US and Europe’s left-wingers are back in the game

For years now, social democracy in the West has appeared to be in crisis. After the Great Recession, this should surely have been the moment for parties of the left and centre left.

Yet few seemed able to come up with a convincing narrative and then successfully stick to it if given the chance to take office.

Ed Miliband’s Labour Party failed to win the 2015 general election in the UK. Francois Hollande left the French presidency in May with the lowest approval ratings in the history of the Fifth Republic, and his Socialist Party is facing a rout in the current two round parliamentary elections.

Barack Obama – left wing by American standards – may have won the White House twice, but the Democrats lost governors’ mansions, state legislatures and the Senate under his leadership and now hold fewer offices nationally than they have at any time since the 1920s.

Yet in the last year, there have been two instances that have stunningly bucked this trend and could show a way forward – the Bernie Sanders phenomenon in America and the strong showing of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in Britain’s recent general election.

True, neither actually won. But had Mr Sanders clinched the Democratic nomination there is a very good chance he would have beaten Donald Trump; he certainly wouldn’t have ceded the Rust Belt states that cost Hillary Clinton the electoral college even while she won the popular vote.

In the UK, meanwhile, many see parallels with 1974, when an overconfident Conservative prime minister called an unnecessarily early election in order to strengthen a personal mandate, only to lose his parliamentary majority.

Today, Theresa May is trying to cling on, but any arrangement she comes to with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionists will still leave her with a perilously thin working majority and one so vulnerable to rebellions and by-elections that she may be forced to resign within months. In 1974, a minority Labour government took office after the Conservative prime minister stood down; held an election eight months later; and won.

This is a scenario that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the campaign, but with Labour having come so far so fast, and with the Tories so demoralised and divided, its plausibility cannot be denied.

Similarly, hardly anyone took Mr Sanders seriously when he began his presidential bid. Yet it clearly could have been him. The reason why neither Mr Corbyn nor Mr Sanders were considered realistic contenders was not just their age or their unpolished personalities and lack of sartorial flair. It is that both of them are self-declared socialists, and it has been axiomatic in both Britain and the US since the 1990s that it is impossible to win from the left, or from any position that has even the whiff of socialism about it.

The fact that that assumption seems to have been dramatically disproved is undoubtedly connected to rising levels of inequality, and that while austerity and low growth have badly affected the masses, the rich few do not appear to have suffered any drop in their standards of living. It is obvious to many that we are not all in it together.

There is also the matter of Messrs Corbyn and Sanders’ palpable authenticity - which was lacking in supposedly leftish leaders who too readily accepted that the centre of political gravity had shifted to the right.

Their trimming and tacking away from what ought to have been their core principles led to a hollowed-out managerialism that failed to stir the hearts of even their most devoted followers.

But it is also that while the programmes of the newly revitalised left may be condemned as unrealistic socialism by conservative critics, to millions of people they just look like fairness. Moreover, many of these policies used to be part of a wide political consensus.

Free university tuition - one of Labour’s proposals - existed under governments of left and right in Britain for decades, until it was abolished, controversially and somewhat ironically, under Tony Blair in 1998.

Raising the top rate of income tax to 50p in the pound – another manifesto pledge – cannot truthfully be considered a sign of lunatic radicalism either; not when one recalls that it was 60p in the pound for nine of the 11 years of Mrs Thatcher’s not noticeably pinko government.

Decent infrastructure and generous provision for citizens are also far from being outlandishly leftist aspirations.

They are the norm in the Arabian Gulf, for instance, and nobody refers to the GCC states as being left wing or socialist.

So the lesson for the left from the UK and US may be this: there are millions of voters who don’t care what you call yourself if they see that your passion is genuine and that your promise is not for some rigid ideological vision but simply for a return to the fairer societies that used to exist.

Those voters might even be a majority.