After scraping onto the ballot paper to play the role of the constantly outvoted minority, Jeremy Corbyn surprised everyone when he gathered 59.5 percent of the total vote to beat his main rivals and become leader of the Labour party in 2015. The following year, after intrigue and internecine warfare, he defeated his challenger Owen Smith with 61.8 percent of the vote and secured his position and the right to take Labour into a general election in 2017.
Thousands of well-intentioned working-class people flocked to the Labour party, wanting to believe that Corbyn would be different from Blair, Brown and Miliband; that he would hold true to his professed principles and that, somehow, we would have socialism in Britain. The experience of the last few years alone is enough to demonstrate that one cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.
What is the reason for the decline of the Labour Party and is it a lost cause? George gives his straight forward and honest answer here as always, and it might upset some members of the ‘left’.