Blair, not
Corbyn, was Dangerous Experiment
By Jonathan Cook
May 28, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- 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.
Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and
winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for
Journalism
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/ |