Written by Adam Peggs   

The left of Britain’s Labour Party has been subdued, or at least marginalised, for decades. This process began in 1983 after Labour’s landslide defeat against Margaret Thatcher, when left-winger Michael Foot led the party to defeat on a manifesto promising large-scale nationalisation and nuclear disarmament, a defeat largely caused by the breakaway of a number of centrist MPs to a new third party.

Since then the left has increasingly been excluded from senior positions in the Labour Party, culminating with the rebranding of the party as ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair in 1994. But now left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, a longstanding MP first elected in that fateful year of 1983, is expected to be elected to the position. Corbyn is a long-standing anti-war activist, campaigner against nuclear weapons and if elected would certainly be the most left-wing Labour leader for 30 or more years. Additionally the frontrunner for Deputy Leader, the MP Tom Watson would perhaps be the most left-wing Deputy Leader for decades. Corbyn is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group which aims to promote a socialist direction in the Labour Party, he has won the award for Parliamentary Beard of the Year more times than any other MP and is a vocal critic of government austerity.

Odds on a Corbyn victory were originally put at 200/1 by betting shop William Hill, with joke candidates such as former MP David Miliband and journalist Owen Jones (who were both ineligible to run as leader) having better odds than Corbyn. Polls for the last few weeks are now indicating Corbyn is most likely to win, with leading polling company YouGov predicting Corbyn will get 53% of the votes of Labour supporters and second-place candidate Andy Burnham to get 21%, while the candidates on the right Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall are expected to come third and fourth respectively. The results are due to be announced on Saturday.

Corbyn is now being widely viewed as the victor amid a deeply critical atmosphere in which senior figures on the right and centre of the party have labelled him unelectable and dangerous. This morning John Cruddas, Labour MP and head of Labour Party policy at the election in May, argued that Corbyn could transform the party into a ‘Trotskyite tribute act’. This is of course hyperbolic and untrue but it does suggest that if Corbyn wins it would lead to a dramatic shift to the left in British politics, like nothing seen in the UK since 1983.

Corbyn is widely being denounced as on the ‘hard-left’ of the spectrum by the Labour right, and as a friend of communists and terrorists by the Conservative press (the tried and tested tactic of Murdoch’s media empire), yet this masks the reality of the populist platform that Corbyn has ran on. His key policy proposals include an end to spending cuts funded through a crackdown on tax evasion, public ownership of the railway and energy companies, a living wage, rent caps, nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from NATO. Many of these policies are popular and YouGov’s polling suggests most of his policies are supported by the public. Public ownership of rail and energy is said to be supported by more than two thirds of voters, while rent caps, the living wage and higher tax is similarly popular.

Compared to the Labour Party in the past, Jeremy Corbyn is not on the ‘hard-left’, although he is among the small handful of Labour MPs who are the farthest to the left. In the 1970s and 1980s Labour’s hard-left advocated nationalisation of larger sectors of the economy. This included advocacy for nationalisation of the retail chain Marks and Spencer, the film distribution industry, tenanted farmland as well as for compulsory planning agreements between the government and big business.

Jeremy Corbyn’s proposals do not get even close to going this far and more represent the ideas of what was called the ‘soft-left’ in the 1980s, the group of the party which pursued more moderate socialist policies but nonetheless was committed to nuclear disarmament, some degree of public ownership, rent controls and strong public services. This group led by Michael Foot and a number of MPs who later converted to centrism in the era of Tony Blair has been overshadowed by their more radical opponents on the hard-left.

While Corbyn’s origins as an MP associated with the hard-left in the eighties and a close friend of that group’s leader Tony Benn has allowed Corbyn to be so easily stigmatised by his opponents. Today in everyday press parlance the term soft-left is now being used to refer to centre-left MPs such as John Cruddas, potential Deputy Leader Angela Eagle and potential Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. Yet these are MPs who have generally supported Britain’s nuclear weapons, generally supported the Iraq War and voted for strict anti-terror laws even if it is true that they each represent more social democratic trends in the Labour Party.

In many ways it is Jeremy Corbyn who best fits into the description of the soft-left, since the original soft-left has all but disappeared from mainstream British politics. Yet his attitude is also more uncompromising, bolder and more unexpected than someone who would fit into this label. If he is announced as winner on Saturday it will be the first time in Labour’s history that a maverick candidate on the left of the party has outflanked his opposition and seized the top job. Since World War II the Labour leadership has only been won by the candidate of the left on two occasions. Once in 1963 by Harold Wilson and again in 1980 by Michael Foot, but unlike Corbyn both of these candidates had over a decade of experience in the higher echelons of the Labour Party. For this reason even Jeremy Corbyn himself seems surprised. The candidate I initially expected to come last or second to last may well become the new leader of the British left.