Corbyn's victory offers some hope for Europe

Honestly, I don't know enough about British politics to have a well pondered assessment on Jeremy Corbyn's victory in the Labour Party elections yesterday (with 59% of the votes) but I have enough intuition to understand that, if all the Blairites are angry, then it is probably something very good and hopeful.

Binoy Kampmark at Global Research reports some of the reactions: 

... former leader Ed Milliband, immediately made it clear that they would be reluctant to serve in a Corbyn ministry, shadow or otherwise.

Good sign.

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, GCHQ’s finest errand boy and rank apologist, chose to congratulate Corbyn with a statement that “Labour are now a serious risk to our nation’s security, our economy’s security and your family’s security.”

Admittedly scarier but also very good sign.

Here's a reminder that back in the 80's David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn were living in two very different worlds. pic.twitter.com/fO4mCColu8

— J. Ali (@junayed_) September 12, 2015

Good sign as well. And the double photo, which will hopefully go viral, clearly underlines what the real issue is about: lizard or human?, wow, the English can finally make a choice now!

Not like in the last elections, when many of the potential supporters of Labour stayed at home out of anger. Some even asked to be allowed to vote for the Scottish National Party, the only large party with an anti-austerity platform - and a few went even further, asking for the annexation of Northern England (where leftism is more mainstream) to Scotland, preferably an independent one. 

Towards the end of Thatcherism?

It is not yet the end of Thatcherism, Babyface Cameron still rules in London with an iron grip, always at the service of his financier dark masters. But it seems it is at least the end of Left-Thatcherism (so to say: not much "left" in it), alias Blairism. 

And that is clearly very good news. These three and a half decades, all my adult and teenager life, have been a very dark time, even if masked by the mega-bubble that the ice-cream chemist began to inflate herself. The tide was set to march firmly to the right, to deregulation, to privatization of social capital, to the demolition of human and social rights, to something way too similar to outright fascism to be comfortable in. Every other day I consider if I should get myself exiled to Latin America... so dark is our Europe these days. 

So it is good to feel some refreshing wind of change. We'll see what it can do and how far it dares to reach but it is no doubt a sign that finally the mega-crisis has began opening the eyes of the people and that some spark of working class consciousness is arising again. And it is not the only such sign. 

As for the Labour Party... it had no other choice: it could never hope to win in the current context with a bourgeois program.

Anti-NATO

The anti-militarist curriculum of Corbyn is quite impressive, as Stephen Lendman, mentions (again at Global Research):

He’s a member of the Socialist Campaign Group, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, Amnesty International, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and chairs Britain’s Stop the War Coalition.

He calls himself a democratic socialist, advocating renationalizing Britain’s utilities and railways, making business pay its fair share in taxes, ending austerity, reversing public welfare cuts, abolishing higher education tuition fees, nuclear disarmament, and quantitative easing for ordinary people, vital infrastructure and renewable energy projects.

He said “(w)e need to strongly challenge NATO supremacy and oppose its exercise in Ukraine.” He opposes Britain’s membership in the US-dominated Alliance.

His web site jeremyforlabour.com says “(o)ur timeless task in the Labour Party is to stand up against injustice wherever we find it. That notion has driven me throughout my political life – and it’s what drove me to stand for Parliament in the first place.”

In mid-August, he said “(s)urely it is high time that we had a serious debate about Britain’s overall defense and foreign policy. More than 60 years of Nato membership has brought us enormous levels of military expenditure and by our close relationship with the US through NATO and the Mutual Defence Agreement involved us in countless conflicts.”

“In a world beset by conflict, often around the grab for natural resources and fueled by the greed of arms and defence manufacturers, surely it’s time to reassess our priorities for a foreign policy based on human values, peaceful development and not exacerbating military aggression.”

This is potentially very important because if some state can effectively challenge NATO from inside those are Britain and France. Their might is a mere shadow of what it used to be a century ago but their military budgets are still very impressive, ranking just behind the three major powers, and their recent role in causing trouble in the Mediterranean and Africa is way too big. 

It was a bit notorious these days, in the midst of the refugee crisis in the European Union, that Britain, the European state most involved in causing the crisis by stirring the pot in Syria and in the wider region, infamous for selling weapons to horrible tyrannies like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, for profiting from the cruelest wars in Syria and Yemen, for closely collaborating with the Washington hawks in creating these very wars, as well as the one in Ukraine... was not accepting a single refugee. 

So it would be indeed quite a change to have an anti-NATO government in London. That naturally explains the stark comment of Minister Fallon, who was maybe just being a bit too honest, but the prospect looks good, much better than with the Tsipras treacherous government in Athens and their preferential agreement with Israel. Surely someone with Corbyn's curriculum cannot betray us as Tsipras did, can he?

Even if he has held political offices in the past, he seems not quite your usual "caste" politician but someone with a social movements' background, a pretty solid one. Sure: I don't expect Corbyn to lead the takeover of Buckingham Palace or the City but rather to, hopefully, turn Britain into a beacon of home in Europe much as Venezuela or Bolivia are in America. They are not "communist" countries, just serious old school social-democracies. Not my ideal type... but still much better than what we have now. 

Anyhow... almost four year to elections in Britain. If they allow elections at all.