When George Osborne watched Ed Miliband winning Labour leadership in 2010, he shouted “Yes!! Yes!! Yes!!” I imagine he had probably passed out by the end of Jeremy Corbyn’s acceptance speech: it was the stuff of Tory fantasy.
In Miliband’s acceptance speech, he had the wit to play down the role that the trades unions had played in his victory. Corbyn boasted about it, in a rambling speech which thanked them by name: the RMT, the FBU – even the Socialist Education Association and Socialist Health Association. I hadn’t heard of either of the last two until today. I suspect, now, we’ll be hearing a lot more about socialist organisations that we had thought closed down in the 1980s. It’s a brave new world.
And then, the delusion: Labour, he said, is “stronger than we have been for a very long time”.
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