People underestimated Jeremy Corbyn because he is a gentle and easy going guy, but could he be starting a new left revolution? Even with most of the Parliamentary Labor Party against him, he, and his small team, are thinking up some very radical and exciting new ideas.
The Labour run Lancaster authority has also come up with some new radical ideas which have been a tremendous success in the county, and Corbyn has taken these ideas on and is encouraging other country councils to do the same. And Momentum, the group formed to support Corbyn, has some radical ideas too to reform the Parliamentary Labor Party. Anyway, I hope we can vote Tom Watson out next time.
The Basic Income comes up a lot here, plus a shorter hourly week, but it's a shame Labour has not caught onto MMT yet.
Will the financial sector snooker Labour like it always does, and like it has always done to the European left parties? Jeremy Corbyn's team are working on that one too. Go on Corbyn!
The next UK election could be really interesting. The Tories have run out off ideas, in fact, they never had any. After 50 years of Thatcherism, the UK it's still flat broke. We tightened our belts, but the plate stayed bare. Trickle down was only ever a gush up.
On the wall of Preston council leader Matthew Brown’s office is an “Anarchy in the UK” Sex Pistols poster. Having once been a byword for economic stagnation (a planned £700m redevelopment of the city centre collapsed in 2011), the Labour-run Lancashire authority has embraced radicalism. Rather than chasing inward investment from large multinationals, as it previously had, the city council forged an alternative growth model. It championed worker-owned co-operatives, persuaded public sector bodies to “insource” services, became the first living wage employer in the north, founded a not-for-profit energy firm and established a credit union to combat avaricious payday lenders.
“We needed to do something that was more resilient but also, crucially, put more democracy and ownership in the Preston economy,” Brown told me when we met one recent morning. The councillor, who identifies with Labour’s Bennite left tradition, observed: “One of the reasons that Thatcher found it so easy to privatise a lot of the public assets was that working people didn’t have a huge amount of affinity with them. If they had been on the board, sharing the profits and had a real ownership stake then she wouldn’t have been able to do it, they would have been hugely popular.”
When John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, visited Preston in 2016 he declared: “This kind of radicalism is exactly what we need across the whole country.” The following year, Jeremy Corbyn praised the city’s “inspiring innovation”.
Labour may not be in power but it is already reshaping Britain.
Corbyn has now led Labour for three years. Never before has the party’s left enjoyed such power. The Marxist Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League of the 1930s, the Bevanites of the 1950s and the Bennites of the 1980s were all divided or defeated. Having previously been consigned to internal exile, Corbyn and his allies control Labour’s commanding heights.
New Statesman
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