The British Labor MP, Jeremy Corbyn, was an unswerving opponent of Tony Blair when in 2003 the then Labour Party leader and UK prime minister declared war on Iraq.

Who could have imagined that 12 years on Blair would be a political pariah and the dissident leftist Corbyn would be frontrunner in the contest to choose a new leader of the Labour Party?

This, however, is the improbable posture of affairs following the defeat of the Labour Party in the May general election and the resignation of its most recent leader, Ed Miliband.

It is the view of Blair and of Corbyn’s three rivals for the Labour leadership that Corbyn would lead the Labour Party straight to oblivion. With many others, they believe that Labour has learned nothing from the defeat of Miliband, whose mildly left-wing platform was rejected in the election in favor of a Conservative government led by Prime Minister David Cameron and pledged to continue the austerity program of the previous Conservative-Liberal Democrat government formed by Cameron in 2010.

Corbyn would not be contesting the Labour leadership had not several Labour politicians moved to nominate him in the conviction that the election contest needed to reflect the full spectrum of left-wing opinion.

A former Blair adviser excoriates those MPs as ‘morons.’ Few guessed that there was significant support for Corbyn, both in the trade union movement that has a large say in Labour leadership elections and among the membership of the Labour Party, which since May has seen an influx of youthful recruits. The embrace of free markets and deference to US foreign policy that defined ‘Blairism’ is evidently a closed chapter in the party’s history.

Whether Corbyn could become leader of a Labour Party that would espouse the radical leftism of Greece’s Syriza Party and Spain’s Podemos Party remains to be seen. What is extraordinary is the venemous reaction to his candidacy of the Labour hierarchy and much of the media. Labour’s interim leader, Harriet Harman, maintains that party must respect the verdict of the British public in electing a Conservative government committed to fiscal rectitude. Yet Harman speaks as if David Cameron won a thumping victory in May. In reality, his party is in power on the basis of 37 percent of those who voted and a mere 25 percent of the total electorate. No government in the democratic world enjoys such exiguous popular endorsement.

The truth is that British political debate is conducted without meaningful reference to millions of low-paid and unemployed people who do not vote. Britain may currently be governed by the Conservative Party but at a deeper level it is governed by a rigid neo-liberal dogma that portrays leftists as deluded dinosaurs. Yet behind the hysterical denunciation of Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy lurks perhaps an establishment fear that somebody like him might reach out to those who feel disempowered, with possibly seismic consequences. After all, Scottish people voted in great numbers last May for a Scottish National Party whose position on welfare cuts and British foreign policy is much the same as Corbyn’s.

The blistering attack on austerity by the precocious 20 year-old Scottish Nationalist MP, Mhairi Black, in her maiden parliamentary speech, has been viewed online more than 10 million times.

David Cameron has had much to say about national security, serving notice on British Muslims that they are still not doing enough to tackle extremism and flagging up the threat to social cohesion posed by Muslim failure to integrate. Cameron declines to address the threat to cohesion inherent in the vast inequalities of the country made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that goes by the increasingly implausible name of the ‘United Kingdom.’

It is not just alienated young Muslims who feel no affinity with Cameron’s government, dominated as it is by metropolitan white Englishmen of immoderate wealth.

Jeremy Corbyn lives modestly and cleaves to a clear-cut set of socialist principles. For years, successive British governments have emulated the Conservative prime minister of the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, in seeking to purge the national consciousness of the very idea of socialism and entrench the belief that there is no alternative to neo-liberalism. The attempted purgation appears to have failed.