PM

When they were trailing badly in the polls, the two-thirds of Labour’s parliamentary group that don’t really support Corbyn decided just to save themselves — run local campaigns, don’t mention Corbyn, and try and survive with the loyal, basic working-class vote. But then, Corbyn unleashed a manifesto that shocked everybody.

I think it’s of world significance, because Labour is part of a big social-democratic family of parties in Europe, and it’s the first of those big, mainstream parties to actually stand at election and say, “You know what? Neoliberalism is over. The free market is over. We’re going to tax the rich. We’re going to nationalize key industries, and we’re going to redistribute the wealth to the poorest.” That’s what he said.

For many people age fifty and above, it was like rediscovering a vinyl record you really liked. You’d forgotten it, but you liked it.

When they did that, of course, the excitement began to build — above all, among young people, because one of the key promises was free college. College fees here are £9,000 per year, so you leave college with a £27,000 debt. Corbyn has promised to wipe that out. He said, “Zero from September,” that you go to university for free.

Now you’ve seen probably up to a million young people register to vote on the basis of that, so once that excitement began, people began to come onside from the right wing of the Labour Party.

Who’s responsible for organizing the campaign? It is the tight group around Corbyn himself: veteran left-socialist operatives inside the trade unions, inside the Labour Party, left journalists. That’s who did it. We don’t know whether we can win, because on the other side of this, we had a very liberal Conservative Party.

We had a Conservative Party, many of whom could have been Democrats in the United States, bu, after Brexit, flipped to the right. We also had about 12 percent of an alt-right party called UKIP, an anti-immigration, xenophobic, racist party, drawing its support from some working-class people.

Now, their vote has collapsed. The Conservatives have swung right. UKIP has basically melted into the Conservatives. It’s standing down in thirty key seats to try to help the Conservatives defeat Labour. So, it’s a really uphill task in this one election straight after Brexit for Labour to win, but I think if we can do really well and if we can achieve some kind of parity with the Conservatives, then it empowers Corbyn to take Labour’s transformation to the next level.