Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist
The man who wants to re-nationalize railways and energy companies and reopen long-failed coal mines.
Also free tuition at all Britain's universities.
Anti-austerity moves to boost the economy; looks like his support is a sort of Brit Syriza moment, in at least that respect.
And more.
Corbyn's positions on foreign policy are more extreme.
He wants to withdraw from NATO, abolish the UK's nuclear arsenal, and has suggested that Blair could face a war crimes trial for his role in the Iraq War.
His position on Ukraine echoes the Kremlin's: He's written that Russian expansionism "is not unprovoked" and that "the obsession with cold war politics that exercises the Nato and EU leaderships is fueling the crisis."
Well, I would have thought it made more sense for the US to leave NATO and for the UK to stay in, but to each his own.
I like his take on Ukraine, though.
And I suppose so long as NATO is committed to pushing its collective thumb deep into Russia's eye wanting out is understandable.
Jeremy Corbyn, Britain's Bernie moment
Like Sanders, Corbyn has long advocated for a rejection of austerity politics and a return to seemingly outmoded policies of ambitious social spending, government activism and higher taxes on big business and the rich.
He has proposed universal childcare and free higher education for all, wants to renationalize Britain’s railroads and utilities, and believes the country should withdraw from NATO, scrap its nuclear missiles and invest most of its military budget in job programs.
Hilarious, right?
Political suicide!
Talk about being out of touch with reality!
Well, nobody’s laughing at the old-time lefty crackpot now.
What few saw coming – and this happened with Sanders too – is that those old-school social-democratic ideas only sound outmoded to those who have been around long enough to be relentlessly indoctrinated with the Reagan-Thatcher ideology that the era of Big Government was a dreadful failure and that the true path to prosperity involves endless rounds of tax-cutting and “belt-tightening.”
To younger generations raised amid the depressing, pseudo-Calvinist piety of permanent austerity and downward mobility, the revolutionary notion that the government might actually help you get an education, find a job, afford a decent place to live and raise your family — instead of just standing there and scolding — doesn’t sound old or tired in the slightest.
Evidently, that both Bernie and Jeremy are geezers hasn't caused a little bulb to light up for Brit journalists any more than for Americans.
Nor the multitudes of gray heads in those big audiences Bernie gathers.
Per the piece in Salon, he scares The Guardian, who seem to think he's a sure loser, much as the Democratic Party establishment in the US still seems to insist about Bernie.
The Salon writer seems more sympathetic to JC and his wave of support.
Is Salon generally to the left of The Guardian?
Maybe.
Andrew O'Hehir concludes,
It’s quite possible that Tony Blair and the other mainstream critics are correct that old-school socialists like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are too easily demonized by the right, and are not “electable” in conventional political terms.
(Opinion polling suggests that Corbyn may now be the most popular politician in Britain, but such things are transitory.)
But their emergence testifies to the failures of conventional politics, and whether they can win elections is less important than the worldwide hunger for change they have momentarily captured.
Neither of them offers anything close to a political panacea, in my view, but they represent a rising tide of resistance against the global cult of fiscal austerity and corporate capitalism, as do Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain and other emerging left-populist movements.
(Donald Trump does not belong in that group, but he represents a bizarro-world inversion of the same phenomenon.)
Even if the Labour Party establishment can find a way to stop the Corbyn surge – and it’s definitely trying to, by fair means or foul – it runs the risk of burning down Britain’s venerable working-class party in order to save it, or making it look hopelessly out of touch with its own core supporters.
Win or lose, the Corbyn rebellion has launched a political chain reaction whose destabilizing effects will extend well beyond Britain.
From this side of the Atlantic, Hillary Clinton’s inner circle of advisers and strategists are watching with increasingly green expressions, telling themselves over and over: It can’t happen here.
Well, to be honest, I increasingly hope it does.
The capitalist pigs of global neoliberalism and their fellow-traveling "third way" creeps of the Democratic and liberal establishments have been having things their own way for far too long.
They need a good thrashing, and who could we expect to deliver it but people who are far from being star-struck admirers of the emerging global plutocracy?
Doing better than Bernie?
Jeremy Corbyn is most popular among voters from all parties, poll suggests
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