The Conservatives are naturally very much enjoying the Labour leadership contest, and are starting to make use of it in the press, with Matt Hancock warning that Jeremy Corbyn would cost every working household £2,400. It’s the sort of thing the Tories were doing in the general election, slapping often rather arbitrary price tags on Labour’s policies, but Corbyn does make it rather easier for these attacks to gain purchase with voters.
Hancock does say that any Labour leader will cost voters money. And it is not right that the Tories will only benefit if Jeremy Corbyn wins. It is too late for any leadership candidate to put the Corbyn genie back in the bottle, even if someone else wins. If Yvette Cooper or Andy Burnham win, they will still have to spend the next few years dealing with an energised and encouraged hard left in the party who will demand a voice on policies and will object loudly to anything they think is a compromise that takes Labour too close to the Tories. The idea that the insult ‘Tory-lite’ and the Corbynistas’ ownership of the word ‘principle’ will disappear after this leadership election will turn out to be as wishful as the thinking that got him on the ballot paper in the first place, which was that the election would be the end of the Corbyn tendency. The party will be seriously fractured for years from now on.
But some Tories fear that a Corbyn win will lead to an excited frenzy among the electorate for a populist, left-wing party. Zac Goldsmith made that point today, telling LBC that ‘the alternative is that [Corbyn] doesn’t flop, that he captures the zeitgeist and people get wildly excited across the country, not just the union members or the people who are signing up in the last few days. And I think that’s even more worrying because we’d be taking this country into a very dangerous terrain. So I don’t see any good coming out of this at all.’
But it’s worth remembering that voters saw what populist elements Ed Miliband had to offer and didn’t think he was worth supporting. Moreover, the British electorate is not in the same desperate position as Greek or Spanish voters who are turning to populist left-wing parties.
Unless that changes, the Tories might as well open the champagne and start celebrating the result of the Labour leadership contest now: whoever wins, they’ve got exactly what they wanted.
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