As the percentage of people from poor and working class backgrounds shrinks, whilst the percentage going to university inexorably rises, Labour is going to have to somehow or other drag it's membership into the mainstream, or become an irrelevance.
Neither Labour Party constituency organisation I've had anything to do with for an extended period of time had a significant working class membership. Instead they were mostly a mixture of middle-class people, a lot of whom worked in the public sector or who were the kind of Guardian-reading lefties much beloved of cartoonists and caricaturists.
The Labour Party, for all its rhetoric has not been the "party of the working man" since well before my time.
Unless all we want are two increasingly right wing parties pandering to the public (which is, IMO essentially what we've had since the early 90's) then political parties have to start to inform and form opinion rather than simply tracking it. As much as I dislike Margaret Thatcher and the way she was as effective at "harrying the North" as William the Conqueror, she led rather than followed.
If the Labour Party wants to be in any way relevant IMO it needs to stop being the Conservative Party with different MPs and needs to forge its own identity. If the British public show that they're not interested in the Labour Party's core values then I guess the Conservatives will continue to form the government up until the increasing levels of economic, social and health inequalities they will inevitably create finally cause a political seismic shift. If it never happens then the Conservatives can continue in government in perpetuity because they'll be doing a good enough job for enough people.
No party in any pluralist democracy can hope to remain competitive if all it does is appeal to those remaining in a shrinking demographic.
One of the things that has surprised me is how different people in the 15-25 year old age bracket are from the Thatcher Generation like me. They are concerned about completely different things, take a much different view of politics and approach things in a different way.
Obviously I don't know every young adult personally but my, predominantly middle class, friends and acquaintances' children and their friends seem to be overall much more left wing than their parents, and more left wing than I remember us being at their age.
With honing, there's no reason why a Corbyn-like message couldn't appeal to this demographic. His eco-credentials seem sound. Younger people, not having grown up in the cold war, are less wedded to nuclear weapons than the population at large
http://www.basicint.org/sites/default/files/tridentpoliticspublicopinion_basicjul2013.pdf
There seems to be a space for a eco-aware, compassionate, anti-Trident party in British politics. Of course that was the Lib-Dems before the coalition
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Far from despising New Labour, they should be learning from it. Even if he survives to get a thrashing at the next election, once Corbyn has been and gone, the Labour Party will need to centre itself in a place where it can win elections, or choose to leave that role to others. Maybe it has to have a Corbyn moment to understand this.....which is a pity, because one thought that having a Foot moment would have been enough to do the trick.
I disagree, continuing to chase to the right will merely result in something like New Labour which, for all my high hopes in 1997 turned out to be nothing more than a Conservative government but without any kind of fiscal responsibility (here I'm referring specifically to PFI - New Labour's worst initiative). If Britain wants, and continues to want a Conservative government then it should elect one and not some Ersatz which tries to do the same thing, less effectively in different coloured ties.
