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NY Times, August 12 2015
Labour Party, Leaning Left, Looks to Outsider Jeremy Corbyn
By STEVEN ERLANGER
LONDON — “A working-class hero,” John Lennon wrote in 1970, “is
something to be.”
Battered in May’s election — too conventional for Scotland, too
implausible for England — Britain’s Labour Party is searching for a new
impetus and contemplating a return to its working-class and trade-union
roots.
In Jeremy Corbyn, a soft-spoken 66-year-old of the hard left, many
Labour members think they have found a hero — not working class,
exactly, though he is the son of parents who met as peace campaigners
during the Spanish Civil War, but someone who appears to be a hero to
the working class.
Mr. Corbyn finds himself in an odd place: A perennial outsider who has
disobeyed Labour Party instructions on how to vote more than 500 times
since 1997, he is now considered the favorite to become the party’s new
leader.
Labour has been taken aback by “Corbynmania,” with large crowds,
passionate social media involvement and news coverage of a trim, bearded
vegetarian teetotaler who says what he has believed for the last four
decades with a disarming clarity.
His views, which were hard-left Labour in the 1970s and ’80s, are
finding new supporters among younger Britons who like his
anticapitalist, anti-austerity stance — much like those who support
Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain — and who dislike rivals’
poll-driven wobble.
Mr. Corbyn was persuaded to put up his hand for the party leadership
role to “widen the debate,” and he got the required 35 nominations from
Labour members of Parliament only at the last minute, when some of them
decided to throw a bone to the party’s activists.
But Mr. Corbyn has shown himself to be fluent, articulate and sincere, a
sharp contrast with his two main competitors, who seem eager not to
offend. Some Americans compare him, in ideology and age, to Senator
Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a presidential hopeful, but Mr. Corbyn now
seems likely to win.
In complicated voting that begins on Friday, with results to be
announced Sept. 12, Mr. Corbyn is facing Andy Burnham, 45, who was
shadow health secretary; Yvette Cooper, 46, the shadow home secretary
and former shadow foreign secretary; and Liz Kendall, 44, who is
considered close to the policies of former Prime Minister Tony Blair and
is running last in Labour constituency nominations. (Shadow secretaries
are ministerial counterparts of the party out of power.)
Few expected that Britain’s two largest labor unions, which have a major
say in the party’s politics, would back Mr. Corbyn instead of Mr.
Burnham, who has not impressed — but they did. Soundings among Labour
members and supporters, who can vote by registering and paying three
pounds, indicate that Mr. Corbyn is far ahead.
Labour grandees are beside themselves, warning of electoral disaster. On
Tuesday, Alastair Campbell, a former spokesman for Mr. Blair, said the
party was heading for “a car crash.”
“Whatever the niceness and the current warm glow, Corbyn will be a
leader of the hard left, for the hard left, and espousing both general
politics and specific positions that the public just are not going to
accept in many of the seats that Labour is going to have to win to get
back in power,” Mr. Campbell wrote on his blog, urging people to vote
for “anybody but Corbyn.”
For many in the ruling Conservative Party, Mr. Corbyn’s rise is
considered better than a second Christmas. If the quickly departed,
little-mourned Ed Miliband moved Labour too far left to be electable, as
most analysts believe, then a victory for Mr. Corbyn ought to mean
Labour has already lost the 2020 election.
His campaign is another illustration of how socialism has become
conservative, trying to preserve the social benefits it won in the last
century in aging and more unequal societies.
He would like to remove private health providers from the National
Health Service, renationalize the country’s railways and top six energy
companies, make state education more monolithic and return to the party
constitution a version of the infamous Clause IV, removed by Mr. Blair
in 1995, which called for “common ownership of the means of production,
distribution and exchange.”
Mr. Corbyn says that public ownership and participation in industry is a
key part of Labour’s principles and could be achieved through the
state’s buying up shares for a controlling stake.
On foreign policy, Mr. Corbyn would withdraw Britain from NATO and scrap
the country’s nuclear deterrent, and he has generally sided with those
most opposed to the United States, like the late President Hugo Chávez
of Venezuela. He has described Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends,” without
backing all their deeds, and has been close to Sinn Fein: He invited the
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to the House of Commons in 1984, two weeks
after the Irish Republican Army tried to kill Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher by bombing her Brighton hotel.
A Twitter feed, @corbynjokes, is proving popular, with sallies like:
“What have Western capitalism and the Australian cricket team got in
common? They’re both subject to inevitable collapse,” and “Why did the
bicycle fall over? Historical inevitability.” Some compare Mr. Corbyn to
Jesus, and others note that he would be the first bearded party leader
since Keir Hardie in 1908.
Mr. Corbyn divorced his second wife, a Chilean exile, when she insisted
on sending their son to a selective grammar school, which he opposed on
principle. He is regularly among the most parsimonious of legislators,
even among those who live in and represent London boroughs.
And Mr. Corbyn is hardly unelectable — at least in Islington North (once
known as the People’s Republic of Islington), where he has been
regularly re-elected since 1983 and won more than 60 percent of the vote
in May.
In the end, of course, Labour may vote for Ms. Cooper or Mr. Burnham.
But with a Conservative majority in Parliament, Mr. Corbyn’s many
fervent advocates suggest he would be a better opponent to Prime
Minister David Cameron at the weekly prime minister’s question time,
more able to puncture what some consider Mr. Cameron’s air of casual
superiority. Labour, they say, would benefit from new energy, and from
younger members coming out of the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.
And Labour would have plenty of time to find a new leader for 2020 — or
prove again that the hard left is unelectable.
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