- Re: Mail on Sunday shivers at prospect of Corbyn as PM Archived Message
- Mail on Sunday shivers at prospect of Corbyn as PM - BB-x April 21, 2019, 7:28 am
Posted by George Brennan
on April 21, 2019, 1:19 pm, in reply to "Mail on Sunday shivers at prospect of Corbyn as PM"
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"If there is any overall winner from the meltdown in British politics, it will be Jeremy Corbyn – leader of what has become by any normal standards an extremist party. By “normal standards”, eg by comparison with previous Labour government policies, Corbynism seems a very moderate affair. But other standards may indeed be more appropriate. One measure of Corbyn’s radicalism should be the degree of hatred and resistance his programme is receiving from the protectors of of the established order. In 1945 the bosses were in retreat and there was a huge pro Labour press, and a huge slice of the intelligentsia was not afraid to write and think freely. What we might call the Unintelligentsia is ably represented by John Gray, a literary demagogue who enjoys high esteem as an independent academic thinker. He is writing to a Mail audience, a Tory Leave audience, so he tells us the whole mess is because we did not exit the EU in an intelligent manner. He does not specify the intelligent manner in which May, confronted with “dubious” stratagems, should have left the EU, still less the intelligent manner in which the Leader of the Opposition should have left the EU. These would be interesting things to know He does know which scarecrows his reader will find most scary. A future Cobyn govt will be full of "dubious" stratagems which, lying in the future, also need not be specified At the same time British politics will become more treacherous. The party Corbyn leads is unlike any Labour party before it... Under Clement Attlee it nationalised sections of British industry and raised taxes substantially in order to fund the welfare state. It did not aim to take Britain out of its historic alliances, nor did it tolerate anti-Semitic racism in its ranks. This could be more honestly have been written: "It is true that under Atlee it nationalised sections of British Industry and raised taxes substantially in order to fund the welfare state. If I were not writing for the Mail I might say I think these were rather good things. In this respect Corbyn is not at all unlike Atlee, though by normal standards, Atlees party was more extreme. But the Atlee Labour Party did not aim to end the Special Relationship with the USA, which necessarily had to be one of subservience nor did it tolerate anti-Semitic racism in its ranks. " Gray knows he can write his last sentence with impunity because he will never be called upon to provide evidence for it. Anyone tempted to demand evidence of significant AS unduly tolerated fears s/he might be accused ipso facto of providing more evidence of widespread AS gb '''''''''''''' it may be true that the membership in 1945 was more trusting toward US power, though that did not last. it is obviously true that Brexit has crippled the Conservative party and sorely divided Labour. A majority of Labour members are Remainers and many of them, even Corbynistas, do speak with implied disdain of Northern Leave voters gb |
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