We were told Corbyn was ‘unelectable’. His fightback shows he’s anything but Gary Younge
.. a man who talked with Sinn Féin (a strategy that
stood the test of time) can be constantly interrogated about his support for
“terrorism” while a woman who joined a party that branded Nelson Mandela a
terrorist is never asked about her support for Apartheid.
The trouble with
received wisdom is that it rarely comes with a receipt. With the provenance of
the “wisdom” unacknowledged, the recipient passed it on as though it were the
self-evident expression of their own genius: an inarguable fact plucked from a
clear blue sky. For the past two
years, it has been received wisdom that, when put before the national
electorate, the Labour party
under Corbyn was unelectable. Not simply that it would lose, but that there was
no plausible way it could compete. These were not presented as opinions but as
facts. Those who questioned them were treated like climate change deniers.
Those who held the wisdom were the scientists. To take Labour’s prospects
seriously under Corbyn was to abandon being taken seriously yourself.
The situation is
volatile. According to one poll, one in five voters could still change their
mind
The political class imparted as much to the media class, and the
media class duly printed and broadcast it. The political class, drawn for the
most part from the same social class as their media counterparts, then took
those articles and bulletins and presented them as evidence. The wisdom was
distributed to all who mattered. Those who did not receive it did not, by
definition, matter. Within this fetid ecosystem the air was too stale for new
ideas to grow.
With days to go,
Labour now sits between one and 12 points behind the Tories in the polls. One projection has
the Tories failing to gain an ovrall majority; most predict they will get a majority of between 30 and 70. None have Labour
winning. Most have Corbyn getting a larger share of votes than Ed Miliband or
Gordon Brown. The polls have been wrong before. The situation is
volatile. According to one poll, one in five voters could still change their mind. We won’t know
whether Labour will be elected or not until Thursday night. To those who have
insisted on its unelectability, the matter of people actually going to the
polls was always a formality. Now it seems, from reporting and the polls, that
even if Labour doesn’t win under Corbyn, it is a viable electoral force.
Received wisdom aside,
this should not surprise us too much. Electability, whether it relates to a
person or a programme, is not a science. There are, it is true, gifted people
out there who have studied elections and traced voting patterns to make
predictions and projections. They are pollsters and psephologists; they are not
clairvoyants… read more:
