In Place of Hope
"We should treat the 2017 manifesto as our foundational document, the radicalism and the hope that that inspired across the country was real."
--- Keir Starmer, January 2020.
EXACTLY seven years ago this week I was stood in the city centre getting - what the kids might describe - as "low-key pissed on" with a pretty big smile on my face.
The "get out the vote" rally was organised on the eve of the eve of the election it's generally hoped we've forgotten these days. If only because the shock surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn might give the strange impression that socialism can be quite popular actually.
A few thousand people - most of them young, many of them with more interesting haircuts than mine - had flocked to Birmingham city centre to see the then Labour leader speak.
Every poll going was predicting a Tory landslide, Corbyn himself had been traduced and abused as everything from a terrorist-sympathiser to a Jew-hater to the most dangerous allotmenteer in the North London area. The common view was that calamity beckoned.
Yet as Clean Bandit's Grace Chatto struck up her cello amid a summer shower, the crowd were all smiles and swaying red banners. "For the Many Not the Few", they declared, or in the case of one handwritten effort words to the effect of "Theresa May has herpes."
There was something in the air that tea-time, something more than the vague whiff of street food and skunk blowing across Eastside Park. It might just have been hope.
After the final defiant notes of Rockabye and a brief warm-up from Steve Coogan, the headline act appeared in open-necked shirt sans tie - he wasn't at PMQs now.
Corbyn, manifesto in hand, launched into a speech railing against corporate greed and crumbling public services and making the case for a fairer society. As he outlined his plans for government, the clouds parted and a rainbow appeared in the sky. For the true-believers who had come together in the second city maybe oblivion had been cancelled after all.
Not cancelled perhaps but delayed. Two days later Theresa May lost her majority after a surprise swing to Labour. It's since emerged that stony-faced officials at party HQ, who'd long loathed Corbyn, choked down their disappointment, saving their shock for a series of snarky emails.
I for one wept tears of joy on the bus to work. The doubters had been proven wrong. Even the prospect of another day ahead trudging through interminable legal jargon couldn't do much to get me down.
Two years on and it was the end of a bleak midwinter - or at least early midwinter - election. In the small hours of Friday the Thirteenth, the steady stream of results was confirming a crushing defeat every bit as bad as the one we had dodged two years earlier and against an opponent who was so very much worse than May.
By then I was back working as a journalist, tweeting reactions and pictures from a local count. On that night even solicitors' LinkedIn pages would have been less painful.
"I think," said a local MP, when I asked about the anxieties in his own party about the then triumphant Boris Johnson. "Those people need to reflect on what Boris has achieved."
As I caught a cab home a while later, wipers swatting persistent mizzle from the windscreen, the cab driver asked me just what so many were doing at the local leisure centre at gone three o'clock in the morning.
"They've been counting for the election," I replied.
"Oh, that was today." A slight pause. "I guess I missed my chance to vote."
I couldn't help a thin smile. When I got out a short ride later I hesitated. "Remember to vote next time, you might just change something."
Letting myself into a silent house where not a creature was stirring - because it was almost 4am, obviously - I felt slightly numb but I still had copy to file. I opened the laptop and got to work writing an impeccably impartial account of the worst case scenario imaginable.
Months rolled on. Brexit happened. Covid came. And somewhere in the foothills of another terrible wave of infections Corbyn was effectively ejected from Labour.
It came as some consolation that in time Johnson was ejected from office and then Parliament. Perhaps the MP recanted but by then he was also out of the party. You can find the full story of that online, but it isn't one of mine. At that point - thoroughly sick of politics, journalism and by extension journalism writing about politics - I was out myself.
Which brought me back to another rather grey June evening earlier this week. The rain was I think, easing off - it had been at it most of the day, a fair bit of the week and actually most of the year. I might be stretching pathetic fallacy to breaking point here, but if the climate crisis is good for anything at all it's atmospheric atmospheres.
Downstairs a Tory and the Labour man trade verbal blows on TV. Their voices drone in and out and with my bedroom door shut are barely indistinguishable - a similar effect I suspect to actually watching the debate itself.
Right now all polls point to Conservative evisceration and unlike those sour little idiots at Labour HQ I hope to see a man I thoroughly loathe become Prime Minister.
Our most likely next leader is a cynical, unprincipled and deeply dishonest politician. The manifesto I saw waved from a sound stage seven years ago was at one time hailed as the would-be PM's starting point. Today he speaks only of a changed Labour Party, one from which many socialists have either hurried from or - as in the case of Corbyn himself - been hurried out of.
The official reason that the policies Corbyn promoted and his successor, when it suited him, endorsed have been shown short shrift is something to do with changed economic circumstances. The unofficial reason is that he never believed a word of the platform on which he won a mandate.
It's perhaps a rather small injustice given how many much larger ones will go unpunished because of a rather radical invention as the least radical of Labour leaders.
His platform for government is thin and utterly insufficient to heal a country shattered by austerity, ripe with inequality and enraged by impunity. But it's the best we're going to get.
A handful of policies on climate and nature are decent, workers' rights will get a bit better and the insane things coming down the track from another five Conservative years would not happen. In a first-past-the-post democracy that will have to do - for now.
But we have to be honest about whether as progressives it's fair that we're having to choose between an opposition barely to the left of John Major's Tory party and incumbents increasingly in-hoc to what we'd have once considered the far-right.
Two "parties of business" both carping on about a small boats crisis, shuddering at the thought of tax rises and reassuring us they'd absolutely be willing to end the world if necessary is surely somewhat overkill. But don't worry because the media have detected the rather desperate stench of indifference and are offering up a racist public schoolboy - a sort of nicotine-addled Admiral Ackbar lookalike - as the saviour of the working man. Hurrah (for the black shirts)!
Seven years ago, standing under a rainbow in Birmingham, there was a next to negligible chance of achieving genuine progress in Britain. But there was a choice. Today there just isn't. I'd still, if I saw him again, tell that taxi driver to head to the polls next month. But the chances of him, or I or anyone else who believes in a properly equitable society moving things forward feels more remote in the likely face of a landslide victory than it did in the likely face of a landslide defeat.
"Let’s work together across the whole country to show them our programme is real, serious and here. And we are real, serious and here. And do you know what? We are going to change things." --- Jeremy Corbyn, June 6 2017
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