Wider Milieu

The Oliver Letwin affair reminds us that the Conservative Party has always considered it the most natural and sensible thing in the world for the Prime Minister to be advised directly on major social problems by a 29-year-old whose entire post-pubescent life until the age of 26 had been spent at Eton and Cambridge.

Tony Blair aped that approach, out of hatred of his party's municipal and industrial bases. Rather more disappointingly, Gordon Brown and the comprehensive-educated Ed Miliband did nothing to reverse that and restore the good counsel of those who had spent many, many years coming up through the very real worlds of local government and the trade unions.

But Jeremy Corbyn, whose academic record is widely mocked, is in fact better qualified than the 50 per cent of grammar school pupils who left with no qualifications whatever; these days, even one school like that  would be closed down.

He owes everything to local government and to the trade unions, which were and are the real ladders of the advancement that their almost total destruction in the 1980s destroyed almost totally.

In that as in so very many other ways, 2016 begins with the clearest political choice in a generation, on the great issues of austerity at home, war abroad, and the enforcement of both by means of the assault on civil liberty, on national and parliamentary sovereignty, on parliamentary democracy, and on municipal democracy.

On one side is David Cameron, who is opposed within his party and its wider milieu by no more than the seven MPs who voted against airstrikes in Syria (although few, if any, of those MPs are opposed to austerity) and by an even smaller number of newspaper columnists.

On the other side is Jeremy Corbyn, who is opposed within his party and its wider milieu both by a small ultra-Left and by an infinitesimal ultra-Right.

The ultra-Left has a certain activist base, but it has no MPs and no mainstream journalists. It opposed the decision to grant a free vote on Syria, it supports the setting of illegal budgets by local authorities, and it demands the deselection of dozens of MPs.

The ultra-Right exists only in the London media, where it probably has fewer than 40 members of any kind, and in Parliament, where it has no more than 15 MPs, namely those who both abstained on the Fiscal Charter and voted in favour of the airstrikes in Syria. Even those figures are arguably overestimates, and one of those 15 is Simon Danczuk.

Thus, the two parties are very clearly distinct, and each of them is almost entirely united behind its Leader. Only one of those Leaders, however, is going to be in place at the General Election of 2020. 

That Leader is Jeremy Corbyn.