On Monday, Momentum founder and chair Jon Lansman told the assembled members of Cambridge Universities’ Labour Club that “now is a time of greater optimism” than ever before, and “not least because of the election of Jeremy Corbyn”.

The lifelong political activist, a close confidant of the late Tony Benn, began his talk by arguing that the current political climate represented a “major battle” but that it was also a “fantastic opportunity which we shouldn’t miss”.

He claimed that this had been caused by “the tremendous disillusionment and disenchantment with politics and politicians of all types”, adding that “I think you can see it quite clearly in the declining level of support for all major parties over a long period”.

Lansman opined that such disillusionment was “universal” and that “we’ve just seen the effect of it in the US”, where the situation is “the equivalent of Yvette Cooper losing to Nigel Farage”.

“It is a terribly worrying period. You see the far-right doing so well across Europe, because of the failure of establishment politicians to deliver to people what they expect, which is rising living standards.”

“The failure to protect people from the effects of globalisation, the insecurity and uncertainty that that brings, and unfortunately people have looked to the Right for those kinds of responses.”

Lansman concluded his appraisal of the current political environment by stating that “while there is optimism, there is good reason for deep concern in this country and across the Western world”.

He claimed that he was surprised by Corbyn’s success in winning the Labour leadership: “My expectation was that if Jeremy got onto the ballot paper, we would do very well, but by very well I thought that would be 35, 40 per cent of the vote.”

The Labour Leader’s victory represented a “fantastic upsurge of support that we could not have predicted”, according to Lansman.

He was critical of the last Labour government, arguing that “the combination of talking tough [on immigration and asylum seekers] while perhaps doing something nearer the right thing has actually created a climate of opinion that enabled UKIP to do so well”.

He also criticised the behaviour of Labour MPs in the wake of Corbyn’s victory, who saw it as a “threatening kind of shock”, but stopped short of advocating for mandatory reelection of MPs on the grounds of party unity.

Lansman, who was a key member of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy in the 1970s and 1980s, also highlighted what he characterised as a “party machine that was “incredibly centralised” with “very little effective party democracy”, creating a system in which “policy came from the top, strategy came from the top, everything came from the top”.

On the issue of the party’s declining poll numbers and Corbyn’s record unpopularity, he insisted that the leader’s policies had a “lot of resonance with the public” and while conceding that Labour has “an uphill struggle”, he emphasised that “the situation that Britain is in is desperate”.

He attributed Corbyn’s poll numbers to having had “a bitter battle in the Labour Party” in the last year since the leader’s election. He emphasised that he “did not want to have a leadership election in the summer”, and that the race “damaged the party”.