Free to dream, I’d be left of Jeremy Corbyn. But we can’t gamble the future on him
Here is a comment I made re an opinion piece in the Guardian by Polly Toynbee…
This is an oddly similar discussion to one happening in Canada today..but we are just beginning the election campaign to try (please…) to unseat the recalcitrant Tories…
We have a Blair-like “Liberal” running, a son of the former PM Trudeau..very cute and a decent enough speaker, but such a centrist as to frighten the more progressive portion of his paty, and we have the Official Leader of the Opposition, a former member of the Liberal Party who is now running for the PM position with the (arguably Labour version) NDP…
We are having the same navel-gazing discussions re the soft progressive versus old Left philosophy, and, like Toynbee, I would, if I could go much farther than the NDP ever would or could..but…
Currently the youth vote is what is news here in Canada, at a time when they are just beginning to get their voting boots on..and this might be the Corbyn lesson, despite all the bodice-ripping nonsense about the certain demise of the Labour Party if Corbyn is elected..from the sounds of it, it is the youth who are being politically energized…the same thing is happening here and where once there were reams of articles bemoaning the lack of voting in young people, now the articles are dire warnings against their choices..make up your silly minds. This reminds me of nothing so much as the so-called Egyptian Spring, where a “party’ was democratically elected, but suddenly Egypt’s much -touted democracy was called into question..and now look at the mess they are in…
Unlike Egypt, however, when the youth of a Western country are feeling left out economically, when they see no hope for the future, they generally do become active, they generally do vote to the Left…deal with it, use it to create a power base, and go from there…
Left Over 