One man to unite them all?

The political rise of Jeremy Corbyn in recent weeks has been an interesting one. And, dare I say it, it could be the most exciting thing to happen in British politics for years.

Of course, there's some in the Labour party who would disagree, principally those associated with "New Labour" who seem oblivious to the fact that what they're seeing is a proper grassroots uprising, an attempt by party members to take back the party where they see the elite as having become hopelessly out of touch with the footsoldiers of the movement. And I'm guessing that for those who've been pushing the whole "we know best now just shut up and get on with distributing those leaflets" mantra for the last decade and a half, it must be giving them a fair few sleepless nights. Hence the vitriolic nature of the attacks on Corbyn from people like Tony Blair and co.

Unlike a lot of people on the political left, I happen to think that Tony Blair did do some good as leader of this country looking back with ten years' hindsight - raising the minimum wage, introducing Sure Start centres and helping bring youth unemployment down mainly. But unfortunately the first thing that will always come to mind when his name is mentioned is that he dragged this country into an illegal war that only 9% of the population supported at the time. On top of that there's his nauseous buddying up to Rupert Murdoch and his hateful horde of right-wing publications, the introduction of disastrous PFI schemes into the NHS, university tuition fees which inevitably tilt the education system in this country towards those with the money to afford it rather than those who are actually clever enough to deserve to be there and many others besides.

And don't give me the line about how Tony Blair is the only Labour leader to win an election in the last 40 years. The Tories were in such a mess from 1997-2005 that you could have had a lobotomised Boris Johnson spearheading the Labour campaign and he'd still have picked up a comfortable 100 seat majority. The Conservative party that we're dealing with in 2015 (and will be dealing with in 2020 as well) is much more organised, much more crafty and a much more well-oiled machine and they won't be nearly as easy to defeat as they were under Major, Hague, Duncan-Smith or Howard.

Maybe rather than scornfully deriding Corbyn and his supporters as fantasists, Blair and his followers like Chuka Umunna, Liz Kendall, Simon Danczuk etc should maybe do a bit of history research into their own party. The Labour Party was set up by the trade unions to be a voice for working class people and protect them from the policies of the Tories and Liberals back in the day who were owned by the ruling class. Hence why in the post-World War II years we got a welfare state and a National Health Service which the current Tory government are doing their utmost to destroy and turn our healthcare system into a terrifying US-style free for all (Andy's recommended watching - "Sicko" by Michael Moore. If you think NHS privatisation is in any way a good thing, this will quickly show you why it really really isn't).

But getting back to Labour, this is why so many working class people now look at the party and don't feel it's standing up for them anymore. Since 1995, there may have been a few cosmetic differences between the red and blue side of the political divide but what Blair, Brown and Miliband have essentially been peddling is a Conservative manifesto from the 1970s. And as anyone with any knowledge of politics knows, the Conservatives have never been a party with the interests of the working class at heart no matter how much Sun journalists might want you to think otherwise.

Labour did make a few moves to the left under Ed Miliband but, again contrary to what Blair would want you to think, it's the fact that they didn't go far enough in setting enough distance between themselves and the Tories that cost them the election, not the fact that they didn't try to continue to be the Tories with red rosettes that they were as New Labour. To quote Edwyn Collins, "I heard it once before and unless I got it wrong, you can't defeat your enemy by singing his song". Don't get me wrong, I think Ed Miliband's a genuinely nice guy and the sort of person I would happily give a mortgage reference to if he asked me but as a political leader, he was hopelessly out of his depth. The instant that him and Ed Balls said that they would accept the horrifically brutish spending cuts imposed by George Osborne in about 2012 rather than trying to reverse them was the moment their chances of getting back into power ended.

Which brings me back to where Jeremy Corbyn comes in. Unlike Miliband, he's the sort of person who won't be dictated to by Cameron, Osborne, Duncan-Smith, Hunt etc and won't let them frame the debate over the economy, the NHS, public spending etc. He's smart enough to realise that a lot of people out there will support a party that promises something different from the five years of poverty that 99% of the population now faces under a Tory administration. And he knows that he can back it up with figures. Consider this - while the Tories were putting through another round of cruel and vicious benefits cuts last month (which, of the four leadership candidates, only Corbyn actually voted against), they were actually putting through in the same bill tax cuts for corporations and the richest in society. Still think that Corbynites are a bunch of left wing loonies? I'd say that the truth is that he's more of a realist than anyone on the Labour or Tory front benches and knows how to fix this country.

In fact, Corbyn's manifesto is probably nearer to that of Neil Kinnock than Tony Benn and makes a lot of sense. Fed up of rip-off train prices and energy bills? Nationalise them. Higher top tax rate? If you can afford to pay then yes - that money will go to the people who need it rather than the fallacy of "trickle down" economics. After all, as "Call me Dave" Cameron said, we're all in this together, right? More affordable council housing? In an age where people can't afford a mortgage until their forties at present, I think that's a very sensible idea. Stricter controls on newspapers and media? Given some of the odious practices of the Sun and the Mail as detailed in the Leveson Report, I'm all for it. And if it annoys a few bankers, corporate fat cats and newspaper owners who decide to take their trade off to Hong Kong in protest then good. The country's better off without leeches like them.

What Labour needs to do is to stop trying to hopelessly chase after the 5% of Middle England voters in swing seats. Newsflash guys - they'll never vote for you. These people are Tories and they won't vote for a Labour party while there's a strong Conservative party in government. What they should do is concentrate on winning back the voters that have been haemorrhaging out of the party since 1997. The people who've joined the Greens because they look at them and see the party that Labour used to be, promising a fairer society. The Scots who've migrated en masse to the SNP - not all of them are rabid nationalists who hate the English spend their waking hours searching the web for people who disagree with independence to troll, they just see that the Westminster system is broken and are crying out for a party promising something different which Labour hasn't been for a long time. The people who've scarily moved to the opposite end of the spectrum to UKIP because they see it as a more grassroots movement than Labour (which it is, unfortunately it's also a borderline far right and ultra-racist one which should have had Labour quickly reacting to shoot down the poisonous myths about immigrants that they're spreading). That's a far bigger group of supporters than just a few undecided 2.4 children families who will probably side with the Tories in the end anyway.

One man to unite them all. And his name might just be Jeremy Corbyn. I hope so anyway. And if Blair, Kendall, Umunna, Yvette Cooper et al don't like it they can always do what David Owen did 35 odd years ago and go off and join the Lib Dems. You might want to ask Nick Clegg about how that party's holding up at the moment though...