Jeremy Corbyn has won the election to be the leader of UK’s Labor Party, currently in opposition in UK’s Parliament. Vox‘s Zack Beauchamp has a piece on him. The summary?
The BBC has an excellent rundown of Corbyn’s actual policy platform. It includes, among other things, renationalizing Britain’s railroad system and energy companies, abolishing tuition for British universities, and imposing rent controls to deal with Britain’s affordable housing problem. He’s even open to reopening the coal mines that used to be a big part of Britain’s economy. It’s essentially a throwback to the unreconstructed socialism — the real thing, way beyond Bernie Sanders — of the old-school British Labour Party, which used to be way more into the idea of the government controlling huge sectors of the economy.
Some of Corbyn’s ideas are more appealing than others. Most importantly, he wants to end Britain’s austerity spending cuts, which damaged the UK’s recovery from the Great Recession. He also proposes something called “people’s quantitative easing,” in which the Bank of England would print money to invest in infrastructure projects. This won him praise from the Financial Times‘s Matthew Klein, who described it as a good way to get money into the hands of ordinary Brits and thus stimulate the economy.
Which, without wishing to be offensive, rings a bell over here in the colonies United States of, well, the standard characterization of the GOP base. Wait, wait, hear me out. The central inclination of the GOP these days appears, at least to me, to view past decades as those golden times, when the world was bright and chipper and all went well. Consider this from Zack’s article:
Corbyn’s socialism, particularly his support for nationalizing chunks of the British economy, is a direct threat to Labour’s current centrism. His critics accuse him of wanting to take the party back to the 1980s, or even the 1970s. A spokesperson for Yvette Cooper, a Labour MP and one of three leadership candidates who lost to Corbyn, warned during the campaign of “returning to the dismal days of the 1980s, with internal party warfare and almost two decades of [being in the] opposition.”
Renationalization? Really? He also speaks of reopening the coal mines and other ideas that, again, seem to come right out of an idealized past that he wishes existed now. While GOP and Corbyn do not share policy positions, they do share a mindset, and that worries me more than some of his positions might. Trying to run a country with a mindset from 50 years ago, disregarding the inclinations and habits of today’s citizens, could lead into a disastrous situation – if his leadership does result in winning Parliament.
