On Monday morning, Lord Warner, a Labour Peer, quit his job and issued what the press called a “damning” indictment of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. He cited the “calamitous decline” of the Labour leadership quality, and claimed Corbyn’s approach would contribute to Labour’s further decline. However, being a nice man, he vowed to fight for “progressive” causes, which he felt able to do much more efficiently without Corbyn’s Labour. Warner’s resignation was a masterclass in rethinking the meaning of words and phrases - the “calamitous decline” now redefined to mean “landslide election of a Labour leader with a bigger majority than Blair,” and Warner’s “progressive” causes now meaning “introducing a paying membership scheme for the NHS,” (as Tuesday’s Independent reported.)

The fact is, every (right-wing) man and his (presumably further right) dog have had it in for Corbyn since day one, and doing so has involved a lot of language redefinition. Corbyn is “unelectable”, now meaning “has won seven parliamentary elections, and over 60 per cent of the leadership vote,”; Corbyn is “unpatriotic,” which means “he went to a constituency surgery and therefore missed a Rugby match”. Corbyn is an “extremist,” i.e. “advocates policies which would be fairly centrist Labour ideals in ‘45”. But the point of this article isn’t about the ridiculous amount of nonsense thrown at Corbyn, but more about what it means for Labour. It means a change, certainly, but is that a good thing?

Change has really hung over Corbyn’s victory. New Labourites have claimed that a Corbyn-led party will be trapped in the past, arguing for the politics of the past. That argument has some sense in it - Corbyn has more in common with the Labour of Attlee and Bevin than Blair or Brown ever did - but the fact is that this kind of politics is relevant today. The Coalition and the Tories after them have set about dismantling the welfare state. Time and time again, we have seen government measures cause suffering among the weakest members of society. Over a million people relied on foodbanks in 2014-15; recently, we saw the government cut tax credits, despite personal promises by Cameron that this wouldn’t happen. The NHS has been subject to stealth privatisation, and as the recent Junior Doctors demonstrations showed, our health services are being run into the ground. In light of this, the kind of politics advocated by a Corbyn Labour - committed to free healthcare, to protecting and rebuilding the welfare state - is really what we need. These ideas aren’t old, they aren’t the ideas of the past. If anything, Tory attempts to marketise education, healthcare and the like are dragging us back into the past; Labour, really, is having to repeat itself.

Labour is changing and for good reason. I find it hard to understand why people hark back to the days of Blair - there’s a four letter word that seems to undermine everything Labour did and that’s “Iraq” - but I strongly suspect the reason Labour won three elections under Blair wasn’t because the electorate approved of Blair, but because we wanted to keep the Tories out, because we knew the risk a Tory government would bring. And here lies the crux of the matter: Labour needs to change because it cannot rely on a core of working class or left votes to keep it in power. Ed Miliband didn’t lose the election because he was too left wing - it was because he’d lost sight of Labour’s base, which is unions, working families, the oppressed. In the last election, Miliband’s “bit of this, bit of that,” left/right manifesto didn’t really ring true with anyone, apart from whoever made that God-awful stone. Left voters, like myself, voted Green, or SNP, or Plaid. Much as I hate UKIP, they did manage to build on working class anger to siphon votes away from Labour. Labour was pulled apart because it had become indistinguishable. It had become hollow.

The world really hasn’t changed that much; we still face the marginalisation of the working class, skyrocketing inequality, discrimination towards LGBT+ people, involvement in costly and pointless wars - these aren’t new threats. The same issues arise time and time again with new faces. And Labour’s greatest failing was that it wasn’t willing to admit that its founding principles - minimum wage, social housing, free education and healthcare, the values of community and compassion - aren’t old fashioned or timeless. These are principles that matter regardless of the age, regardless of the economic climate, because they are about basic human decency and respect for our fellow citizens. If Labour’s “change” is to put those principles into the foreground of its politics once more, to fight against austerity, to defend the welfare state and so on, this can be no bad thing.

Will it “work”? I can’t say. Who knows where we’ll be in 2020; our man Jezza could be walking into Downing Street. We could have left the EU. We might even get another season of Firefly. I don’t know. No one does, and trying to determine now what’s going to happen five years from now is pointless. But what I do know is that if the Labour Party is going to remain relevant - in any world - it needs to be the voice of the voiceless.