Corbyn supporters. Photo: Flickr/Chris John Beckett
As the election approaches, we have a momentous fight on our hands
On 8 June we will have a novel thing in politics, a real choice between the two main parties. The choice will not be between the Conservatives and a party desperate to steal their clothes, as the Labour party was under Tony Blair: Thatcherism with a human face.
The choice will be between Theresa May’s conservatives, hell-bent on the destruction of the welfare state, the creation of a bargain basement economy, and a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn.
The establishment’s reaction to the Labour manifesto tells you much.
The manifesto marks a break with Neoliberalism and shows a serious commitment to redressing the shift of wealth and power away form ordinary people and towards the rich and the corporations. It is a break with the party’s surrender to neo-liberalism, which goes back decades.
It is the most radical manifesto put forward by a mainstream social democratic party in Europe.
Our rulers are frightened. They fear a victory for Corbyn will open the floodgates. That millions will suddenly think that the world really can be different.
They are throwing everything they have at Labour, but to less and less effect, after Project Fear I and II cynicism is growing, and the blatant bias of much of the media is now recognised by most.
It has had an affect though, and so has the outright sabotage of the Labour right who have kept up their own barrage against Corbyn over the last couple of years.
But the rise of Corbyn, driven by a shift to the left amongst large swathes of the population, is part of a broader picture. As our rulers become nastier, ever more desperate to make us pay for their crisis, resistance to them grows.
We all want and are working towards a Labour victory in the general election.
Whatever happens on 8 June, whoever is in Downing Street, we must be prepared to fight. If it is Jeremy Corbyn, we all know the forces that will be arrayed against him.
And if it is Theresa May, we will have to fight her attempts to drag us back much further in time than the 1970s.
But either way politics will have changed. The genie of radicalism is out of the bottle.
