Blair, not Corbyn was dangerous experiment
Blair, not Corbyn was dangerous experiment
By God, how Tony Blair and his ilk have degraded the public discourse. He warns that a Jeremy Corbyn government would be “a very dangerous experiment”.
In fact, it would not be an experiment at all. Ideologically, it
would look a lot like the government of, say, Clement Attlee in 1945,
which brought us such “dangerous” experiments as the National Health
Service. And that, of course, was exactly how the welfare state was
portrayed by the Conservatives of the time.
The real experiment was the series of Thatcherite governments the UK
has endured since Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, including the 10
years under Blair and his “New Labour” party.
This dangerous experiment in neoliberalism dug us deep into an
economic hole, and made us incapable of showing the solidarity necessary
to begin the fight to reverse climate change. In fact, that experiment
is looking increasingly likely to prove lethal for the human species.
A Corbyn government wouldn’t be experimental. It would be a return to
the kind of compassion-based politics that once made sense to large
swathes of the public – before neoliberalism worked so hard to persuade
us that we live in a jungle in which only the fittest should survive.
It is a mark of the growing disgust with neoliberalism and its
outcomes – massive inequality, socialism for the rich, political
croneyism, compulsive consumption and accelerated climate change – that
people, especially young people, are turning their backs on
their corrupt elites and looking for those like Corbyn and Bernie
Sanders old enough to remember a time and politics before the Thatcher
and Reagan era.
In truth, the biggest danger with Corbyn is that he may not be radical or experimental enough.
