SQUINT, and the People’s History Museum in Manchester could be a church. Vast trade-union banners rich with symbols—masonic eyes, spanners, linked hands—hang like ecclesiastical tapestries from the walls and ceilings. Bibelots nestle in their showcases like saints’ bones in their reliquaries: a handkerchief commemorating the Peterloo massacre, an Edwardian membership certificate for the old dyers’ union (motto: “We dye to live”), a docker’s hook belonging to a protagonist of the London port strike of 1972. The galleries echo to sermons by tribunes of the left: Nye Bevan hailing universal health care, Ernest Jones urging the crowds in Manchester to reject the “gospel of the rich”. The light is low—the better to preserve the treasures of this, Britain’s only museum to the struggles of the common folk.

Like many churches, the museum is also near-empty of a Sunday. Bagehot shared it with perhaps a dozen other visitors. Outside, central Manchester teemed with life. Drinkers spilled out of pubs and bars. The Arndale Centre writhed with shoppers. Canal Street, in the gay village, fizzed with the music and colour of Pride weekend. Out in the suburbs Muzak and the babble of middle-aged couples replaced the thud, whirr and hiss of the Industrial Revolution in factories now serving as furniture showrooms. In Shaw, where the last mill shut in 1989, trams from Manchester disgorged families clutching shopping bags.

This is not to disparage the museum, which is magnificent. But it is to make an observation relevant to today’s Labour Party, whose archives it houses and which finds itself in the final throes of a leadership contest. A blackboard in one of the galleries provides an accurate snapshot of the race. Below an invitation to chalk up their opinions of the four candidates, visitors gush about Jeremy Corbyn (a bearded MP on the party’s hard left, now storming ahead): “Back to OLD LABOUR principles—yes please,” writes one. Of Liz Kendall, the most centrist, a visitor opines in colourful letters: “New Labour apologist”. Another merely scrawls “h/8” (hate).

So it is in Labour at large. Exuding the romanticism of the sort of old socialist causes—nationalisation, unilateral nuclear disarmament, the hyperactive state direction of industry and public services—documented on the walls of the People’s History Museum, Mr Corbyn has attracted tens of thousands of idealistic new members and registered supporters to the party. It seems likely that their support will propel him across the finishing line on September 12th.

His electoral prospects thereafter? A clue is in the museum’s name. The sort of great ideological clashes that burn on in the mind of Mr Corbyn are indeed history. Britons today do not, on the whole, spend their weekends marching behind banners, just as they tend not to join trade unions, go to church or—notwithstanding his popularity among a corybantic minority—support political movements. According to Geert Hofstede, a Dutch psychologist who has devised a means of quantifying such things, Britain is the most individualistic country in Europe; a place of “rampant consumerism” where “the route to happiness is through personal fulfilment” rather than collective endeavour. Polling by Ipsos MORI supports his claim, showing that each successive generation is more sceptical of organised religion, the welfare state and government in general.

With the notable exceptions of their sports, pets and royals, Britons tend to spurn great displays of sincerity, too: from politics to popular television, Britain’s public life is striking for its sardonicism. This is not to say that it is a reactionary country. But recent decades suggest that the Conservatives are mostly best at harnessing this aversion, one eyebrow near-permanently raised, to pharaonic political visions. David Cameron is already stressing the contrast between his pragmatism and the ideological purism of Mr Corbyn and his supporters. On September 2nd, for example, he launched a new wave of self-governing “free schools” (loathed by Labour’s statist left).

We don’t all want to change the world

It does not have to be thus. Under Tony Blair, Labour came to terms with the country it wanted to govern, with its white-bread preference for garden centres and loft conversions over dialectical materialism. Recognising that voters had—in the words of one Blairite—“outgrown crude collectivism and left it in the supermarket car-park”, it did not fall into the traps of the old left: confusing individualism for misanthropy; a rally of frenzied lefties for the electorate at large; the country’s consumerism for a passing phase. As Mr Blair always argued, the party cannot fake its accommodation with this Britain. It has to mean it.

Today, however, it is careening towards a leader who, more than any in its recent history, misreads (or worse, does not like) modern Britain and its instincts. The result, unless Labour’s moderates can reclaim the party, will be electoral oblivion. Shown footage of Mr Corbyn by Ipsos MORI last month, swing voters in Croydon and Nuneaton seemed bemused: “He’s got all the policies straight out of the Sixties,” said one, adding: “He’s a bit of a hippy.” The Islington MP’s supporters, in denial, promptly accused the pollsters of “programming” the participants.

Yet the gulf between Mr Corbyn’s perception of Britain and the reality offers the centrists one morsel of hope. Bagehot recommends that they welcome their party’s thousands of new left-wing members and encourage them to go door-knocking, particularly in the sort of marginal constituencies, like Nuneaton, Croydon and the middle-class suburbs of cities like Manchester, which the party must win from the Tories to regain power. A few weekends canvassing the views of typical Britons—unimpressed and upwardly mobile—and listening, really listening, to what they say, might open the eyes of all but the most intransigent Corbynista. To understand, they may find, is to forgive.