More on Jeremy Corbyn

Peter

[This post began as a comment and has now been promoted to the front page]

Good article Sean, not much to disagree with!

Perhaps I could add a few random thoughts of my own in no particular order:

With the possible exception of Charles Kennedy, Mr Corbyn is the only person in recent decades who has been allowed anywhere near the leadership of a major party who is a recognisable human being. The others all give the impression of automata regurgitating a script that has been put together by a committee of propagandists.

A good idea of what this means in practice are these recent comments from Peter Hitchens:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/09/my-evening-with-jeremy-corbyn.html

I would also say that if Mr Corbyn does in fact win the leadership contest, he will be the only honest man at the head of any major UK political party. That’s not to say that I like his ideas; in many cases I don’t. It is merely to say that he says things as he sees them, which has become a very rare quality since at least the mid-1980s. That in itself must a be a siginificant point in his favour for many voters wo are fed up with hearing politicians who are asked a simple qestion and proceed to say what their psin docotr told them to say on the topic, whether or not it answers the original question. The sort pf phrases that introduce this sort of answer include: “what we’ve said”, “I think the real issue”, “I want to make it quite clear” and so on. By contrast, whenever I have listened to Mr Corbyn, he has endeavoured to answer questions in plain language in a way that he feels is right, no matter how they might play with some focus group or other.

With regard to his economic plans, which have been heavily criticised, I do not think that his ideas would prove to be anything like the turn-off for voters that some suggest. Again, that is not say that his ideas are sound, but rather to make the point that practically none of his critics in this area has a leg to stand on. For example, all parties support the idea of printing money; so how can politicians who have been quite happy to hand out free money to failed bankers then oppose handing out more free money as “People’s QE”? Of course Mr Corbyn is wrong, but but those who have conceded the initial principle can hardly carry much weight in opposing him.

It should also be noted that thanks to efforts by various governments to prevent any correction taking place in 2008-09, western governments including the UK’s now have signficantly more debt and there are huge stresses in the economy: just look at the results of asset price inflation in relation to incomes. All of this suggests that we might not be very far from another economic crash, in the aftermath of which someone like Mr Corbyn might do rather well. The fact that what will have been seen to fail is corporatism rather than free markets will be lost on most people.

Another criticism against Mr Corbyn is that he will put the defence of the UK at risk. Again the problem is that his critics are generally the very least qualified people to make this allegation: does any sensible person really think that the last 25 years of UK involvement in middle eastern affairs has been a success or has made the country safer? It has also been alleged that Mr Corbyn has been involved with groups like Sinn Fein and Hamas in inappropriate ways. But can any of this really be valid criticism from a politicians who themselves have been happy to see people like Martin McGuinness entertained at Windsor Castle? Or who have supported aid for people fighting in Syria who might have been called terrorists in other places and at other times?

As Sean rightly says, there is a strange consensus in UK politics whereby the current order is built on various lies and staffed by characterless people. To take this further, one might note that the system actually +requires+ characterless leadership and is based around neo-conservative foreign policy and corporatist-authoritarian domestic policies. The common feature of all these policies is their fragility in the face of serious debate; they could not exist in a system where principles rather than trivial details were allowed to be discussed, much as hot-house orchids could not survive outside the greenhouse.

A good example of this is the corporatist fiasco that is rail “privatisation”. This whole tottering, opaque and totally insane structure is infested with waste and perverse incentives throughout its whole fabric; it is fundamentally indefensible, and would surely collapse in the face of decent principled criticism. Yet it has survived for over 20 years now thanks to a political consenus whereby nothing important may be debated. Mr Corbyn’s straightforward commitment to end rail “privatisation” will have come as a breath of fresh air to many people.

None of these points should be taken as any kind of endorsement of Mr Corbyn. It is merely to say that those on the “right”, some of who have even become temporary supporters of Mr Corbyn to try and wreck the Labour Party as they would see it, might very easily come to regret their enthusiasm for his candidacy.