Here’s a confession: in nine years as a Labour MP until 2010 I can’t recollect ever having had a conversation with Jeremy Corbyn. Oh for the benefit of hindsight! Anyway, he rarely seemed to be around the House of Commons, he rarely if ever bothered going to the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) meetings; he was seen by most Labour MPs as semi if not fully detached, ploughing his own course. It was also true that regional MPs tended to stick together—if you’re bothering ministers about a hospital’s funding in Leeds you’re not looking to an Islington MP for assistance. But there was another kind of conversation going on in those Blair/Brown days, and this is thankfully fully documented. The system of Early Day Motions (EDMs) enabled dissident voices to rather fruitlessly raise common concerns, and I think I will have signed plenty of Jeremy’s EDMs and he mine. I was thinking of this today when JC came to Scarborough to speak at a meeting in support of our local Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC) Hugo Fearnley. I guess there were around 200 or 250 members there and JC went down very well. Some local rightwingers stayed away (probably on holiday, let’s not leap to conclusions) and there was a genuine warmth towards him—in complete contradiction to the nonsense we read daily in the media. His speech was sincere. How many big time politicians would devote ten minutes of their time to bus services (the most used form of public transport by far)? Here in North Yorkshire bus services have been decimated. But if you live in some rural village, you’ve got a 4X4 right? He also devoted a considerable part of his speech to the climate emergency. At long last, I think the Labour Party is becoming an environmentally conscious party, not simply a socially conscious party, wedded to the precepts of GDP growth as the solver of all problems. I was pleased that our candidate Hugo forcefully made this point. I said JC’s speech was sincere. In doing so I think an important feature of his rise to prominence is that he didn’t really seek it out. Our current prime minister has laid a snot-trail of ambition all the way from a dorm in Eton to his present address. The English establishment would rather see on-your-sleeve ambition so as better to understand how it can be manipulated, using all the old tricks. These don’t seem to have worked on JC yet, and I don’t think they will. Which is why they will intensify their attacks on his sincerity and integrity all the more. Contrast that treatment with their fawning acceptance of the charlatan Johnson.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
November 2024
|