DAVID CAMERON’S DREAM
Well, comrades, here he is, in all his glory at the poignant and emotional Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival on July 19th - Jeremy Corbyn, the man the Tories fervently hope will win the Labour leadership election. It’s a rousing speech, packed with truth and common sense. But what was once a mighty steam locomotive, the Labour Party, is now nothing more than a battered little clockwork train set, something the Bullingdon Boys’ nanny has scattered over the Axminster for George, David and Boris to play with.
Corybyn’s heartfelt rhetoric is meat and drink to an old leftie like me, but there are bitter social and political bullets to bite. Prominent among these is the fact that the current generation of adult voters are basically ‘Thatcher’s Children’. They have had the notions of equality, compassion, public service and fair play blow-torched from their souls by decades of aggressive right wing corporate propaganda. The poor have participated in their own demonisation; just watch Benefits Street, Benefits by the Sea and all the other poverty-porn, and there they are, being manipulated by media Svengalis with all the skills of Josef Goebbels. They have been taught in a rough fashion that the word ‘socialism’ is some kind of semantic Ebola. They have opted for the quasi-racist vacuity of UKIP and the blatant lies of a cabinet of millionaires who have convinced them that the only viable society is one run by global corporate finance. Profit before people; the only way. Selling socialism to this electorate, or the 56% of young people who decided not to vote, is as valid as selling snow to Eskimos. They don’t want a fair society. They proved that beyond doubt on May 7.
If Corbyn wins the leadership election, such a result would send orgasmic tremors throughout the British media. Murdoch, Dacre, the Barclay Brothers and the entire Tory Party will crack open the Bollinger by the crate. All the fascistic-tinged rhetoric will be wheeled out; ‘Evil, Out-Dated Reds’ will be splashed across front pages, Britain’s ‘recovery’ will be ‘endangered’ and every past aspect of Corbyn’s life will be dragged up. If the Tory establishment could saddle Miliband with the sobriquet ‘Red Ed’, then they’ll have a field day with this leader - he’ll be everything from Stalin through to Trotsky and Pol Pot.
So, is there anything positive for an old socialist to enjoy should Jeremy win? Well, yes, actually, there is. It will highlight the rank and file’s utter disgust for the treachery of fervent Tory-supporters like Harriet Harman and Liz Kendall. But the nicest thing will be this. As the Labour Party is now little more than a shambling zombie shadow, bereft of any of its original values, it will indeed be stone dead by the end of this year. But it would be nice to think that, with Corbyn as leader, as the decaying corpse is lowered into the grave (or tossed into Trotsky’s ‘dustbin of history’) that it will be buried with its old socialist heart still beating.
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| Picking up the Banner 1957-1960. Painted by Gely Mikhailovich Korzhev-Chuvelev, 1925-. At Russian State Museum. Oil on Canvas, 156 x 290cm. |
As for those of us old flat-earthers left behind, we can live out our lives like banished cave-dwellers on the fog-bound slopes of a mountain of dreams. We’re the fag-ends of a vanishing species who believed in a society where everyone cared about everyone else, a world where the words ‘welfare’ ‘care’ and ‘compassion’ had not been replaced by two gilt-edged catch-all nouns; AUSTERITY and GREED.
Vote Corbyn and let’s go out with a bang.