The Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon, by Nisar Ali Shah
9 years ago faa 0
Britain is rejoicing in Jeremy Corbyn’s success in keeping the Blairites at arms length. His supporters are confident that he will make an excellent leader not only of his party but also of the country.
The nation is fed with the warmongers, war criminals, and spin doctors, and needs a new direction which can restore Britain’s reputation as a just, caring, and truly democratic country.
Corbyn is the only candidate capable of bringing about that change with his more enlightened, progressive and fresh ideas.
Tony Blair’s irrational and illogical statement that the election of Corbyn will be annihilation of the Labour party is as good as his series of lies about the Iraq war before the invasion in 2003. That conflict, still not resolved, resulted in brutal massacres of two million Iraqis, on one hand, and hundreds of British soldiers’ lives lost on the other. Blair does not claim this time how many minutes Corbyn would take to annihilate the Labour party. Is it going to be 45 minutes or less?
The ex-prime minister, a spent force, and a total failure as Middle East peace envoy, can fool some of the people some of the time, as the saying goes, but not all the people all the time. There is a limit to what people can take in.
So, why is Blair undermining the democratic process and denigrating Corbyn?
Is he frightened by the likes of Jeremy or any future leftist government to press prosecution for war crimes at the International Criminal Court in Netherlands?
Corbyn’s appeal to the vast majority is that he is anti-wars, anti-austerity, anti-Trident. He supports the trade union movement for workers’ prosperity, collective bargaining and right to strike, and believes that new anti-trade union laws are counter-productive. He has always encouraged the underdog and strongly supports the Palestinian cause. He is a staunch supporter of nuclear disarmament.
He says he will oppose any new wars abroad and thus save billions of pounds for spending on higher education, national health service, raise the national minimum wage level, and poverty alleviation.
If those are his most frequently declared policies for the future, then there is little room to argue against them.
Jeremy’s known opponents Blair and his former spin doctor Alastair Campbell are yesterday’s men who together ruled Britain two general elections ago. Since their sudden interference, Jeremy’s popularity has considerably increased over other candidates, according to the latest poll projection. Liz Kendall, another leadership candidate, has conceded that Jeremy is doing really well.
An extraordinary orator with clarity of thought, he is quite capable of challenging the Tories.
Under Blair and Brown the so-called New Labour followed a right-wing Thatcherite policies and was indistinguishable from the Conservative Party. Under Corbyn’s leadership the Labour party would have a different feel to it, and would rapidly regain at last its original principles and ethos which were abandoned by Blair and Brown regimes.
While his rivals in this campaign criticise him on economy and taxation, Corbyn is not reciprocating in the finger pointing game. Corbyn phenomenon is such, as his supporters claim on hustings, that he will win this battle quietly with his hands down.
It is mystifying why Blair is conspiring to undermine mild-mannered Jeremy’s chances of becoming leader of the Labour party and possibly a great prime minister in 2020.
The writer is a London-based journalist