Since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in September 2015, certain things things have become very clear.

Firstly, tremendous advances have been made under his leadership. These include:

Membership. There has been a big surge in the size of the Labour Party. Huge numbers of people have been inspired to join and the membership has grown to well over over half a million.

Elections. All four parliamentary by-elections which have taken place during this time have been won. They were Labour seats already but three saw a big increase in the share of the vote. The four mayoral elections have all been won (including in two cities where the sitting mayors were not Labour). There was a good performance in the local elections in May.

Government policy reverses. While Jeremy has led Labour in opposition, there have been a substantial number of policy U-turns by the conservative government. These have been on issues such as forcing all schools to become academies, cutting Personal Independence Payments for disabled people, tax credit cuts, and many others.

Setting the agenda. During Jeremy’s leadership, the whole terms of political debate have shifted. A year ago, his was one of the few parliamentary voices opposing austerity and he was ridiculed for it. Now, just about everybody claims to be against austerity. Even the Conservative government has pulled back from Cameron and Osborne’s rhetoric.

Secondly, after his election Jeremy adopted an inclusive ‘broad church’ approach. He appointed a shadow cabinet representative of all strands of opinion within the Parliamentary Labour Party. It was entirely open to the PLP to unite behind the leadership in good faith and for all sections of the party to retain some influence on policy and decision-making. If such an approach had been adopted, Labour would have been on course for an excellent performance at the next general election.

Thirdly, however, it seems many in the PLP could not come to terms with the new direction of the party. They simply could not accept the overwhelming choice of the members. Along with their allies in the party apparatus and many sections of the media, they plotted and schemed to oust Jeremy from the first day. Their tactics initially included negative briefings, manufacturing controversies over trivial non-issues (what he wears, whether or not he sings the national anthem, etc), and trying to create a negative perception of his parliamentary performances (PMQs, Trident, Syria). This campaign has culminated in the failed coup of recent weeks. Enormous efforts were made to remove Jeremy by non-constitutional means. First there was the campaign of orchestrated resignations from the shadow cabinet and the vote of no confidence. When that didn’t work, there was a concerted attempt at psychological harassment, bullying, and intimidation. That didn’t break him so the coup plotters were forced to challenge him in an election. It almost goes without saying that this was alongside a desperate attempt to stop Jeremy having an automatic right to be on the ballot paper. And when that failed there was another attempt to do the same, this time via a court of law.

So now we have a leadership election and the Blairites have put up Owen Smith. Their attempt to minimize the margin of defeat has five main strands:

1. Denial and denigration of the the successes. Growth in membership? That’s just Trotskyite infiltrators (as if there were hundreds of thousands of Trotskyites – more than the combined membership of all other political parties in Britain – wandering around who were just waiting for this so they could all join the Labour Party). Winning parliamentary by-elections? That’s just because of good local candidates, nothing to do with Corbyn, and anyway, they were safe Labour seats. Local elections? The results were terrible, you’re just looking at them wrong! Government U-turns? That’s because of the House of Lords or Tory rebels, nothing to do with Corbyn.

2. A massive operation to disenfranchise potential Corbyn voters on spurious pretexts. Anybody who has joined the party in the last six months has been arbitrarily banned from voting (despite the Labour website telling them before they joined that one of the benefits of joining was the right to vote in leadership elections). This excludes well over 100000 people. They are also trawling people’s social media profiles looking for pretexts to deny people the vote e.g. not being sufficiently respectful. The Labour NEC seems to have given up caring about how this looks. It seems to accept that being seen to be dictatorial is a price worth paying for the sake of excluding Corbyn supporters.

3. A relentless smear campaign. The idea seems to be to throw as much mud as possible – no matter how far-fetched, no matter how tenuous the connection to reality – and hope that some of it sticks. Hence we are told that the Corbyn campaign is misogynistic, that Corbynism is a cult, that Corbyn supporters are homophobic, they are racist, that they are violently thuggish. Corbyn himself, we are told is “not a leader”, he is too weak, he is too ruthless, he is a throwback to the 70s or 80s, etc. So a group of 44 female Labour MPs publishes an open letter calling on Jeremy to do more about escalating abuse and hostility, an MP moans that Jeremy threatened to phone his dad, another MP complains about unauthorized entry into her office, and so on.

4. A draconian ban on local Labour Party meetings (except for very tightly controlled nomination meetings). This makes it difficult for members to criticize or object to any of these procedures or to engage in collective discussion, and ensures that their primary source of news and information remains an anti-Corbyn mainstream media.

5. Owen Smith claiming to be more Corbyn than Corbyn himself. It’s somewhat amusing to watch but he has started telling us he is a socialist, or that he is “massively to the left” of Tony Blair (neither of which Jeremy has ever needed to say about himself). He even suggested that Jeremy was a bit like Blair.

So will these tactics work? It seems unlikely. At the time of writing, 63 CLPs have put in supporting nominations for one or other of the candidates. Of the 38 in this list which either nominated Jeremy or did not nominate anybody in last year’s leadership election, 33 have gone for Corbyn and only 5 for Smith. Interestingly, of the 25 who nominated Burnham, Cooper, or Kendall last time round, this time 18 have nominated Corbyn and only 7 have backed Smith. It’s difficult to be sure but it seems possible that Jeremy would win even if voting was confined only to those who voted for candidates other than him last time.

That is not to say we should be complacent. There is a huge task ahead for those of us who want Labour to win the next general election and Jeremy to be Prime Minister. Once this leadership election is over we’ll need to build the nation-wide campaigning infrastructure to ensure victory in 2020 (or whenever it is). But in the meantime we need to ensure the second Corbyn landslide is as big as possible. The bigger the win, the less scope there will be for the hard-line Blairites to make trouble and the less likely members of the PLP will be to be misled into further destabilization attempts.

This site hopes to make a small contribution to discussing and analysing developments as they happen.