Over the past few weeks, many of us have watched with evident schadenfreude as Your Party, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s embryonic progressive-socialist cum Islamo-populist outfit, fell into disarray. The wheels came off quicker than an expensive bike chained to a lamppost in Hackney.
The jokes wrote themselves, part Armando Iannucci (‘Stalin would be loving this!’), part Monty Python (‘We’re the People’s Front of Judea!’). But an Ipsos poll suggested that one in five British adults would consider voting for Your Party, rising to one in three among younger and Labour voters. New parties often do well, of course. But, as the steady rise of the Greens also shows, there is an undeniable growing appetite for whatever Your Party claim to be selling.
Why do people feel the pull of Your Party and the like?
It’s easy to laugh. But, as conservative as I am now, a decade ago I joined the Labour party as a member under Corbyn, my then-local MP. I feel no shame, friends – before that, I rode Cleggmania to a landslide Lib Dem victory in my school’s 2010 mock election. I am in good company with conservatives such as Peter Hitchens in my youthful dalliance with the Left. And so, I try always to remember why left-wing populism, and Corbyn in particular, have lasting appeal.
Why do people feel the pull of Your Party and the like? For Your Party in particular, there is the obvious appeal to Muslim voters, given the inclusion of Muslim MPs elected on a pro-Gaza platform in 2024. This is something which makes what the French call Islamogauchisme (think ‘Queers for Palestine’) inherently unstable. More broadly, there is of course the classic left-wing motivations of sheer resentment. More generously, many hold a sincere but naïve belief that leftism is synonymous with kindness, fairness, and justice.
Yet none of this is what enthused me about Corbyn for a couple of years. Admittedly, I was a queer fish as a Labour member: never a card carrying Corbynista, always a socially conservative Christian, with no illusions about class free utopias.
So, what was the appeal? It was a search for what felt like an organic form of politics. Corbyn and other dress-down leftists broadcast ‘organic’, homegrown, grassroots. With the Greens, the clue is in the name, and Corbyn has an allotment, after all. Back in 2015, as now, I found myself exhausted by a malign force now known by various names: the uniparty, lanyardism, the Blob. I knew it was a shared vice of both Tony Blair and David Cameron, an alien transplant into British politics, a skin graft trying desperately not to be rejected by the body.
Whatever it was, it felt overwhelmingly fake. It was top-down, but pretended it wasn’t, and with no sense of Old World noblesse oblige. Corbyn, by contrast, seemed bottom-up, a sort of political mushroom sprung from the loamy British soil. If you’ll recall, Corbyn drew his debut PMQs from the public. The first question he asked as Leader of the Opposition in the Commons (from a lady called Marie) was the same as one I submitted about the country’s housing crisis and spiralling rental costs. At the time, I found this invigorating, my first real sense that Parliament represents the voice of the actual British people.
But what changed? The cliches about being mugged by reality apply. Yet there was more to it than that. For a start, I began to read authors and (perhaps more importantly) to actually meet people who happily called themselves ‘conservative’ but who shared my disdain for the Blairite lacquer encasing the Conservative party.
I realised that an organic politics of the people is not found in leftism but, counterintuitively, in conservatism – true conservatism, not the urbane Cameroonism that simply enacted New Labour at the speed limit while wearing a cummerbund.
Leftism gives the appearance of an organic politics by attempting to create the flattest possible governance structures, the kind that allowed me and Marie to nose in at PMQs. Yet these are mere gestures, a kind of political greenwashing, like a picture of rolling fields slapped onto plastic-packaged meat that was fed through a tube and has seen less sunlight than Gollum.
Leftist politics, by its very nature, inclines to fakery. The whole project rests on the state overreaching into the remits of other natural institutions. No good can come from that.
What’s more, traditions such as the conventions of Parliament, the pomp and ceremony of the monarchy are not the ostentatious fabrications of exploitative elites. Rather, they are the treasures of the people, accrued throughout great historical epochs and moments. There is nothing inorganic about a story that unfolds over a millennium and more from King Alfred to Winston Churchill. Something is not inorganic simply because it is old. Often, quite the reverse.
The economic pill was the hardest to swallow. I held out hope in a kind of Blue Labourism for a while. But eventually I conceded: markets are organic too. Yes, of course, they can be manipulated and greed can run amok. But ultimately, a system of free and fair exchange is a natural human dynamic. When the state attempts to muscle in, things usually end badly and expensively.
Conservatives should remember all this. Not everyone lured by the Your Party siren song is an irredeemable ideologue, a tender hearted naif, or a recalcitrant Islamist. Many are in search of an organic politics. We must show them where it can really be found.
Comments