Jezza's the one.

Make your mind up time is rapidly approaching and my ballot paper for the Labour Party Leadership Election has to be completed and returned by next Thursday. Me? I'm going with my heart and putting my X against Jezza.

Many say that a vote for the man is a vote for the Tories in the next election. That may be true, but in the meantime, I think it could mean a number of things.

1. It means that for the first time since they were elected there will be a truly robust opposition to the Conservative party in power. It means that at the PM's Question Time, Cameron will have to answer to someone who can actually challenge the underlying logic of his policies, not just waffle about the details or degrees of his austerity plans.
2. It means that the press cannot ignore and will have to deal with those clashes, and an alternative way of thinking about the economy and social policy will have to be reported and discussed in the public sphere.
3. It means that five years from now, and I may be being very optimistic here, the electorate will have a wider perspective with which to discuss their options. It will no longer be confined to a debate about how much we allow the upper 10% to dominate the landscape but whether we allow them to continue to do so.
4. It means that discussing what’s best for society as a whole – what is in the common good – will no longer be a quaint, faintly embarrassing eccentricity. It could become mainstream.

For the record, I’m not in agreement with all of Corbyn’s ideas. A lot of them, yes, but not all of them. Many I feel are valid, but some ignore the realities of a global economy. Further, I’m not sure that he is the right person to head a Labour government in power.  But that is not what we are facing for the next five years. What I know for sure is that none of the other candidates, to my mind, are up to the task of offering the kind of challenging opposition to the present government I think we need or have shown the ideological capacity to broaden a debate about what kind of society we want. Corbyn is, in my view, the perfect person to do just that. He has enough distance from the entrenched sites of power and a robust enough ideological education to be familiar with the structure of alternative possibilities. Right now, we don’t need someone who knows how to be a slightly less greedy, vaguely kinder capitalist; we need someone who knows that capitalism isn’t the only way of ordering the universe. Not because we’re going to do away with it, but because having the two poles there in the public sphere for discussion, we can see a wider set of choices along the spectrum.

This is what I want for the next generations: more possibilities and greater opportunities than the present one and, what I know for a certainty, is that won’t be possible unless we overturn the broadly held myths of trickle-down economics and the efficacy of the kind of selective  ‘austerity’ to which many supposedly ‘liberal’ governments now adhere. Neoliberalism doesn't work and we need someone standing up in Parliament pointing that out.

And that's why I’m voting for Jezza.