Bad news for the Tories: Corbyn has learned to love the centre

When Tony Blair was selling out the Labour Party by introducing a minimum wage, paid holiday leave and free nursery education, the hard left reckoned it had his measure. Semi-Trots and leftover Bennites, since decamped to one of the many exciting acronyms British Leninism has to offer, filled monochrome magazines and academish journals with tracts denouncing Blair as a Tory, a Thatcherite and both a neoliberal and a neocon. The charge sheet was echoed with righteous indignation by proud purists on the backbenches and in the columns of the Guardian and the Independent. New Labour was so far to the right it was indistinguishable from the Conservatives. What was the point, they asked, of a Labour Party that simply aped the policies of its opponents?

Pointing out that Labour was accruing a record any social democrat could be proud of was pointless. The wealth redistributed, the money invested, the poverty lessened – first they denied it, then they dismissed it, then they cried ‘Iraq’.