Gary Younge
Two days before the election I wrote a column for the Guardian arguing that despite the received wisdom, the campaign of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party had shown that it was electable. I thought I’d been careful. I didn’t argue Labour would win, only that its chances could not be dismissed. Drawing on two month’s reporting in Harrow and a month in Muncie, Indiana, for last year’s elections in the United States, my point was that “electability” is not a science: the attributes that candidates and programmes need in order to win change with the times and our current times are volatile. I gave the full range of polling evidence—from Labour taking a drubbing, to a hung parliament. “It seems, from reporting and the polls,” I wrote, “that even if Labour doesn’t win under Corbyn, it is a viable electoral force.”