Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of Britain’s Labour Party with a resounding 59 percent of the more than 400,000 votes cast. Corbyn is a far left character, who protested the killing of Osama bin Laden and has made public appearances not only with Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein, with its terrorist past, but also with supporters of Islamist terrorism. He wants to nationalize Britain’s railroads and energy industry and to raise tax rates far above where they have been for the last 30 years. He has represented the trendy gentry leftist Islington North constituency since 1983 but has never taken a leadership role and has voted against party positions (which most British parliamentarians seldom do) more than 500 times.
Corbyn was only nominated by the required 35 Labour members of parliament just after the deadline (with some signatures from those who opposed him but said his part of the party should have a chance) and was elected under new party rules that gave a vote to anyone who paid £3 for party membership. Bookmakers evidently lost £100 million because they started off taking bets with odds of 200/1 against a Corbyn victory.
Corbyn’s election is a repudiation of every Labour leader of the last 30 years. Andy Burnham, a North of England bloke who appealed to traditional trade unions, got 19 percent of the votes; Yvette Cooper, wife of Ed Balls, who despite being Gordon Brown’s right-hand man and shadow chancellor was defeated in his constituency in the May 2015 election, got 17 percent; Liz Kendall, a backbencher who ran as a Tony Blair New Labour moderate, got 4 percent.
It is widely assumed that Corbyn’s victory makes the Labour Party unelectable, as New Labour backer Dan Hodges writes in the Telegraph. For more detail, follow the links to Hodges’s previous commentary. In any case, unless the law is changed, there will be no general election until the spring of 2020. But absent some disastrous course of developments, it seems clear that a Corbyn-led Labour Party cannot win a general election.
Why has Britain’s Labour Party abandoned the center-left course followed with such success by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown? And why are so many Democrats in the United States eager to abandon the center-left course followed with such succeed by Bill Clinton? I addressed that question in my Washington Examiner column titled “The strange death of the center-left.”
