The next six weeks saw an extraordinary turnaround. Labour’s vote soared to 40%, some 10% higher than its 2015 performance, and the biggest rise in any party’s share of the vote since 1945. The Tory government, anticipating a post-Brexit landslide, lost its majority, sending it into a chronic tailspin. [...]
For Goodfellow and others, Labour’s rise vindicates Corbyn’s strategy of building support through a radical programme capable of appealing to those who usually don’t vote rather than triangulation to appeal to those who do. The party’s challenge is to consolidate and extend the support it won in 2017, a coalition encompassing not just the infamous ‘metropolitan elite’ but also low paid public sector and precarious workers, students, and the poorer working class in former industrial areas, amongst whom Labour retains significant support (though it has indeed fallen back among the older working class). [...]
There are interesting thoughts here about the substance of Labour’s agenda. There is praise for the bold social democratic intent of the 2017 manifesto, with its commitment to the principles of universalism and a strong state. But there is also an appeal for a social democracy that goes beyond statist managerialism. Hilary Wainwright draws a contrast between a paternalist ‘power-as-domination’ according to which the state seeks to do things for people and ‘power-as-transformative capacity’ exercised by people themselves once given greater opportunity to access and shape political and economic systems. [...]
Jo Littler locates the emotional appeal of Corbyn’s message in his insistence, against neoliberal orthodoxy, that individual freedom can only be realised through collective agency. With his gentle demeanour and heartfelt language Corbyn seeks to reclaim the language of aspiration from the right, and presents an ideal of collective provision that evades conservative stereotypes of statist authoritarianism.
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