The mere fact that Jeremy Corbyn could be within less than 24 hours of becoming Prime Minister of this country is so incredibly unlikely that it would be dismissed as ridiculous were this a work of fiction – but of course it isn’t!
OK the polls and the pundits will still tell you that as madly romantic as the thought of having a genuine, long-term and highly-principled socialist for PM might be, it just ain’t gonna to happen. It’s ridiculous; the man is totally unelectable!
He certainly is as far as The British Establishment and the big media outlets are concerned and that’s why they have been banging their drums and shouting that message ever since his name first appeared on the ballots for the leadership of the Labour Party.
Until then, aside from the odd snide mention in the Sun, the Mail, or the Express (invariably after he’d voted against his party’s policy on yet another matter of principle), the media dealt with him the same way they have always contained genuine socialist thinking, by simply ignoring it and by so doing, they starved its troublemaking ideas of the oxygen of publicity.
Well it stands to reason doesn’t it; if they were to provide free exposure to cranks like Corbyn spouting mad ideas (of the sort that are now contained in the Labour Party manifesto: re-nationalising the railways and utilities, investing in schools, public housing, social care and the NHS, and a liveable minimum wage) even the readers of the tabloid trash listed above might begin to think that socialism wasn’t quite as dumb as it sounds.
Rubbish say the credulous classes in thrall to the tabloids, they’re always reporting on political correctness and leftie nonsense in my red top; that’s why we know what an absolute hopeless case Corbyn is!
On Wednesday March 13th 2009, I attended the launch on The People’s Charter For Change at the Houses of Parliament. I was there because I’d been a member of the small socialist think-tank (for the want of a better word) who had originally come up with the idea; also present were Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Bob Crow, Matt Wrack, John Hendy QC, Michael Mansfield QC, Imran Khan (Stephen Lawrence family lawyer) and number of other left-wing luminaries.
Consequently I was assured that the TV, press and radio would all be in attendance so – unusually for me – I didn’t bother taking my professional camera; and sure enough when I turned up the mainstream media were there in force to record the occasion for posterity.
And what an occasion it was; the idea behind ‘The People’s Charter’ was that it expressed six core principles (not dissimilar to those contained in the current Labour Party manifesto) that candidates in the 2010 General Election could sign up to; which would allow people like me whose consciences hadn’t allowed us to cast our ballots for the Blairite Labour Party, to vote for a candidate who had endorsed the charter, irrespective of what party they represented.
It was hoped that this could provide a means of getting around the two party system and facilitate the introduction of socialist arguments into the parliamentary debate – and as you can see from all of the smiling faces in the short video below everyone was very pleased with how well the launch had gone.
I filmed that tiny clip of video on my phone, along with the outdoor photograph of the aforementioned lefties holding up The Charter; and it’s a good thing I did because if I hadn’t, there would have been absolutely ZERO RECORD that it had ever actually happened.
That’s right, there was a rock solid, 100% news blackout of the whole event! Sounds unlikely? Try Googling it; surely a gathering of all of these representatives from the lunatic fringes of the ‘Far Left’ in the House of Parliament would have merited at least a tiny picture and a couple of column inches in someone’s local giveaway? But alas it would appear not.
So I would suggest that if you haven’t put your X in that little box yet and you’ve been making the mistake of believing the fairy stories that the big media outlets put out – the ones that portray Jeremy Corbyn as a cross between the Big Bad Wolf and the Wicked Witch in the woods – that you consider what’s required for a real happy ending.
Or at least the beginnings of one…
This was originally entitled “Do You Believe In Fairy Tales” but I thought it might prove interesting to provide Google with a link to The People’s Charter For Change.
