Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair.
Momentum is building — Jeremy Corbyn could be the next leader of the Labour Party
“It’s not about an individual, it’s about a platform that, in the end, wouldn’t work for the country. When people say ‘My heart says I should be with that politics,’ well… get a transplant.”
The words of former British prime minister Tony Blair, a week ago, as he tried to sway the voters who will choose the next Labour leader away from the rising star that is Jeremy Corbyn.
Warning the party could only win an election from centreground, Blair was reacting to a “shock” poll that put Corbyn with a whopping 17-point lead over his nearest rivals.
Corbyn, a virtual unknown until a few months ago, is currently storming through his meet-and-greets and photo-ops, charming the general public. And that word — charm — is apt, there is a real charm to his public appearances; he supports his policies, he genuinely seems to be saying what he believes and he has yet to be smoothed out enough by spin doctors to have stop wearing his £1.50 vests from the local market and socks with sandals. Some days he even wears a jaunty 1950s-gentlemen-on-vacation-style hat.
As if the attack by Blair, the inevitable “SexyJezza” hashtag and the incessant “leftie,” “hardline left-winger” and “Marxist” labels in The Sun and Daily Mail tabloids weren’t enough of a sign that he has made it, this week Corbyn won the key backing of major unions.
Unite, Aslef, Fire-Brigades Union, the Communication Workers Union, Transport Salaried Staffs Association, the RMT and Britain’s biggest public sector union, Unison, have all urged members to support him. Momentum is truly building.
“Jeremy Corbyn could be Labour’s next leader. Until a few weeks ago I never imagined I would write such a sentence,” president of the YouGov polling company, Peter Kellner, said recently.
Whether Corbyn is a practical candidate for a general election is becoming beside the point. The next election is years away, he is the frontrunner and he is in command — Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall are struggling to keep up.
“Jeremy Corbyn could be Labour’s next leader. Until a few weeks ago I never imagined I would write such a sentence.”
What is apparent, from seeing the welcome Corbyn has received this week at events, is that he is tapping into real anger at austerity measures and a sense of social injustice, as the Scottish National Party did in the last general election and parties like Syriza and Podemos have elsewhere in Europe.
Many of those at Corbyn’s events would’ve been disgusted, for example, by the party’s support on July 21 for the Tory government’s bill establishing £12-billion-worth of welfare cuts. Despite a whip, 48 of Labour’s 216 MPs still rebelled, showing just how split the party is. Surely a traditional “Labour” party would have rejected such drastic measures?
Despite all the leadership talk, the bigger issue here for Labour, with its leadership contest, is that it has trapped itself in stasis just when the British public needs an effective opposition the most. The party, despite the unions all plumping for Corbyn, is anything but united. Should Corbyn win, he will face many challenges ahead.
@URLgoeshere
Originally published in the Buenos Aires Herald, on Sunday, August 2, 2015.
Link: http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/195433/from-out-of-nowhere-.