Corbyn happened to win a seat that year for the first time, but then again so did Blair. The Newest Left(now organized as the "Momentum" group) derives mainly from people who came out of the Occupy movement. The old Militant types(btw, I assume you'd have to agree that Liverpool hasn't had a decent local government since they were forced out, with all their successors either being right-wing Liberals or Blairite austerity freaks)played no meaningful roles in this.
The term "hard left" is not at all useful. Corbyn's not a Stalinist or a Trotskyite. And his proposals on rail renationalisation and other issues(with the sole exception of his antinuclear stance) are similar to the policies the SDP proposed in the Eighties. The man isn't calling for the forced collectivism of the Ukraine.
As to the democratic mandate...if joining the Labour Party doesn't give you any say in what the party stands for(as it hasn't since Blair took over and turned the party into The Other Tories), why even have paid memberships at all? A party is made up of the people who work to get it elected...not just the handful of people who happen to become MPs(and it was the MPs, I might remind you, that chose Micheal Foot, the epitome of "the 1983 left"
. You seem to want the overwhelming majority of the people who make up Labour to have no say whatsoever in what it stands for. If they are to have no say, what right would any Labour leader have to ask them to keep working to elect a Labour government at all? Labour was born as a party that was run differently than the others...the only one run from below, not above. No good comes in keeping the Blairite "the leader is the only one who matters" structure in place. Labour won in 1997 because the voters hated everything the Tories had done by then-not because anyone actually LIKED Blair having destroyed free speech and open debate within the party.
As to Corbyn...there are no grounds for deposing him, and the comparison of a removal process to the leadership election process is completely invalid. Corbyn has done nothing against party rules and has learned from the mistakes of the Eighties. He deserves a chance...and he has promised that he will stand down on his own if it really looks like he's dragging the party down.
The young people who flocked to Corbyn...the only leadership candidate who had any ideas, any principles, any dream of a better world in his words, anything other than "It's enough to elect something CALLED Labour" in his policy offer at all, would be driven away from politics forever if Corbyn were forced out. No one else who became Labour leader could ever manage to say anything to appeal to them. And there are no votes anyone else could bring in from anywhere else that would make up for the permanent loss of hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of the young, the poor, the dispossessed, the powerless.
It's pointless to go after anyone who voted Tory this year by "moving to the center"
which is the same thing as just becoming Tory). People who would demand reductions in the benefit cap(which also has to mean endorsing all the harassment the Tories have inflicted on the poor, since benefit can't be cut compassionately)wouldn't ever support any even mildly progressive policies on anything, and couldn't ever be persuaded to vote for Labour even if Blair were to come back. If you voted Tory this time, you have made your mind up forever. People who are comfortable with the status quo never vote for a party that says "vote for us, we'll be basically the same"-which is what Kendall, Cooper and Burnham, none of whom proposed any real break with anything important Cameron and Osborne are doing, would all base their strategy as leader on doing.
The key to winning in 2020 is to bring back those who went SNP, to win over those who voted UKIP on "shake up the system" or anti-Iraq War grounds(the party does need to officially apologize for EVER joining Bush's imperial invasion), to cut heavily into the increased vote the Greens took in 2015, and to turn nonvoters into voters. Only Corbyn will try to do any of those things.
It's a question of whether Labour is to be a living, vital, creative and inspirational party(which it can only do if internal democracy is restored and the party conference is once again controlled by the rank-and-file rather than being the market-Stalinist "transmission handle" it's been under Blair(the kind of place where elderly men were arrested just for shouting antiwar slogans), or if it is to remain an empty shell that forever settles for power-without-convictions, power-without-ideals, power-without-dreams(or that assumes that getting power HAS to mean standing for as little as possible).
A non-idealistic Labour Party can't be worth having. Or electing. Mundane service provision and less of it isn't of any value.
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