On the morning of September 14, the British public received an alarming tweet from their Prime Minister, David Cameron, warning them of a clear and present danger:

The putative danger took the form not of those legendary as-yet-undiscovered missiles aimed at London which could be deployed in less than 45 minutes but the new Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, the bearded, mild-mannered backbencher who in a shock landslide victory this weekend, took charge of the Labour Party.  The Russian embassy in London was quick to note that a similar tweet from President Putin about a new opposition leader would have met with widespread Western condemnation.

Lazy vitriol

Cameron wasn’t the only one dismayed by the prospect of an actually opposing Opposition to confront in Parliament after several years of an easy pass or, at best, half-hearted challenges to Tory policies. Several senior Labour figures – who, under Tony Blair, had long ago abandoned any of the party’s older commitments to social justice and the welfare state – beat their breasts and tore their garments at the prospect of what they called “unelectability.”

“Labour’s Darkest Hour,” screamed one op-ed in the Independent newspaper. The man they were deeming “unelectable” had just won 59.5% of the party vote – larger than Blair’s 1994 mandate. Under them, in the last General elections, Labour received just about 30% of the national vote and was practically wiped out in Scotland in addition to losing many formerly “safe” English seats. The party can hardly become more “unelectable.”

From the point in recent weeks at which polls suggested Corbyn was the surprise frontrunner, the British political establishment and media – including  liberal organs like the Guardian newspaper—had begun to sound the alarm. Publications not previously known for feminism or anti-racism began to denounce the possibility of another white man leading the Labour Party.

The sheer volume of lazy vitriol and sneering dismissal Corbyn was subjected to made clear that the established political class was seriously unnerved at the prospect of challenge to the ruling “neoliberal consensus” –  the belief that there was no alternative to unfettered capitalism and harsh austerity policies involving savage ideologically-driven cuts to public services – from a new Opposition leader. In a 30 year parliamentary career, Corbyn displayed an unflinching commitment to core progressive concerns: strong trade unions, good public healthcare, free university education, better schools, demilitarisation and economic redistribution, voting against the party leadership over 500 times.

The strategy backfired. The more vague and vituperative the smears – “anti-Semite”, “terror-sympathiser”,  “Trotskyist nutjob” and so on – emerged from the mouths of politicians and pundits, the more popular support for Corbyn swelled with long queues at public meetings he addressed, enthused young people literally hanging off the windows to get a glimpse of him.

When Corbyn’s landslide victory was finally announced on the 12th of September, the soundtrack accompanying shots of the dismayed faces of Labour grandees on television was jubilant cries of “Jez, we did!” (using the popular British diminutive for “Jeremy”).

The media attack machine has now, unsurprisingly, cranked up several notches deeming Corbyn’s shadow cabinet full of “nutjobs” and “white men” even as it includes only two other members of the parliamentary Labour left.  With a ratio of 16 women to 15 men, with two Asian women and a black woman, it is possibly the most diverse shadow cabinet in British history though Corbyn may have erred strategically in not appointing a woman to one of the four perceived “top jobs” – or offices of State, which include finance and foreign policy.

Courage of conviction

Besides an impressive campaign that brought tens of thousands of “supporters” to the Labour party – eligible to vote in the leadership elections under new rules – what lies behind the remarkable surge of grassroots sentiment that swept Corbyn to this historic backbencher victory?

The answer lies partly in a widespread hunger for and appreciation of those rare qualities in a politician: courage of conviction, political integrity, and manifest personal decency, including financial probity. His direct approach to questions emerged as “a rebuke to the political class in general”, as the commentator Gary Younge put it.

Corbyn has promised to bypass the “animal noises” and “jolly jokes” style of British parliamentary debate for substantive discussion. His manifest sincerity has played well with a public deeply tired of brazen misbehaviour by predatory financial elites and paying the price, as they see it, for this misbehaviour, bailing out banks with their taxes while Britain’s once exemplary welfare state and valuable public services has been steadily eroded in favour of rampant private wealth-making.

Corbyn’s impassioned first speech as leader laid out a different agenda: fighting the Conservative government’s attempts to “shackle democratic unions” and marketise healthcare, ending the “scourge of homelessness” and poverty, and welcoming the “desperate” human beings seeking refuge in Europe. So too eliminating “grotesque levels of global inequality and grotesque threats to our environment.” Poverty, he announced, was not inevitable.

The Indian angle

Corbyn has long taken a personal interest in matters related to India: he is one of the trustees of the Britain’s Dalit Solidarity Network and a leading supporter of an Early Day Motion in parliament in 2003 condemning the “authorities in Gujarat” for the massacres of 2002 and the attack on the country’s secular fabric.

It remains to be seen to what extent the new Labour leader’s personal campaigning interests influence his foreign policy or the Labour Party’s relationship to vociferous “Hindu rights” organisations in Britain claiming to represent Indian concerns.  The new Labour leader also espouses markedly non-establishment positions in relation to the occupation of Palestine, the Iraq war and NATO militarism more generally, nuclear policy and refugees.

For India’s voters though, there are also other resonances in the rise of Corbyn: like them, large swathes of the British public are fed up with what is essentially a two-party system at the centre with little to distinguish them in terms of economic and political alternatives, the same uninspiring and familiar cardboard cut-out options offered to them each election year. Something of the groundswell of support for the Aam Admi Party in its early days also characterises the enthusiasm for Corbyn’s brand of clean politics, although much like that party, he also is yet to build a wider social movement that might bring and keep him in power. Unlike Arvind Kejriwal, however, Corbyn is a socialist with clearly articulated opposition to the neoliberal regime.

A difficult path lies ahead for Corbyn and his supporters who have to face down opposition from the media – still branding him as a “divisive” and “leftwing” hardliner, terms rarely used to describe the current rightwing regime,  a determined and rabid ideological Tory opposition,  and most difficult of all, from within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Only building a strong and powerful popular movement – yet to emerge – will be able to prevail over this and demonstrate that another politics is, indeed, possible.

Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge.