Jez we can? Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership surge represents popular frustration with ‘no alternative’ politics

He was ruled out as a 66-year-old maverick, a political dinosaur who was expected to come a distant fourth.

Indeed, Jeremy Corbyn began the Labour leadership contest with bookmakers giving him odds of 100/1 to be victorious.

But just four weeks after his nomination – in which some MPs “lent” support only to spur debate – the veteran left-winger is now 5/1 to win and two shock polls yesterday indicated that he will come first.

Will the Islington North MP, who is so committed to socialism that he reportedly attended a political meeting the day after his mother died, actually secure the leadership though?

Probably not. Some of his opponents would surely prefer to drop out of the race than allow it - and Labour’s new one-member-one-vote system is likely to factor in members, affiliates and registered supporters’ second, third and even fourth preferences into the total figure if the winning candidate cannot pass a 50% threshold.

Yet what Corbyn’s surge does demonstrate is that the party’s activists share a popular, nationwide mood of frustration with politics in general and Labour in particular.

Many people feel alienated and angered by what they view as an overarching political consensus that seems to scream: “There’s no alternative.”

I’ll give you three examples of how the toxic mantra of defeatism has become entrenched, although there are many, many more.

There is a sense, which most MPs share either gleefully or reluctantly, that there is no alternative to the powerful business elite’s race-to-the-bottom mentality that pits us all against each other, squeezes those at the bottom hardest and shovels ever more wealth and power to those at the top.

Amid ever rising inequality – with the richest 1% seeing their incomes grow four times faster than the remaining 99% during the last 36 years – the illusion of getting marginally ahead, even if it is only because your neighbour has been made poorer by government attacks on benefits, is about the best many people can hope for and they have resigned themselves to this apparent certainty.

There is also a sense that there is no alternative to domination by the City, despite the fact that, even during the boom years between 2002 and 2008, the long neglected manufacturing industry contributed twice as much tax as the tax-dodging finance sector and employed a great many more people.

Indeed, in its entire history, British manufacturing has never received as much public subsidy as the £1.16trillion bank bailout in 2008, which was gifted despite the City’s traditional contempt for the state and insistence on being left alone.

And, finally, there is a sense that, even though the privatisation of the utilities and the railways has been a demonstrable failure, there is no alternative.

The Conservatives, of course, are the most natural political representatives of this free market fundamentalist worldview, which is often described as neo-liberalism because the ideology lauds Victorian “liberal” ideal of untrammelled corporate power.

Yet Labour too have been seen to accept it and certainly did not challenge this attitude while kissing the feet of those, like City bosses and their media allies, who will fight tooth and claw to maintain the status quo and their vested power.

Andy Burnham, who remains the frontrunner despite the recent polls, best sums this problem up when he says Labour “went along with too much” and now “need to look like we believe in things again”.

The triumphant Conservatives have been busily crowing that Labour’s defeat was because it deviated too far from the “no alternative” mantra with modest challenges to free market orthodoxy such as an energy price freeze and limited rent controls.

Yet millions of voters know they didn’t distinguish themselves enough – and duly stayed at home or deserted Labour for the SNP, Greens or, indeed, UKIP, a party dominated by ex-Tories and millionaires who want to continue slashing public services and taxes for the rich but, at least, represented some kind of alternative.

A few voted Conservative too because, faced with too meagre an offering from a Labour Party cowed into austerity and a failure to refute blame for the financial crisis, they went with the devil they knew and the party that would give them the best hope of squeezing themselves ahead amid the unchecked framework of growing inequality.

Reconnecting with these different groups of voters is the route to Labour victory.

The electorate has no deep love for the Conservatives, but far too many voters have become fed up by what Labour has become.

Yet Labour right-wingers, best represented by Liz Kendall, are determined to believe the only way to win is to turn the clock back to an era in party history that too many voters are repulsed by.

A lot has changed even since 2010 and, given the collapse in vote in many of Labour’s heartlands, if the party doesn’t return more fully to its instincts for social justice and away from the privatisation and cuts agenda, it faces not just another defeat in 2020 but extinction.

Support for Jeremy Corbyn reflects this fear, a growing anger over “no alternative” politics and a hope that, given a real opposition, the Tories’ current triumphalism might turn into the last dreadful blast of Thatcherism and finally be replaced with something better.

Many of us considering voting for Corbyn (and I am among them, even though I supported David Miliband last time because he seemed so much more “prime ministerial”) know full well how much he would be battered by the press and other vested interests if he was elected leader.

But, at the very least, we also know that we would be standing up for our principles and not merely forever having to defend the way someone chews his bacon sandwiches.