Three pounds. That was the price of a ballot paper in 2015 — the cost to vote in the Labour leadership election. I paid it with a private promise to myself: if Corbyn wins, I join the party. Not as a floating voter. Not as someone hedging bets. But as a committed member of something I believed could be different.
Corbyn won. I kept my promise. I joined.
He arrived at the right moment, which was not a coincidence. Five years of austerity had done their work. Not the austerity that was economically necessary — there was cheap money available, historically cheap, and the choice not to use it was political, not fiscal. The choice was to take the money out of the people who had the least of it: to close Sure Start centres, freeze tax credits, run down mental health provision, replace the welfare state with a punitive bureaucracy designed to exhaust claimants into giving up. The result was not a balanced budget. The result was millions of people who understood, viscerally if not always articulately, that something had been done to them deliberately. Corbyn named it. That was why they showed up.
In 2017, I went to Plymouth to campaign. I knocked on doors, spoke to strangers, listened to what people wanted. What I found surprised me — not because it contradicted the narrative being told about Corbyn, but because that narrative was so comprehensively false. The streets were alive with something I hadn't seen in years: hope. Young people, particularly, were engaged in a way that made the "unelectable" story sound like the invention it was. They believed change was possible. They showed up.
Labour secured 40% of the vote in that election. Forty percent. They came within 56 seats of a majority. If the story about Corbyn was true — if he really was unelectable, a liability, a personal failure as a leader — the numbers don't support it. He exceeded expectations catastrophically. The institutions knew this. They also knew that if he ever got a majority, their world would change fundamentally.
In 2019, I went to Southampton. Same mission, same belief that something could shift. What I found instead was sadness. Not disappointment in policy, but something deeper: the wearing-down of hope. People had watched, over two years, as the party machinery turned on its own leader. They had seen the antisemitism row weaponised — and it was weaponised. But Corbyn's instinct to build broad coalitions rather than discipline his movement left him exposed. His own position on Israel and Palestine was always more careful than the most maximalist voices around him. The institutions didn't distinguish between the two. That wasn't an accident. They had watched the internal sabotage. They had seen the MPs — people elected on Labour tickets — work to undermine the person their members had chosen. By 2019, the energy had drained away. People on doorsteps weren't angry. They were tired.
Labour got 32% in 2019. A defeat, certainly. But this was after years of coordinated institutional rebellion, not because Corbyn suddenly became unelectable. Four years later, Starmer would win a landslide with 34% — a lower vote share, winning on seat distribution rather than superior electoral appeal. Yet somehow 34% was proof of electability in a way that 40% never was. The narrative changes depending on who it serves.
I stayed in the Labour party after 2019. Not because I believed Corbyn could return. But because I held onto a thin hope that someone from the left might one day emerge to lead it. That one day, the promise I'd made to myself in 2015 might be kept.
Here's what the institutions didn't understand, or what they understood perfectly and couldn't tolerate: Corbyn was a reluctant leader. He didn't impose vision from above. He embodied what people already wanted — a clean break from Thatcherism, from the machinery that had ground down communities for forty years. He was a skeptic of European structures, consistent in that skepticism for decades, and he wouldn't change his spots to suit the party apparatus. On Brexit, he let members decide rather than imposing discipline from the top. He was, in the plainest sense, a democrat.
But here's what made him truly threatening: Thatcher once said her greatest achievement was Tony Blair. She meant it. Blair proved that you could neuter the left by making it accept the Thatcher settlement. The privatisations, the union-busting framework, the neoliberal consensus — Blair administrated all of it, just with a social democratic gloss. That was total victory. Even the opposition party, when it came to power, would accept Thatcher's fundamental architecture.
Corbyn was the first serious attempt to break that consensus since 1979. Not to manage it better, not to soften its edges — but to actually go beyond it. Every MP, every official, every apparatus person who had built their career within the Blairite settlement had to resist that. Because a genuine clean break didn't mean a different kind of neoliberalism. It meant undoing forty years of what they had built.
For people who had voted for him, this was the point. Finally, someone who wasn't triangulating, wasn't selling a story, wasn't manipulating. Someone who actually trusted people to know what they wanted.
For the institutions — for the MPs, the officials, the media commentators — this was a fatal vulnerability. You cannot manage a reluctant democrat the way you can manage an ambitious careerist who accepts the rules of the game. He wouldn't play. So they broke him.
The treachery was dressed up as pragmatism. "He's unelectable." "He's a security risk." "He can't manage the party." All of it designed to disguise the simple fact: the institutions chose to protect themselves rather than build something different. They had the votes to remove him (they always do, in a hierarchical party structure). They had the media megaphone. They had the loyalty of the machinery. So they used those tools.
What they replaced him with was someone they could mold. Starmer used to be somebody — a human rights lawyer with conviction, someone who stood for something. But the machine knew how to shape him. How to sand down the edges. How to make him into what the party apparatus needed. By the time he reached power, he wasn't a person with principles anymore. He was a vessel.
Corbyn was somebody who remained somebody. The institutions tried to mold him, tried to break him into their preferred shape, but he refused. He wouldn't change his spots. He wouldn't discipline himself into the machinery. He stayed true to what he believed — a democrat, consistent, unmanageable.
It is worth being precise about what kind of radical he was — because it wasn't the kind that frightens horses. He was not a street fighting man. There was no performance in it, no heat, no appetite for the confrontation itself. What he had was something rarer and in the end more threatening: patience. For thirty or forty years, before anyone was paying attention, he had been saying the same things. About inequality, about foreign policy, about what happens to communities when the state decides they don't matter. He didn't shift when it was inconvenient. He didn't dress it up when the audience changed. He told his truth — quietly, consistently, without requiring anyone to applaud him for it. A man like that cannot be bought and cannot be redirected. You can only remove him.
That same quality had a cost. He could say there was no place for antisemitism in the Labour Party — and he meant it. But he couldn't bring himself to name names, to pick out individuals and expel them. The coalition-builder couldn't become the enforcer. The man who didn't want power for himself also struggled to wield it against others. His enemies exploited that. They took a real failure of nerve and inflated it into a defining moral catastrophe. Which was not fair. But it was effective.
The party machinery that eventually expelled Corbyn himself had always had the tools to expel antisemites. That it chose not to use those tools until they could be turned against him tells you everything about whose interests the machinery was actually serving.
That's why they had to destroy him. And that's why Starmer could be made leader: because he was willing to be remolded by forces that Corbyn would have resisted.
When Corbyn stood down after 2019, he declined to endorse any candidate for the leadership. McDonnell backed Long-Bailey, the continuity left candidate. Corbyn said nothing. This too was entirely in character: the reluctant leader, unwilling to impose his preference even at the moment of succession. He had never wanted to be king. He wasn't going to be kingmaker either.
The cost didn't fall on them. It fell on people like me — people who paid three pounds and made a promise, who showed up in Plymouth and Southampton, who kept their membership alive on the hope that maybe, one day, the promise might be kept. The institutions walked away intact. Many prospered. The people who believed paid the price.
On Friday evenings, I go to the Tiger for a drink. I talk to people who were enthusiasts in 2015, 2016, 2017 — the same years I was. Many of them have adopted the institutional narrative now: it was a personal failing. Corbyn's weakness. His inability to lead. The big man couldn't deliver.
The anger didn't disappear when Corbyn did. Anger doesn't disappear. What disappeared was the left-wing outlet for it. Brexit was already done. Farage was already circling. Reform was already being assembled. The millions who had believed in 2017 that change was possible through the Labour Party had watched, by 2019, as the party destroyed their hope from the inside. With nowhere left to go on the left, the same grievance — the same accurate sense that something had been done to them deliberately — flowed rightward. The institutions got what they wanted: a Labour Party that accepted the Thatcher settlement. They also got Farage. These things tend to travel together.
But that's the wrong frame entirely. It was never about believing in a big man. It was about millions of people — young people in Plymouth, exhausted people in Southampton, people on doorsteps across the country — who wanted something genuinely different. Not a personality cult. A clean break from forty years of Thatcher's principles embedded in Blair's machinery.
Corbyn didn't fail those millions. The institutions failed them. The institutions chose to protect the Blairite settlement rather than let millions of people have what they voted for.
I don't believe it was a personal failing. I believe it was institutional treachery against the will of millions who wanted change. And I believe — increasingly — that if the Labour party cannot be a vehicle for that change, then its end might be the right thing to happen.
Because what is an institution worth if it exists only to preserve itself, and in doing so, betrays the millions of people who believed it could be different?