Earlier in the week, I was going to write a piece explaining why I, a relatively normal person, was supporting Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership election. But yesterday I attended the meeting of my Constitutency Labour Party convened to decide for which candidate — Jeremy Corbyn or Owen Smith — the CLP was indicating its support. This is my entirely anecdotal account of that meeting.

It may also be helpful for readers to know the following. I consider myself a normal person, mainly because I don’t usually go to meetings; nor do I watch, much less tweet about, Question Time or The Andrew Marr Show. I’m a 55-year old, white, male. Grammar school educated, living in a small city on the south coast of England, with my wife and dog. I can pass unnoticed in the supermarket and the garden centre; less so at the book launch and the Momentum meeting. I am a trade union organiser at the post-92 university where I teach, and a former contributing editor to New Left Project.

So last night I attended my first CLP meeting since I rejoined the Labour Party following Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader last September. The constituency in question straddles leafy, solid Tory shires, suburban sprawl and inner city poverty. Depending on where the pin drops, you can find support for Labour, Conservatives, UKIP or even Lib Dem. So it was always going to be an interesting meeting, even without the ongoing war within Labour.

It was a warm, dazzlingly-bright summer evening as we all signed in at the youth centre where the meeting was being held. Despite the severe restrictions on CLP meetings recently imposed by the Labour National Executive Committee, gaining admission to the meeting was relatively easy — just announce my name, show my membership card, get ticked off the list, and I was permitted entry. As easy as getting through immigration, for a white guy at least.

The meeting, like many others up and down the country I am sure, was oversubscribed, and seats were at a premium. I found a seat next to a woman who, like me, had rejoined Labour because of Corbyn. Next to her was an elderly woman who had clearly been a committed member for decades. We were keeping our cards — whether we supported Corbyn, or his challenger, Owen Smith — close to our chest.

What became apparent immediately was that the meeting represented a meeting of two tribes. On the one hand were the long-standing constituency members, activists and officers. On the other were the swollen ranks of those, like me, who had joined or rejoined the party because of Jeremy Corbyn. It was immediately obvious that, for almost all present, this was the first time they had clapped eyes on those from the other tribe. This point was driven home by the constituency chair, when she welcomed the fifty-odd members who had turned up. She made a point of saying how glad she was to see so many new members, and that she hoped she would see them when the hard work of campaigning and canvassing needed to be done.

After the preamble, in which we were allowed ten minutes to read wrotten statements by the two candidates, there was half an hour in which members were permitted to speak on behalf of either candidate. For several minutes, various members voiced their support for either Corbyn or Smith, and set out their working class credentials, while the rest of the meeting listened quietly. I suspect that few, if any, minds were changed either way.

Then a man stood up to speak. He explained, in a Liverpudlian accent softened by many years in southern England, how he had served for many years as an official of the CLP. He then launched into a declaration aimed at those new, “Corbynite” members whose presence had so swollen the attendance at the meeting. He asserted that the rules of the party did not permit the deselection of MPs, like the local MP who had recently resigned from Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet. He made it clear that, in the event that Corbyn were re-elected as Leader, his isolation within the Parliamentary Labour Party would mean that Labour MPs would defer instead to what he called a proxy leader. He said, in so many words, that new, Corbynite members should get over themselves, shut up, and do what Labour MPs and the party machine told them to.

Now, as one who has read Ralph Miliband’s excellent book Capitalist Democracy in Britain, I know that the historic function of the Labour Party has been, first and foremost, to sustain and reproduce the institutions of representative democracy; and, to that end, to manage and police popular aspirations and demands. Corbyn’s election last year was enough to persuade me that there was an opportunity to break with that tradition. But even I was taken aback by the easy condescension with which these words dripped from the speaker’s lips.

A few minutes later, another man stood up to speak. It immediately became clear that he was in a state of some agitation, which quickly erupted into anger. He told the meeting how angry he was, how he spent a lot of time among the inhabitants of a local estate notorious as a pocket of deep poverty, how he had begun his shift at the nearby docks at 5am that morning, and how he detected, from surveying the clothes of others present at the meeting, that they were in fact middle class (as if that should come as any surprise at any Labour Party meeting). All the while, he was jabbing his finger at members of his audience. As he spat out his contempt for Corbyn and his supporters, the mood chilled, and I could sense those in the room — most of whom were women, most of whom were working class — tensing, shrinking, becoming uncomfortable and afraid to speak. In the end, the chair intervened, and he later apologised for his rant. (After the meeting — which resulted in a narrow vote in favour of Corbyn, by the way — I shook his hand and offered to canvas with him.)

What do I take away from this?

First, I see that most Corbyn supporters at the meeting are like me: ordinary people who have supported Labour in the past, but who became disillusioned some time during the Blair period, and took Corbyn’s election as a signal to return. I lost count, in this small meeting, of the number of peoole who offered this as the basis of their presence, and of their support for Corbyn.

Second, and more important given the current agonies of the Labour party, I presume that much of the antipathy of Smith supporters/coup supporters towards Corbyn and the hundreds of thousands who have (re)joined the party to support him springs from fear. Fear that they are all Trotskyists or entryists of some other stripe. Fear that is fed by the media, and by the pronouncements of people like Tom Watson. As I said, this meeting was the first time that pro- and anti-Corbynites in this constituency had met face to face. For people like the dock worker, is it any wonder that they view all those fresh faces at the meeting with fear, anger and suspicion? Or that they believe that such members are mostly members of the notorious, if fictitious, “metropolitan bubble”?

Third, that it is a mistake to ignore the fundamental drive within the Labour party machine to resist any attempt to disrupt its historical mission to manage and police popular demands. The same forces that were pushing through one member one vote (OMOV) in the 1990s, to break the influence of the trade union block vote, are those that are having the current meltdown about the logical consequences of OMOV in 2016.