The Corbyn ‘phenomenon’

A tragedy is being played out on the outskirts of fortress Britain where refugees attempting to escape conflict and misery have gathered.

Values of tolerance and social justice are being trashed in Downing Street, by a Prime Minister who is using vastly exaggerated, despicable rhetoric.  And each day the government is thinking up ways to avoid their responsibility, either as a member of the EU or for past interventions.

We are not being invaded.  There aren’t thousands of migrants wanting to come to England.  The facts.  Asylum seekers from outside the EU in 2014: Germany – 202,645; Sweden – 81,180; Italy – 64,625; France – 64,310; Hungary – 42,775, and the UK – 31,745.

This inhumanity seen on our TV screens daily makes me feel ashamed and I haven’t yet heard anything from Labour that fills me with confidence.

How the candidates respond to this global issue is one of the most important tests for any future leader.  An old friend, active in the Labour Party and a committed trade unionist for decades told me he was ‘nervous and excited at the same time’ when Jeremy Corbyn went ahead in the battle for CLPs and trade union endorsements.

When Unison came out for Corbyn, Dave Prentis, its general secretary, talked of public sector workers who have endured pay freezes for years; “They have been penalised for too long by a government that keeps on taking more and more from them. “Their choice shows a clear need for change towards a fairer society where work is fairly rewarded, and where those living and working in poverty are supported.”

 

Hope

It’s an aspiration not for the individual but the collective.  And for hope in an economy where hopelessness appears to be a constant state of reality.

Corbyn’s entry into a leadership campaign, that had until then all the hallmarks of a contest that would have plodded its way to the September special conference, has laid open old wounds – the defining issue of the war in Iraq, and a political language from a political class that leaves people cold.

He has upended the predictability of a contest centred on a rehashing of the same failed arguments on the deficit and the wringing of hands on who and what was to blame for Labour’s defeat last May.

When the Labour leadership wanted to change the relationship with the unions so that members should, instead of automatic affiliation, actively opt in to become individual Labour Party members/supporters, Unite’s general secretary, Len McCluskey argued that the ‘status quo was no longer an option’.

It was a response that wrong footed journalists who had expected some sort of rant and were clearly disappointed.   Now union members are signing up in their thousands to take part in the leadership vote.  Corbyn has gone from being a no-hoper to front runner and the political elite are screaming blue murder.

We see young people, union members and a formerly disengaged electorate becoming political active in the Labour Party.  Political change is happening.  It is coming from below and Labour panjandrums are clueless as they seek to instil fear and threaten non-cooperation.

We saw it in Scotland during the referendum campaign and by the 2015 rout of Labour MPs.  Payback time for a Labour Party that had ignored the warning signs for years and certainly since 2007 when the SNP formed a minority government.

It’s a phenomenon that is driving people to rallies, to CLP endorsements piling up and young people bashing phones.

But while members are inspired by his clear anti-austerity line it is more than that.  It’s a craving for a genuine politician who talks straight, and knows exactly where he stands.  And it’s not on some mushy centre ground.

We’ve got a political class that appears to be echoing Zbigniew Brzezinski the former security adviser to the American President Jimmy Carter’s and his Trilateral Commission who in the seventies wrote about the ‘Crisis of Democracy.’

The problems of governance they concluded “stem from an excess of democracy”. Well the genie is out of the bottle and it won’t be put back.  Corbyn has momentum with him.

Will he maintain it?  Will his campaign team tie the vote up early?    They’ve been helped by the absurd decision to abstain at second reading of the government’s welfare bill.

They’ve certainly been helped by the intervention of Tony Blair who argued Labour couldn’t win with Corbyn as leader fighting on the left and in any event ‘he wouldn’t want to win on a left platform’.   Who now is afflicted with, ‘ideological purity’?