, again, that this isn't about defending Corbyn for his mistakes - or even the parts of the left that I do consider myself aligned with for theirs (including, yes, way too much accommodation of forms of AS) - but rather about how so much of politics today involves people with power clamping down on grassroots movements for change. I honestly think all of this applies just as much to euroscepticism on the right; it was a movement led by a small group of wealthy Tory and Tory-aligned elites, but there was also a real on-the-ground social dissatisfaction which they tapped into. You can point to charismatic leaders like Farage and Johnson and blame them, but they were lightning rods as much as weathervanes.
You might think that sounds OK by you - and this final point
is a bit tribal to an extent - but I think you're also doing yourself a disservice in not understanding why people like Corbyn so much, just as much as if you just handwaved away people like Farage or Johnson as "not having much". Disagreeing with liking them is perfectly fine and it would be an incredibly shit world if politicians really could expect and demand mass loyalty and love. But if you don't try to understand what it is that draws people towards a politician, what gives them their power, you're undermining your own ability to oppose them. Corbyn had a decades-long history of pointing at stuff in British politics, going "don't do that, it'll make things worse," and turning out right. Easy to do from the backbenches, of course, but over 30+ years a
lot of people had been repeatedly labelled crazy, loony - even unelectable - because they wanted the UK to look more like France or Germany or Sweden than the US, and the system finally gave us someone to act as an outlet for that pent-up pressure. If you disregard it all as cranks yearning to thrown Jews into camps then you're misunderstanding it just as badly as someone thinking Brexit happened because of a bunch of swivel-eyed, racist loons. Those people exist, but there were never hundreds of thousands of them joining the Labour party in 2015.
