The first was the clear cut defeat in May’s general election, a defeat that might have been avoided or at least reduced with more forethought and planning, and dare one say, a little more humility and respect for the voters.

Too much was taken for granted. Not enough was done after the 2101 election, at grass roots level, to counter conservative propaganda designed to attach responsibility for the financial crash of 2008 and recession on the Labour party. In Scotland, on the other side, the party had become complacent after years of electoral success and failed to understand the inroads made into its support base by the Scottish Nationalist Party’s very effective street and media campaign. The result was the loss of 40 seats in Westminster which was a decisive factor. And the labour campaign was not helped by silent endorsement of the repeated strident Scottish flavoured calls from Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, to “throw David Cameron out of no.10 Downing Street”. This was inevitably exploited by appeals to English nationalism, always a lurking beast in the undergrowth of British politics.

The second battle resulted in the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Party with a massive mandate from Party members and registered supporters. This was the first election for the general secretary (and his deputy) under the new “one man ,one vote system” introduced by Milliband and which applied across the party instead of the previous union block vote impact. It was ironic that Corbyn only made it onto the list of candidates because some members of the Parliamentary Party thought the list should be more inclusive in order to widen the debate and managed to put the minimal needed support which was 15% of labour mps, some 35 out of 256 in total.

This has been a nasty shock for the Parliamentary Party for many of whom Corbyn is an unwelcome intrusion who rode in on the wave of mass grass roots and leftist support ranging from the idealist dreamers to hard left activists, in fact a massive left-wing anti establishment vote, be the establishment Conservative or Labour. They also now have a leader who in September accepted the post of Vice-President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a campaign that is not supported by the Party and which is no more likely to appeal to the wider public that it has in the past.

Corbyn” success in the leadership election – he gained 59.5% of the vote in a turn-out of 76.30% (about 400,000 voters) – was a remarkable phenomenon and owed much to his old style campaigning. The Parliamentary Labour Party backed his three rival candidates with 210 votes for them with 20 for Corbyn but he had the support of the two biggest unions, Unite (which covers a wide array of public and voluntary sectors including public services, manufacturing and transport ) and Unison (the biggest Trade Union with members from the public services and utilities) and also of a huge surge in new Party members who were able to take part in the election on the payment of £3 per head.

Corbyn’s own political roots lie largely in the heated atmosphere of mass rallies and street protests and his campaign was a return to the politics of the pre-modern media age, a targeted series of appearances in halls and streets across those parts of the country where support was at its greatest potential, especially among the young. It was an overwhelming success and he played to packed audiences who drank in his basic message that people were fed up with the injustice and inequality in Britain. And this halo of popular support together with his air of honesty and sincerity, almost naïve at times, served him well in TV debates with his rivals who seemed unable quite to shake off a veneer of Westminster verbal games and opportunism, the sort of thing that has left much of the British public suspicious of the integrity and wisdom of their leaders.

However, the emergence of times past has for the present left the Labour Party without a coherent set of embryo policies that might be put to the country later. In short Labour no longer exists as a force of public opinion and for the time being has fallen back on popular protest themes. Some of these such as the government’s weak presentation of its plans for tax credit cuts that affect the poorest in work are quite effective in the hands of Corbyn and will leave their mark in the electorate’s consciousness. Yet, in these rapidly changing times, the Party is currently failing to establish a source of orientation for the country as a whole and recent opinion polls seem to suggest it is viewed as incompetent even by some of its own supporters.

The subsequent disagreement between Corbyn and the majority of Labour MPs over military action in Syria which he opposes has exacerbated the situation. There is an urgent need for the party to set out at least a coherent intellectual basis for a set of policies that will in the longer term offer a credible alternative government. Given the present internal party strife this could be a lengthy process and the question now is whether in, say, two years time Corbyn will have been able to achieve enough to lead a party that can realistically challenge the Conservative recipe for government.

There is a significant gap in the UK version of democracy that might be exploited by anyone who can draw the “masses” out of their materialistic, well-fed torpor and point out clearly its failures and their possible impact on their and their children’s futures. For the time being it seems the UK public (but not necessarily the Scots) remains acquiescent in the country’s reputation for being the mother of parliaments. But it can hardly be called the “mother of democracy” and there are increasing signs that the treadbare nature of the system is slowly coming under fire.

­­­On the one hand there is an Upper House of Parliament, the House of Lords with some 820 unelected members and on the other in the House of Commons there is a Conservative governing Party which was elected with only around 25% of the total electorate while, of those who did vote, around 60% did not vote for it. This is a sufficient mandate under the current system of parliamentary democracy but it would be a reckless politician who believed that it offers a blanket approval for all and everything especially policies and projects ,eg high speed rail 2. That seem to have little immediate bearing on such black spots as the wide gap between rich and poor and the near impossibility for young people to purchase their own home.

The process of evolution will be slow; it is not in the political nature of a well protected off-shore island with many centuries of stable government often to seek fundamental change in its constitutional framework. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” has been the default setting and of course there are inevitably many vested interests and a great deal of inertia in play. It is still possible to trace the shadow of the form of governance imposed on England by William the Conqueror after 1066. The Conservative party is more or less (there were some hiccups en route) in direct line of descent from William the Conqueror’s barons, not in terms of large land holdings or DNA although some of both may persist, but in terms of private wealth and its inbuilt claim to social superiority derived from its former aristocratic roots. Hence it claims the right to be the natural ruling party and has the instinct to preserve this position by hook or by crook in extremis.

The Labour party with its long established roots in the trade union movement is equally “tribal”. One could say it represents the serfs and it remains marinated in class consciousness and smouldering anti-conservative emotions. In general, democracy in the UK, unlike say France or Italy, has not been built from the roots up but handed down, often reluctantly, by ruling classes obliged to cede ground. It is still the case that no law can come into force in the UK until the queen has given her blessing in medieval French. This may seem to be a quaint semi feudal custom but it rubs off on social and political consciousness as indeed does the existence of such features as the privy council the dealings of which are kept secret and presided over by the queen.

New members are required to kneel and kiss the Queen’s hand in true feudal style. It seems that Jeremy Corbyn who is a Republican by conviction refused to kneel but made some sort of token hand kissing. How long before a general feeling arises that this sort of thing is not appropriate to the citizens of a 21^st century democracy?

In fact there is a faint but clear parallel with the situation in Poland when the Communist Party retreated from sectors of public life allowing the Church and Solidarity to move in. The parallel cannot be pushed too far; the communist party was far more objectionable in the eyes of the polish people than is the UK’s “ruling class”. Yet there is in the UK, certainly in England, a space for a more grass roots driven socio/political agenda as a counter to the impact of unfettered wealth creation for the few, globalised business and finance. In theory at least the labour party would be the institutional focus for weaving together the various strands of this dissatisfaction and converting it into a political force.

Clearly a majority of the population while not necessarily disagreeing with what the present government does is not a surely reliable source of support and equally clearly there is a large chunk of the population that is either indifferent to politics or distrusts politicians and finds the present setup unacceptable. The Corbyn question then revolves around his and his supporters capacity to organise themselves and their ideas , move into and claim support in this gap while uniting the Party as a whole. As a marker of his intent Corbyn has said “I was elected on a clear mandate to oppose austerity and to set out an economic strategy based on investment in skills, jobs and infrastructure. Our economy must deliver security for all, not just riches for a few”.

To deliver this mandate will be a huge task and a race against time and existing party alliances and interests. Corbyn has made it clear that registered supporters and members will be given a greater say on policy as part of the “democratic revolution”. There is a proposal for online ballots for members on policy thus opening up decision making to hundreds of thousands of new members and supporters who have joined the party since may. The aim is to “focus everything on the interests, aspirations and needs of the middle and lower income voters”. It remains to be seen how online ballots will be viewed by the parliamentary party.

A key factor will be Corbyn’s ability to hold the party together while producing economic policies that will convince the public . To this end a new panel of economic advisers was announced in September which includes Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty. The latter has declared this “a brilliant opportunity for the labour party to construct a fresh and new political economy which will expose austerity for the failure it has been in the UK and Europe”. And there in a nutshell is the birth of Corbyn’s direct challenge to the conservative government’s present direction of economic travel.

Mounting this challenge will be a huge task and a race against time. It is also a contest between Corbyn’s notion of democracy from “the bottom up” and tolerance of different opinion as a basis for democratic renewal as opposed to policy being cast in concrete by various Party movers and shakers, picked up in Westminster and fed down to the masses via the media. In this case the “bottom” consists of a congeries of mass enthusiasm driven by the young and union support plus extreme leftist groups following their own agenda. This could initiate a time of intellectual renewal for the Party and politics generally but it also has the ingredients for internal strife the fall-out from which would be unpredictable.

At present the majority view among Corbyn’s supporters is that he is the solution to the Party’s woes while its MPs are part of the problem. They have not yet moved beyond the stage of seeing the battlefield as the Party rather than the country as a whole and the contest for the levers of power within is under way, control of committees, conference resolutions and other means of making their mark.

His supporters have set up Momentum, a nascent network of activists which is intended to be the follow-up to Corbyn’s leadership campaign, enthuse, exploit and organise grassroots supporters out of a sense of civic duty and social conscience. Not surprisingly there are those in the Party especially among MPs who question why this movement is needed when the Party as a whole is available. The answer for now is that the Party as a whole is not available, a situation highlighted vividly by the decision of its General Secretary to suspend Corbyn’s Policy Chief on the grounds that he allegedly encouraged people to vote for rivals in the general election. While MPs respect his mandate there is obvious concern that a deep gulf is being dug in the public mind between Labour and anyone who may have semi Conservative sympathies. Once this gap is there is will be very difficult to close; as a counterbalance backbench members of the Parliamentary Labour Party have formed a group of their own to oppose Corbyn’s shadow cabinet where necessary and further moderate” thinking on socialist lines.

With the Conservatives now attempting to dominate the centre ground of British politics there is a natural tendency for the Labour Party and its potential supporters to retreat to its comfort zone. But this zone has largely now gone; there is no large suppressed working class, some 50% of the young have university or higher technical education and are not interested in the “-isms” and menus of left wing recipes for some sort of future social paradise. They are ambitious, need good advice and a firm framework so that they can get on with their lives; the less government the better. And most of the rest of the population are only concerned with basic life sustaining issues such as personal finance, the purchase of a home, immigration and public security.

The present age is one of rapid technological and social change against a background of globalisation and international finance the full impact of which has not yet been seen. If Corbyn is to initiate a “new politics” amid this upheaval and create a socio/economic framework in the uk in which future generations including the young can be confident of realising their ambitions he will need not only to unite the party and convince the public of its economic competence, never an easy sell, but he will not be able to avoid a debate about the nature of British values and culture. or indeed the present shape and institutions of British democracy. it will not be enough simply to work within the present “tribal” patterns.

This means a far wider and more practical vision that that which at present preoccupies his supporters. It is one thing to lead a popular movement but quite another to impress the mass of voters under the intense scrutiny of a general election. On the evidence so far one could be forgiven for suspecting this to be “mission improbable”.

December 2015