Iain Macwhirter’s premature obituary of the new Labour leader, while no doubt effective in reassuring the faithful, coincides with a more malign chorus, one which seeks to pour scorn on any attempt to stir up "divine discontent" from the left (Corbyn's failure hands Scotland to the SNP on a plate, Comment, October 4). It is this hegemony – of fatalism and retreat – which Corbyn and his supporters seek to counter. In eschewing hollow rhetoric and top-down policy making, Corbyn demonstrates an understanding of the patient work required at grassroots level if the events of the last few months are to be cemented in party policy and structure.
Mr Macwhirter’s failure to register the circumstances in which a left leadership finds itself reveals a readiness to summarily dismiss developments which by any account offer the UK left one of its most significant opportunities for generations.
To so quickly condemn the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of new party members galvanised by Corbyn’s campaign serves to expose the ideological and strategic grounds on which much of the nationalist case rests. In a quite different spirit, the Scottish Labour Party left invite all Scots of progressive opinion to return to a party determined to reconnect with them. In doing so, we can resist the clamour of the cynics whose principal objective is to douse the spark that Corbyn’s election has ignited.
Mike Cowley,
Editor, The Citizen,
Scottish Labour Campaign for Socialism
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