One of the strangest things about Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to the leadership is that nobody’s quite clear as to who the people are who made it happen. Many commentators have made lazy and inaccurate assumptions about the class backgrounds of the new recruits, and the prevalence of hardened Left activists has been greatly overstated. There is a vague acceptance on all sides that a lot of them are young (the Left finds this encouraging; the Right, inexpressibly disgusting). Of course, they’re more likely than most to identify as “Leftwing”. Beyond that, observers have found fairly little to agree upon.

If we’ve been relatively starved of definitive research on the exact demographics of Corbyn supporters, what we have had is plenty of minutely detailed psychoanalyses of the man and his supporters. Helen Lewis kicked this off in a New Statesman piece last July, diagnosing support for Corbyn as an example of what some commentators call “virtue signalling”. Allister Heath at the Telegraph told us to “get off Twitter and read a book instead.” And more recently Marina Hyde, in a typically acerbic Guardian column, branded Corbyn’s backers (or “Corbynistas” – who, after all, would rather be associated with revolutionary Leftists than with murderous narcoterrorists?) as being vitriolic tribalists driven by “an innate confidence allied to a blithe anti-intellectualism”. Continue reading →