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.
