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Jeremy Corbyn: is the world ready for his sandals and socks? | Jeremy Corbyn: is the world ready for his sandals and socks? |
(35 minutes later) | |
I woke this morning after a good night’s sleep to face a nagging question in my head. Did Jeremy Corbyn used to wear open-toed sandals around Westminster in hot weather? Does he still? They’re comfy (I wear them myself), but ridiculous. If memory serves, he wore them with socks, white socks even. | I woke this morning after a good night’s sleep to face a nagging question in my head. Did Jeremy Corbyn used to wear open-toed sandals around Westminster in hot weather? Does he still? They’re comfy (I wear them myself), but ridiculous. If memory serves, he wore them with socks, white socks even. |
Refreshed by sleep, my brain raced ahead. Harold Wilson, four times Labour prime minister, used to wear open-toed sandals on Scilly Isles holidays (no socks). But is post-imperial Britain ready for a major party leader who wears them to work? With socks? | |
Checking my emails from the warmth of my bed, I next found one from Pat and Dave, a charming couple I met through my old school in Cornwall. They reminded me that when I showed them around the House of Commons I introduced them to “a hardworking and pleasant MP, who is now the frontrunner to be Labour leader”. Guess who? | |
“Exciting stuff, eh?” they told me. After which I checked the headlines and stumbled on Ewen MacAskill’s warm-hearted, cheery account of Candidate Corbyn’s crowded public meetings up and down the country, which struck MacAskill, an expatriate Highlander, as like the revivalist mood he encountered among SNP audiences in Scotland before last September’s referendum. | |
A few weeks ago I made two points here, one point that Corbyn is a lovely fellow – as this enjoyably sceptical New Statesman encounter again confirms – the other point that, under the Miliband revised rules of the contest, anything could happen, even a Corbyn win. | |
I didn’t think it would actually happen, but you have to be open minded. Now that Unison, the big public sector union, has decided to follow Unite, the other big public sector union, in backing Corbyn (I’m afraid the herd mentality is not confined to stock markets), and activists are fired up too, the bookies have him as the favourite. | I didn’t think it would actually happen, but you have to be open minded. Now that Unison, the big public sector union, has decided to follow Unite, the other big public sector union, in backing Corbyn (I’m afraid the herd mentality is not confined to stock markets), and activists are fired up too, the bookies have him as the favourite. |
So Jeremy Corbyn may actually become leader of the Labour party. I struggled to type those words because I still find it hard to believe. Not since it elected the admirable but unworldly pacifist, George Lansbury (1932-35), after the great Ramsay MacDonald split, will it have been so reckless. Michael Foot (1980-83) was eminently well qualified by comparison. | So Jeremy Corbyn may actually become leader of the Labour party. I struggled to type those words because I still find it hard to believe. Not since it elected the admirable but unworldly pacifist, George Lansbury (1932-35), after the great Ramsay MacDonald split, will it have been so reckless. Michael Foot (1980-83) was eminently well qualified by comparison. |
Yes, I realise that the declared candidates on offer after Ed Miliband immediately quit on the morning after his 7 May defeat (an irresponsible trend in politics) were all pretty uninspiring and remain so after three months of low-key combat. Corbynmania, a well-intended fix to open up debate engineered by non-Corbyn MPs, has transformed a sleepy affair. | Yes, I realise that the declared candidates on offer after Ed Miliband immediately quit on the morning after his 7 May defeat (an irresponsible trend in politics) were all pretty uninspiring and remain so after three months of low-key combat. Corbynmania, a well-intended fix to open up debate engineered by non-Corbyn MPs, has transformed a sleepy affair. |
Yes, I also know that Westminster-based pundits are supposed to be an unimaginative bunch of sheep who take dictation from the “establishment”, the “political elite” and other fantasies of fervid populist imaginations on both left and right. Diane Abbott MP has told us so. | |
If only these “elite” people were that good. Mostly they’re not and, watching close up, one is grateful for a cabinet which has half a dozen smart enough members with their feet on the ground most of the time. Genius is rare, sometimes dangerous, the mediocrity usually on display – like now – safer until things go badly wrong. | |
As well they might, in whichever direction we look at home or abroad. Russia is already in the hands of a nationalistic populist, while Donald Trump, a comb-over phoney, leads the Republican field for the White House. China’s economy is faltering, which could prove nasty. | |
Nearer home, Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble hold the eurozone together, though their austere economic grip may prove politically self-defeating. No, we haven’t even got to Isis yet (a different version of populist fundamentalism on offer), let alone to the desperate migrants gathered on Mediterranean and Channel shores, where better cooperation is urgently needed, not resurgent nationalism. | |
Unenthusiastic voters recently judged Cameron and Osborne to be the best on offer locally. It pains me to admit they were probably right. Do you think Corbyn has the answer to much of this troubling agenda? | Unenthusiastic voters recently judged Cameron and Osborne to be the best on offer locally. It pains me to admit they were probably right. Do you think Corbyn has the answer to much of this troubling agenda? |
Anti-Nato, basically anti-Europe despite this week’s belated statement (remember, he’s a politician too), pro-Hamas, in favour of renationalising all sorts of things he doesn’t have the money to buy, let alone invest in: the list of tried and tested, failed Labour policies is a long one. On top of which, he’s old enough to be Greece’s Alexis Tsipras’s dad. | |
Related: What Jeremy Corbyn offers his supporters is clarity | John Harris | |
I know there are good ideas in there, too, and that his lack of spin, his candour (sort of) and informality (etc) make a refreshing change from the timid incrementalism of the post-Blair Labour world. But running a party, let alone a government dealing with other governments, is a disciplined business. It’s got to hang together, which is not easy, as the Cameron government often shows. | |
I’m not alone, nor is the “Westminster bubble”, in thinking this, as this sample of Guardian letters confirms. Here’s a wider spread of views. Labour activists, the ones who do the hard work, are usually more leftwing than Labour voters, let alone floating voters. After 13 years of uneasy compromises in office, they want a leader who believes what they believe. If the price of the comfort blanket is permanent opposition, well, some would accept that too. Shame on them. | I’m not alone, nor is the “Westminster bubble”, in thinking this, as this sample of Guardian letters confirms. Here’s a wider spread of views. Labour activists, the ones who do the hard work, are usually more leftwing than Labour voters, let alone floating voters. After 13 years of uneasy compromises in office, they want a leader who believes what they believe. If the price of the comfort blanket is permanent opposition, well, some would accept that too. Shame on them. |
Wouldn’t it be nice if it wasn’t so? Yes. A cooperative world with sound green policies, global peace and no more poverty, would also be lovely. We’ve actually done pretty well in the last few centuries, despite their periodic horrors, centuries in which unlovely things like markets and capitalism, tempered by humane social interventions, brilliant science and the rule of law, have overwhelmed the primitive, impoverished authoritarianism of the past. | |
Related: Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership bid has a momentum even he didn't expect | |
The modern battle is never permanently won. Reactionary fundamentalism of many varieties is in view: anti-science, anti-internationalist, anti-women, anti-reason. Isis is just the most lurid manifestation of the flight from modernity among those it either has not yet touched or (in many countries like Britain) feel left behind by the hi-tech digital world it is creating. | |
They have a point. And it has been the historic task of social democrats, democratic socialists if you prefer, to think hard and address urgent problems that society throws up on behalf of “the many, not the few”. | |
The response so far has been disappointingly timid, leaving the field open to Syriza, Spain’s Podemos and – perhaps – to sharp-suited reactionaries like Nigel Farage or romantic beardies who wear sandals and socks to the office. They don’t have the answers either, but their failures would open the road to the forces of real darkness. |
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