Why Smug Centrist Dads Can’t Understand Corbyn’s Enduring Appeal

“Where’s Jeremy Corbyn?”

As people marched through London on Saturday demanding a “People’s Vote” on Brexit, this was the question they were asking. Where is the Labour leader? Why isn’t he here listening to us?

For those who place Brexit at the centre of their politics, and others in the ideological grouping known as – for want of a better word – “Centrists”, there is a strange love-hate relationship with the Labour leader. It’s either: Why won’t Jeremy listen to me? Or: why won’t his supporters realise they are being fooled?

Corbyn’s critics don’t understand how his supporters can keep backing him despite his shortcomings not only in their eyes, but also in their conception of what his supporters should think. Corbyn is cast variously as a middle class “Islington liberal”, disconnected from the concerns of the real working classes, or as a throwback to the old union agitation of the 1970s, fooling his more moderate base into supporting Full Stalinism.

The only explanation his critics can come up with regarding his continued support is that his supporters are irrational cultists who believe Corbyn to be the literal second coming of Jesus. The constant sneering of “you can’t say anything against your Dear Leader” from the centre (a phrase gleefully picked up by the right) tells us more about them than it does about Corbyn’s support base. It’s notable that nobody was chanting, “Where’s Theresa May?” on Saturday – although she is, at least on paper, in charge of the government. Love him or hate him, it’s all about Jeremy.

It’s worth separating “Centrists” from people who consider themselves “not on the left or right”, just as it’s useful to separate capital-A Atheists, like Richard Dawkins, from the much larger group of people who just do’t believe in God.

Capital-C centrists, or the “radical centre”, or whatever else they call themselves, are a group without much in the way of raw numbers, but are vastly overrepresented in politics and the media. The common thread linking them is not a particular ideological standpoint, but rather a shared belief that they are the smartest people in the room. They believe that they stand above the rest of us mere peasants and partisans, gazing down clear-eyed at the vast and total sweep of the political landscape. They can see what we, blinded by our ideologies, cannot.

This belief persists despite Centrists being constantly wrong-footed by events they don’t see coming. Brexit and Trump left them reeling. Their ill-conceived leadership bid against Corbyn straight after the referendum was a strategic blunder of epic proportions. With a Tory Party in the middle of a leadership crisis following Cameron’s resignation, there was an opportunity to take the fight to the Tories and hammer them relentlessly. Instead, the Centrists launched a leadership bid, running a guy so plainly out of his depth it was embarrassing. In doing so, they associated criticism of Corbyn’s Brexit stance with incompetent, bad faith wrecking. It was an unforced error that undermined their own position. Most bafflingly, afterwards they still kept acting like they were the world’s most insightful political geniuses.

Even last week, the conversation from the anti-Brexit centre was claiming the “Tory Rebels” as their salvation, while running attack ads against the Labour leadership, only to see Corbyn’s Labour push a desperately ill MP into Parliament on a wheelchair to vote for Tory “rebel leader” Dominic Grieve’s “meaningful vote” amendment, while Grieve himself voted against it.

What they haven’t seen – and perhaps cannot see – is that people’s support for Corbyn is so strong, not because they think he’s the messiah, but because they really don’t want these clowns back in charge.

Corbyn is by no stretch a perfect candidate. Over issues such as policing and migration, he endlessly frustrates the left wing of his base by picking policy positions that seem designed to outflank the Tory Omnishambles for a quick headline rather than trying to advance the conversation in a better direction. Why, for example, choose to respond to the knife crime issues by promising more police, when the communities that are most impacted by this are already overpoliced and racially profiled?

But now, in this political moment, if he goes, the people who are still trying to make David Miliband happen will reclaim the party, and at that point you might as well pack it all in. You only have to read arch-Centrist Chris Leslie’s new pamphlet “Centre Ground” to see how little they have engaged with the changing political landscape, and how much their position is a desire to roll back the clock to a time when they were in charge. Leslie waxes lyrical about “the need for restraint, forbearance and short-term sacrifice for the sake of long-term stability”, as if that bears any resemblance to anything about the economic vandalism of austerity that Centrist Labour MPs endorsed. It’s easy to present yourself as the responsible, moderate one if you miss out the part where everything failed and the right took over.

This week, 100 Labour MPs voted – against the leadership – for another runway in a London airport because, well, eventually some of that money will trickle to their constituencies in the north, right? Compare that to John McDonnell’s New Economics programme, which speaks of green regional investment banks, the municipalisation of public services, radical measures to give people concrete control over their own lives.

People don’t support Corbyn because they’re stupid cultists or ignorant knuckle draggers who need things explained in even more patronising tones. For all the compromises of Corbynism, they’re nothing compared to the utter lack of ambition and imagination shown by those who would replace him if he went.

@Mc_Heckin_Duff