The Good and The Bad of Jeremy Corbyn

Submitted by Mousumi Roy…

As expected Conservatives under populist Johnson trounced Labor under Corbyn. The conservative candidate who won even seemed a little surprised himself. The BoJo-ites are not perfect. Brexit on road with many economical pitfalls. Scotland will most probably go its own way. Scottish Nationalist party SNP swept the election in Scotland. Will watch for moves in Northern Ireland and Welsh for separation from UK. Over the last 2 decades the demography of UK had undergone a huge change. The voting pattern of Urban centers like London and Manchester is totally different from the countryside. This dichotomy of thought and perception is not good.

Corbyn wasn’t proposing state socialism. He was planning nationalisation of key natural monopolies only – power, water, post office, transport, and broadband. In the 70’s, had a collapsing manufacturing base which governments of both stripes tried ineptly to bail out. That’s not the case at the moment.

Labour in the 90’s and early 2000s took a Keynesian approach, which notable success up until the global financial crisis. Brown should have repaid more debt during his second financially positive period, but he nonetheless  ran surpluses and reduced debt using a keynesian model. There are many things about that government’s conduct that People disagree with; involving the private sector to make things happen in a hurry meant large unnecessary costs and a lack of really solid institutions, so the tories have been able to tear it down very quickly. They should have reversed some of the tories financial market deregulation, but instead they continued on that course.

NHM is a socialist plan sucessfully implemented in UK .

Any Progressive nation with high level human development/happiness indices are socialist in nature be it Scandivian countries or Holland etc.

The global financial crisis resulted from the deregulation, not from the short term actions of any one party in any one country. Keynesian economics, on the broad pallet, works. Austerity doesn’t, at least it doesn’t work on the basis that it was presented, as a means to sort out national finances. As a narrative to remove the public services that normal people rely on while enriching the already rich, it was a great success.

The tories have been touching the NHS. It’s on its knees. The industries to be nationalised are services that every citizen requires, and they should not be generating profits. The proposed taxation is not “very high” even by current European standards. Now the NHS is partly privatised, has been horribly underfunded, and is under threat of being put up for sale. They’ve starved it so that it looks like it doesn’t work, and after Brexit, there’s every indication that it will be sold off in large part to American corporate healthcare firms.

Lots of European countries run nationalised industries with decent success. Look at what Boris was PROMISING manifesto. The removal of judicial oversight, the shackling of the Lords, severe erosion of democracy. You are guessing that a man who had worked hard his entire life as a constituency MP and peace activist is going to turn into a totalitarian when in office, and therefore someone who is promising authoritarian reforms seemed like a bad bet.

4 years ago Portugal kicked out their austerity-loving conservatives, and voted in a socialist govt who promised to end austerity (to the absolute horror of the bankers).

The result? The fastest economic growth this century, above the EU average for 8 straight quarters. Unemployment has halved. The place is alive with concerts and art that was nowhere to be seen 10 years ago. They’re raising the minimum wage in January.

Boris Johnson will mean Brexit. They  will leave on the 31st of January, without a credible deal, with no trade agreement in place. Boris Johnson also means, according to the Tory manifesto, the removal of many of the legal checks and balances which protect their democracy, such as judicial oversight and the power of the House of Lords.  What you’ll get will be another 4 years of economic stagnation and rising debt. The rich and corporations will continue to pay the low taxes they are currently on, and you will get a tiny tax cut. Your services, healthcare, social care, libraries, sure start centres, homeless support, housing, they’re already gone, with no credible plan to replace them. 1000’s more people will die from tory cuts.

“Everyone knows” Corbyn is an anti semite and an IRA supporter, but he’s done some weird things considering.

Like when Islington Council, at the time led by Margaret Hodge, one of his accusers, wanted to sell the Jewish cemetery to property developers, and the notoriously anti semitic Corbyn worked with Jewish residents on a successful campaign to prevent that. Or when the notoriously Pro IRA Jeremy Corbyn met with former convicted UVF loyalist terrorist David Ervine to discuss the peace process.

Probably doesn’t mean anything significant, but it’s interesting to think about.

In 1945, Clement Attlee’s Labour Party won a general election, and began one of the most important projects in British history; the creation of the welfare state, a social safety net that ensured normal working people had access to the very basic things they needed.

They launched the national health service, providing taxpayer funded doctors, hospitals and medicine to everyone, free at the point of delivery. This is now so normal to them that they see it as the status quo.

They began an enormous housebuilding programme, which provided good quality houses, owned by local authorities, and rented to people on low incomes at affordable prices. Not only did this provide good quality housing to a lot of people, but it also held down housing prices and rents, because people who have an option for something more affordable will not swallow the kind of prices and rents do today.

They provided a system of employment rights and unemployment benefits so that you had security and decent treatment in your job, and could afford to live if you lost that job.

For the ensuing 75 years, the Tory party have been working with every ounce of their energy to remove all of those provisions. Social housing is more or less gone – Thatcher’s right to buy allied with a moratorium on spending the money from right to buy on new homes means that council housing stock has been massively depleted. They have a housing crisis, an overheated housing market meaning that those of them who can afford to own a house are paying many times more compared to wages than their parents or grandparents did, and stratospheric rents for properties which don’t legally have to be fit for human habitation.

Disability and unemployment benefits have been decimated, and Job Centre and PIP staff have targets to sanction or reject a certain proportion of applicants REGARDLESS OF THE VALIDITY OF THEIR CLAIMS.

Greens are anti-Brexit and want to see lots of improvements in EU policy that is currently damaging the environment. The UK has sacrificed its once science-based Department for Energy and Climate Change to make way for the Dept for Exiting the EU. There are justifications for severely criticising the EU’s environmental policies, but Brexit is driven by people and philosophies that are likely to exacerbate the problem.