Jeremy Corbyn would put human decency back into high level politics

Bren­dan Ogle’s lat­est blog on the UK Gen­er­al Elec­tion “in an era of Prime Min­is­ter Boris John­son and Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, in a world which has swung inex­orably to the right and where greed is now con­sid­ered not only good but great, find­ing a per­son with human traits of empa­thy, social jus­tice, equal­i­ty and dig­ni­ty and putting them into high office would dra­mat­i­cal­ly buck recent trends.”

The ques­tion keeps pop­ping up with­in media cir­cles, in var­i­ous forms – ‘why is Jere­my Cor­byn so unpop­u­lar?’

I could make an argu­ment that the pre­sump­tion in the ques­tion is unsound. After all the British Labour Par­ty has had its great­est lev­el of mem­ber­ship ever dur­ing Corbyn’s lead­er­ship, at times his meet­ings have tak­en on the size and sound of mass ral­lies, and young peo­ple in par­tic­u­lar seem inspired by this aged Marx­ist in a way which is extra­or­di­nary to see. Yet it is cer­tain­ly the case that all this is hap­pen­ing against a con­stant back­ground of vicious and dis­hon­est attack, bla­tant media bias, and per­son­al vil­i­fi­ca­tion so intense and sus­tained that even some peo­ple that I would have thought would have had more sense on the left here in Ire­land have descend­ed to ‘Cor­byn bash­ing’.

Then of course we have the lib­er­al com­men­tari­at. In Britain they are called ‘Blairites’, or ‘Red Tory’s’ to give them a more inci­sive name. To under­stand them remem­ber that Mar­garet Thatch­er her­self, when asked once what her great­est achieve­ment was, answered ‘Tony Blair’. They are those who have effec­tive­ly giv­en up on a rad­i­cal reform of soci­ety, of a re-dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth down­wards from rich to poor, of just tax­a­tion and of improved and increased pub­lic ser­vices, and instead believe that the best the work­ing class can achieve is a com­pro­mise with neolib­er­al greed and inequal­i­ty. They use the words ‘com­pro­mise’ a lot as if neolib­er­als are into com­pro­mise. They talk about ‘hold­ing the cen­tre’ as if the cen­tre hasn’t already moved to the extreme right, and they mea­sure pub­lic opin­ion by what peo­ple text into TV and radio shows on the ide­o­log­i­cal sect that pass­es for media these days. Oh, and they car­ry a White flag, ready to wave to their mas­ters when­ev­er chal­lenged.

Faced with such times and cir­cum­stances a win for a Cor­byn led Labour in today’s UK gen­er­al elec­tion would be extra­or­di­nary. But to me, who has tak­en some stick in my time myself, the most extra­or­di­nary thing is this – that Jere­my Cor­byn is still stand­ing after every­thing that has been thrown at him and is in with a fight­ing chance on deny­ing Johnson’s tox­ic dis­hon­est, self­ish and greedy agen­da a major­i­ty Gov­ern­ment (or even bet­ter)! I take my hat off to the man.

Jere­my Cor­byn has nev­er vot­ed for, let alone start­ed, a war. He has nev­er made a per­son home­less. He has nev­er closed a pub­lic ser­vice. He leads a hum­ble, some would say fru­gal, life. Unlike his oppo­nent he is not a liar, he doesn’t threat­en peo­ple, he doesn’t hide from robust and dif­fi­cult debate and he doesn’t try to manip­u­late tragedy and mur­der vic­tims for polit­i­cal gain as Boris John­son did recent­ly. He is a decent, hum­ble and deeply com­pas­sion­ate human being. Any coun­try should feel priv­i­leged to have the poten­tial to be led by such a man in a Pro­fes­sion lit­tered with liars, crooks, nar­cis­sists, sociopaths and even psy­chopaths.

But Cor­byn does some­thing very rare in pol­i­tics today. He speaks truth to pow­er, and he promis­es reform. Here’s a wee secret, pow­er doesn’t much appre­ci­ate the truth, and the rich and pow­er­ful cer­tain­ly don’t want reform and change. They are doing very well thank you very much, and the media out­lets that they own and con­trol know it. Cor­byn threat­ens their hege­mo­ny, so much so that they would pre­fer an uncouth buf­foon and renowned liar in pow­er that will do their bid­ding, that they can put in their pock­et like a pos­ses­sion.

I am not going to dig­ni­fy the dis­gust­ing slurs ped­dled as fact about Cor­byn and anti-semi­tism. Just remem­ber this though while you are look­ing and fail­ing to find any race of reli­gion that Cor­byn has ever attacked, this man of prin­ci­ple would be the first every British Prime Min­is­ter to have a pro-Pales­tine posi­tion and has promised to stop sell­ing arms to Israel – arms that they use for their eth­nic cleans­ing of Pales­tini­ans. In a world where Zion­ists con­sid­er stand­ing with the oppressed chil­dren of Pales­tine enough to damn you as anti-semit­ic, it’s not hard to see why the pow­er­ful ‘Israel Lob­by’ so dread Prime Min­is­ter Cor­byn. Shame on them.

As I write this, polls are nar­row­ing, but prob­a­bly not quick­ly enough. A Labour/SNP coali­tion is still pos­si­ble, high­ly desir­able, but maybe unlike­ly. Is there a Labour surge that the unre­li­able polls are miss­ing? We’ll know soon enough.

But I am cer­tain of this – in an era of Prime Min­is­ter Boris John­son and Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, in a world which has swung inex­orably to the right and where greed is now is con­sid­ered not only good but great, find­ing a per­son with human traits of empa­thy, social jus­tice, equal­i­ty and dig­ni­ty and putting them into high office would dra­mat­i­cal­ly buck recent trends.

It would be an immense­ly pos­i­tive turn, a nec­es­sary change #ForThe­ManyNot­The­Few, a pre­cious moment of fight back for decen­cy.

Bren­dan Ogle

ENDS