Daily catch-up: the Corbyn social movement is an optical illusion

David Aaronovitch had a characteristically fine (translation: I agreed with it) column in The Times yesterday (pay wall). He wrote:

Even quite sensible people have written that Jeremy Corbyn has (cliché du jour) “galvanised” the party. You may not agree with him or John McDonnell on everything but they have brought about a rejuvenation, a refreshment of Labour: 60,000 new members since JC was elected! An infusion of energetic new blood. And that, surely, has to be good. It has to help to put Labour on the path to victory.

He doesn't think so. All it means is that more people fall prey to the Activists' Delusion, namely that protest is a good way to persuade people who might agree with you that you have a point.

Actually, it is worse than that. The idea that Corbyn has galvanised a new generation is an optical illusion. Maria Grasso of Sheffield University has a forthcoming book called Generations, Political Participation and Social Change in Western Europe, which finds:

The youngest generations – those that underwent political socialisation or came of age during the 1980s and 1990s – are much less politicised than older generations. [And] younger generations are also less likely to engage in unconventional/informal/extra-institutional modes of engagement than those coming of political age in the more radical 1960s and ‘70s. Such modes include demonstrating, joining occupations or becoming engaged with the actions of ‘social movement organisations’.

(Thanks to Spinning Hugo for spotting this post.)

Corbyn's success in bringing together 300,000 people (the 250,000 who voted for him and most of the 60,000 who have joined Labour since) was a coincidence. It was the product of the failure of political education by New Labour, the collapse of the machine politics of the Brownites, the holding of a leadership election too soon after a surprise defeat, and the accidental candidacy of Corbyn himself. The idea that this "momentum" can be sustained by forming yet another umbrella organisation, Momentum, would be laughable if it were not so sinister. This is the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, designed to defend the doctrinal orthodoxy of the hard left and to root out the 40 per cent who didn't support St (my apologies: the Rt Hon) Jeremy.

• Book news: I have a review of Call Me Dave, by Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott, and Andy McSmith has a very fine (translation as before) review of Volume 2 of Charles Moore's official biography of Margaret Thatcher. I am told that the subtitle, Everything She Wants, is a Wham! song from 1984, which seems fitting.

• And finally, thanks to Moose Allain ‏for this:

"Yesterday I saw a couple of buzzards grazing in a field. 'Couple' is an assumption on my part. They may well have been strangers."