Party Cards, Identity Cards, Winning Cards

Try putting Tony Blair up now, and see how far he would get.

I hate to break the news to the "unelectable Corbyn" brigade, but the Blairite vs Tory score now stands at only 3-2, and the most recent Blairite win was 10 years ago, or 15 years before the next General Election. It is time to try something different.

This evening's Any Questions? from Exeter College was held in a Labour constituency, although hardly one known as a bastion of the Hard Left. But the college serves the whole of Devon, or at the very least an area of it far beyond the City of Exeter.

The audience was raucously pro-Corbyn, and delighted when Frank Field said that he had no regrets about having nominated him.

Also, while Field was all ready to vote to withdraw from the EU rather than to stay in on David Cameron's terms, Robert Halfon was quite certain that whatever his boss brought home would be worthy of unconditional endorsement. Watch out for that split on party lines during the next two years.

If, as Jonathan Freedland would have it, Corbyn is about "identity politics", then it is the politics of the identity defined by the Labour Government of 1945.

That is the only British identity that almost anyone alive can remember, or that almost all of the rest would wish to have.

Do you assume that, if you were hit by a car, then an NHS ambulance would take you to an NHS hospital? If so, then you are part of "the Corbyn tribe".

How many of the anti-Corbyn Guardian writers are his constituents in Islington North? How many of them hold Labour Party membership cards?

But how many of them have ever had a hope in hell of replacing a man who is now, by very popular demand indeed, on course to be re-elected to Parliament a few days short of his seventy-first birthday?

It is time for figures such as Field, Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer, Roger Godsiff, and even Gisela Stuart (who agrees with all of them and with Corbyn about the EU), to say that, yes, of course they would serve under Corbyn if he asked them.

The Born To Rule crowd is not Labour's historically normative right wing, it is not the only one that could possibly exist, and it is not even the only one among today's Labour MPs.

From the Trade Union Bill, to public ownership, to the proper centrality of rail and coal, to foreign policy and wars, to Trident, to civil liberties, to the case against the EU from the very start, the views of Jeremy Corbyn are the views of Peter Hitchens.

Many of them are also shared by Peter Oborne and by several other commentators who could hardly be described as "Loony Left". 

Furthermore, they are popular.

For example, the renationalisation of the railways is consistently supported by between 65 and 70 per cent of the population, stable across all parts of the country and across the electoral bases of all parties.

There is strong public support for rent controls, and for a mandatory Living Wage properly so called. Defending the NHS and defending the BBC are massively popular propositions.

But even if none of those things were the case, a political party does not exist purely in order to follow public opinion.

What would be the point of the Labour Party if it did not campaign for such policies as these? Or if it did not vote to defend the best legacy of Tony Blair, his drastic reduction in child poverty?

There needs to be a right wing of the Labour Party, and not merely a right wing in the Labour Party. A Corbyn Leadership offers the opportunity of such a reconfiguration.

Figures of such Olympian self-regard as to profess that they "would not serve under him", as if they would have been asked, need to be made aware that plenty of people without a Marxist bone in their bodies would be more than happy to do so, and would happily relieve them of the parliamentary seats that they obviously would not be needing.

The same goes for their newspaper columns.