Britain needs a shot in the arm!

I left the UK 29 years ago. Three of my daughters and 2 sons-in-law still live in a country I once admired and whose fortunes I still care about and follow closely.

This is the week of the British General Election – early Friday morning will give us the result. My rights to vote in a British General Election expired 15 years ago – but no one I consider a friend could possibly vote Conservative in this election.

It’s not just the support that the Tory party gives to the class system and to all that’s worst in greed and jingoism. Even Conservative ex-Prime Ministers and Ministers currently feel unable to vote for the present British Government – headed as it is by a man universally agreed to be a liar and a cheat and with a Cabinet of self-confessed neoliberals.

I never knew the country under New Labour – when Tony Bliar was rising in the Labour party, I was part of the old Labour system which was deeply suspicious of his motivation. Our reservations were confirmed by his pursuit of a “modernisation” agenda which was a translation of neoliberalism into Orwellian Newspeak – culminating in his enthusiastic support for the US-led Iraq war

The moral disgust for all this was eventually felt even by the British public who may not have been able in 2010 to give the Conservatives a full victory - but managed to do so in 2015, only to recant in 2017.

Britain (or rather England) is a country which has always been at war with itself – with an electoral system designed to give power to one side or another. “Compromise” and “consensus” are swearwords in the english lexicon.

The UK has a reputation for pragmatism – so surely it should now have penetrated even the dullest heads that “strong leadership” does not seem to produce the goods! For every Churchill there has been a Stalin and Hitler….   

The “self-belief” of those such as Thatcher and Bliar soon morphed into arrogant conceit and moral blindness. Atlee was famous for his modesty and willingness to delegate. Even Harold Wilson understood that the other beasts of his cabinet – such as Dennis Healey, Anthony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and James Callaghan – needed space to roam. But leaders such as Bliar are driven by control freakery.

The current (English) Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn has been an MP for almost 40 years and has never been a Minister or shadow Minister. Corbyn is – and always has been - a rebel. Not quite of the Oxbridge-educated Michael Foot sort but a rebel nonetheless - always ready to support the downtrodden and to express unfashionable opinions. It was therefore easy for the corporate media to demonise him – although the conspiratorial “story” which appeared in this week’s “Sun” (bringing back memories of the infamous “Zinoviev letter”) does demonstrate the desperate lengths the corporate elite will go to retain power. George Monbiot gives another powerful example here of the lies being perpetrated in this campaign by a combination of the conservatives and the media

Of course Corbyn doesn’t look like your average Prime Minister – except perhaps Atlee. But that is precisely his strength…The literature on leadership now understands the dangers of strong leadership but lazy political journalists haven’t caught up with the new insights about power – which needs to be “transformational” rather than “transactional” as the academic like to put it…  

Corbyn came to the leadership of the Labour party in 2015 not from any ambition – but simply because it was his turn to be the left’s sacrificial lamb….

In my book that was one the best motivations for becoming a leader – reluctance. Compare it with the ambition which was driving Gordon Brown from an early age – when I knew him and indeed contributed to two of the books he edited. Sadly, however, I thought of him when I read this generalisation –

Our system obliges us to elevate to office precisely those persons who have the ego-besotted effrontery to ask us to do so; it is rather like being compelled to cede the steering wheel to the drunkard in the back seat loudly proclaiming that he knows how to get us there in half the time.

More to the point, since our perpetual electoral cycle is now largely a matter of product recognition, advertising, and marketing strategies, we must be content often to vote for persons willing to lie to us with some regularity or, if not that, at least to speak to us evasively and insincerely. In a better, purer world—the world that cannot be—ambition would be an absolute disqualification for political authority.

We may know little of the team which might form the Corbyn Cabinet – but we do have a good sense of the programme which they will try to implement.

The manifesto which Corbyn presented for 2017 set many of us alight – and the new one is even more appropriate and necessary.