Jeremy Corbyn: Reactionary not Revolutionary

Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. 

It is in the ranks of those most bitterly resisting change, not leading the progressive forward charge, that Jeremy Corbyn has ever been foremost. He is a Labour leader of the past, not the future. 

The Labour leader revels in raging against the establishment, exults in playing the revolutionary, but in truth there is more of the reactionary than the radical in Jeremy Corbyn. A Bennite without Tony Benn’s effortless charm, a disciple of Michael Foot without Foot’s wit or intelligence, Corbyn lacks even the decency to confine himself to the 1980s. Instead, for the benefit of those who missed the show first-time round, he’s determined to stage a re-enactment. But regardless of whether this election ends up resembling more 1983 or 1987, Mr Corbyn has certainly proven himself to be no harbinger of the future. He is instead little more than the shadow of a discredited past.

With dogmatism seldom being the bed-fellow of originality, the 2017 Labour Manifesto came with few surprises. The same tired-old policies were dusted off and trotted out, revealing once again the dearth of any new and radical thinking on the contemporary hard-left (at least in the Labour Party). Instead of seeking to harness the vast opportunities of our ‘never-before’ age to tackle its myriad problems, the rose-tinted glasses were duly applied and 70’s nostalgia decreed Corbyn's order of the day. Sweeping nationalisations, super-empowerment of trade unions, bashing corporations and squeezing the rich; with Arthur Skargill’s once-favourite refrain that “We’ll roll back the years of Thatcher England” clearly ingrained as their guiding mantra, Labour proudly took up its stand atop a platform of gravestones. Reeling back in horror from the sight, the IFS looked on in disbelief as Corbyn calmly fixed a red-rusted sword of Damocles above the already Brexit-battered British economy. The markets sweat and jitter, muttering feverishly that surely, surely, it’ll be a Conservative majority. A gust of wind causes the sword to swing precariously and though the thread is thick, it still threatens to fray. But surely...?

As caricatures become mere portraits, it is a sorry state the British Left finds itself in, and not only because it is unelectable. Even if the unlikely were to happen and Labour is swept into government on the 8th June, switching sides in the Commons does not make their programme any more right or credible. Perhaps bearing some relevance to a bygone age, for our own it would bring harm rather than good, a step to the past when we must move to the future or be left far behind. Tony Blair used to talk of fighting ‘the forces of conservatism,’ entrenched forces which had to be beaten and overcome to achieve real and relevant change in the fast-moving, technology-driven modern world. Blair, as Wilson had before him, fought to make Labour the party which shapes the future rather than simply protests it, but for Corbyn the future lies behind us and the present must be remade into the past. That is not the vision of a radical, not the dream of a revolutionary, but the retrograde desire of one seeking to reverse progress not enhance it, fighting change not embracing it; the leader, not of the forces of progress, but of the forces of conservatism most bitterly resisting the forward-marching tide. In the convictions of his heart, Jeremy Corbyn is no revolutionary; he is a true reactionary.