When Fenner Brockway, the Labour MP, lifelong anti-imperialist and peace activist, recalled his early involvement in the Independent Labour Party, he wrote, “On Sunday nights a meeting was conducted rather on the lines of the Labour Church Movement – we had a small voluntary orchestra, sang Labour songs and the speeches were mostly Socialist evangelism, emotion in denunciation of injustice, visionary in their anticipation of a new society.”
Fast-forward a century or so, and Brockway could be describing a Jeremy Corbyn leadership rally: the same joyfulness, fervour of conviction and ecstasy of expression, only this time clothed in the self-belief of the Labourist left, rather than Nonconformist millenarianism, and playing to a larger crowd. Corbyn’s campaign reinvented the party political rally, a form of British politicking long since presumed dead. He created a space in which the lost tribes of the British left could reunite, and new followers join the throng. Suddenly a “surge” was under way, a democratic explosion within the mainstream body politic, not safely contained outside it.
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