THE Labour leadership selection process, which confounded the pundits three years ago, has today left those self-same experts stirring their tea leaves for a glimmer of enlightenment.
Jeremy Corbyn was elected because he represented the prospect of new beginning for Labour after the desperate decline of the Blair and Brown years, and his leadership transformed the party.
This rising tide of hope created an exponential rise in Labour’s membership.
Some were returning Labour Party members — many of whom had dropped out from disillusionment and disgust at neoliberal policies and war brought about by consensus capitalist politics. And others were part of a new generation of people, mostly, but not exclusively, young.
The leadership election process gives Labour’s membership the decisive say in the final moment — but it is designed to ensure that candidates have a credible base of support in Parliament, in the trade union movement, among the affiliated socialist societies and in the constituencies.
This distinguishes Labour from other parties in that it unashamedly reflects the founding principle of the party, which came into being in order to give representation to working people.
To do this it had to shed the illusion, and the organisational baggage that accompanied it, that the Liberal Party could be a reliable vehicle for the promotion of working-class interests.
We have the experience of the coalition government and the role of the Lib Dems in the last election to demonstrate how far-sighted our forebears were.
It was the unions that made Labour happen. In the dying days of the 19th century, the TUC narrowly voted to hold a conference with the co-operative and socialist organisations.
The division among them put the Miners’ Federation and the textile unions against the idea but the new, and more radical, “new unions” won the day and the Labour Representation Committee was formed in the new year of the new century.
Exactly six years later, the first cohort of 29 Labour members took their seats in Parliament.
The radical transformation of the trade union movement went alongside a great explosion of socialist ideas.
In 1884 both the Fabian Society and the Social Democratic Federation were founded and both were constituent parts of Labour.
Today it is the trade union movement that gives Labour a solid anchor in the daily realities of working-class life.
It is not that the unions agree on every question. How could they when they represent more accurately than any other social force the full diversity of our working class and working people as a whole?
But it is with the unions — in alliance with an active Labour Party, campaigning in working-class communities — that Labour’s path to political power lies.
It is socialist ideas that give Labour’s radical rebirth its transformational character and it is against the yardstick of socialist ideas that the candidates for Labour’s leadership must be judged.
The next few weeks will see the differences between the different candidates begin to take on a more transparent character.
This is necessary because the profound defeat we suffered contains contradictory elements. On one hand Labour polled in absolute numbers excellently compared to socialist parties abroad.
But it lost spectacularly in key working- class areas. Clarity and honesty on why is a critical factor in deciding who should lead us.
“By inherited instinct we are all communists at heart; and if the isolated ego of self gets the upper hand for a time he produces results so terrifying that the mistake of allowing him to rule is speedily made apparent” — Keir Hardie.
