The Evils of Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn has a beard.  Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon had a beard and he was evil.  Therefore Jeremy Corbyn must be evil.  It's obvious, isn't it?  All of which is about the level that the right wing press is operating at in their rush to smear the new Labour leader.  Of course, if he is as hopeless as they've been telling us he is, why do they feel the need to try and discredit him now that he is leader?  Maybe it is because he is just so bat shit crazy that he's going to 'abolish the army' as one tabloid headline screamed at me from the newsstand today.  Which is funny, because I thought that Cameron had already done that with his defence cuts, reducing the Navy to a couple of rowing boats and the RAF to the Battle of Britain Memorial flight, for good measure.  Corbyn's also out to destroy the economy, jobs, education, health care and just about everything else that the Tories and their Lib Dem lickspittles have already trashed.  So, I guess that there's no change there - even with a new leader, Labour are just following Tory policies.  I'm amazed that the right wing press haven't alerted us to Corbyn's plans for the national currency should he become Prime Minister: he's going to replace the Queen's head with that of Karl Marx, with other heroes of communism replacing the various Great Britons currently on the other side of banknotes  - Chairman Mao is going to be on the five pound note, Trotsky on the tenner and Lenin on the twenty pound note.  Oh, and Wolfie Smith will be featured on the pound coin.

The hysteria the press and the Tories are trying to whip up around Corbyn really are ludicrous.  They even present as 'evil; things he suggested in the past, which Tory ministers actually did, ('Corbyn wanted to talk to IRA', just like John Major's government actually did in pursuit of the Northern Ireland peace process).  Moreover, for a political incompetent, he's apparently an incredibly dangerous political insurgent, with bonkers Justice Secretary Michael Gove telling us that he fears that Corbyn's election will lead to protests in the street,  Good!  If he can galvanise the UK's depressingly apathetic public into actually standing up to this bullying government of occupation in its attempts to strip us of our rights, then he'll have been a stunning success.  It's what we badly need: for people to take politics back into their own hands and away from over centralised government.

I'll be quite honest, Corbyn wouldn't have been my choice for Labour leader.  I have severe reservations as to his actual ability to do the job.  That said, the reality is that most of his policy proposals actually aren't 'barmy' or, indeed, particularly left wing.  Not so very long ago, most of them were part of mainstream political ideology.  As for those Labour MPs apparently disgruntled by his election, well, if you couldn't see the way public opinion on the left of centre (which Labour is meant to represent) was running, then it isn't any wonder that you lost two elections in a row.  Labour's 'establishment' have consistently misread the aspirations and feelings of its traditional core supporters, instead chasing the mythical 'centre ground', whose opinions are supposedly represented by the Daily Mail.  Except that they weren't the middle ground, they were Tories who were always going to vote Tory, no matter how Tory the Labour party tried to make itself look.  Clearly, the Tories and their friends in the media are getting worried that maybe, just maybe, Corbyn is tapping into a genuine shift in the tide of public opinion.  We can but hope.  Sure, there's every chance that Corbyn's leadership will be a disaster, but at least it might restore the Labour party to its founding principles. That might still result in electoral failure, but at least it will be failure on their own terms, not by trying to be Tory-lite.  So, let's just give the man a chance.