Wednesday 20 July 2016

Corbyn: best populist MP in Parliament for decades


I found Cailean Gallagher's article "How to popularize the case against nuclear weapons"   (Morning Star, 20 July; http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-b734-How-to-popularise-the-case-against-nuclear-weapons#.V4-ZAORTHjo)  a mixture of interesting quotes  and complete confusion. But the final statement: Isn't it time Corbyn drew on CND's tradition to chart a vital course between moralism and populism? is so completely at odds with the overwhelming facts of Jeremy Corbyn's grass roots activism, I don't know what planet the author has be living on.

Corbyn is the MP above  all  MPs who has consistently worked  with populist ( but  often unpopular with the mainstream media) campaigns, from assisting refugees, to the Chagos Islanders displaced from their home island of Diego Garcia to allow US long-range nuclear bombers to be based instead, to victims of nuclear testing to the homeless, etc etc This is why  he is so unpopular with Blairite rump of MPs in the Parliamentary Party who do not resonate with their constituents, only the big  money lobbyists.

Last weekend Corbyn was down with people at the Tolpuddler Festival; the previous weekend he was at the Durham miners;gala two great popular Labour movement events. 

How many Blairite MPs were there. Was Owen Smith, the "newly minted man of the people" at either?

Every year  Jeremy Corbyn  attends the London-besed commemoration of the atomic immolation of 200, 000 Japanese  civilians by US weapons of weapons of mass destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. On many occasion she  has been the  only MP in attendance, although until his death, the great socialist former MP Tony Benn regularly also attended.

Corbyn also has chaired Parliamentary CND for over a decade, and he has been the one MP who has consistently campaigned within Parliament as well as outside Parliament for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile other MPs like leadership contender Owen Smith were in CND when they though tit would advance their career in Labour to get selected for a Parliamentary seat, but now have dropped all the beliefs they had in a nuclear free -world by  lending their pro-Trient vote to the new Tory Prime Minister in the very first occasion Labour had to oppose this terrible right-wing Government.

I know who I  see is in touch with the grass roots of the Labour movement.

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