22 February 2018
Czeching on Corbyn
What a waste of time.
By John Watson
Once upon a time, in the dark days of the 1980s when the world was young and Amazon had not been invented, Jeremy Corbyn met a Czech spy. Maybe he knew the Czech was a spy: maybe he thought he was a diplomat. Only Jeremy really knows, if indeed he can remember, yet much political energy is being absorbed by the question. What a waste of time it all is.
The right way to approach this story is through the pictures. Forget the politics for a moment and compare the photographs. On the one hand you have young dashing firebrand Corbyn, as he then was, bubbling with energy, fresh faced, unwrinkled, good looking enough to have pulled Diana Abbott; on the other, the grey and avuncular Jeremy who now leads Labour. Can you see a difference? Well, yes, of course you can unless you are blind. Time has certainly changed his appearance.
You will often hear a greybeard say that he feels young inside, that the passage of the years has affected his physical but not his mental state. Perhaps he really thinks that, but it is an illusion. Time changes the way in which we think, talk and behave every bit as surely as it changes our outward appearances and digestions. Of course some features remain. A character defect, like a physical one, may survive the change. So indeed may a character strength or a talent; but the man or woman who thinks just as they did thirty years ago has been taking some form of mental Botox.
There is a well-known story of which eight-year-old children are particularly fond and it runs like this:
A man enters a restaurant and is served soup. He asks the waiter what sort of soup it is.
“It’s bean soup, Sir,” the waiter informs him.
“I don’t care what it’s been. What is it now?” replies the customer.
That surely is the standpoint from which to consider whether Jeremy Corbyn and his party are fit to take over the running of the country.
So what is relevant and what is not? Corbyn’s links to the extreme Greek left are certainly an indicator of Labour’s current approach. Then there are the people he gathers around him. Do you trust them or don’t you? These are the people who will be running the UK if Labour wins the next election.
But in truth, this is all secondary. The fitness of Mr Corbyn and Labour hangs on the policies which they now put forward. There are plenty of them and Labour has made no secret of its plans to change the balance between the private and public sectors. There will be nationalisation of the railways, the water companies, the post office and energy. If the public is to make a mature decision it needs to hear the debate on these issues and indeed it may well get a chance to do so. The government is probably locked in place by the negotiations over Brexit for the next year or two, plenty of time to discuss what should happen afterwards.
The need for debate on these issues goes beyond party politics. The UK is in a transition phase at the moment. Doctrinaire Thatcherism has run its course. Despite remarkable successes it has not succeeded in pushing prosperity down the generations and social structure in the way we now require. Charging on indiscriminately in pursuit of market solutions does not seem to be the answer – there is no appetite for it, and many doubt the financial efficiency of bringing private finance into public utilities, particularly through the techniques championed by the Private Finance Initiative. Going back to where we were in 1979 is unlikely to work, either. It was their failure which was recognised by the electorate in that year. We need new and clever structures, drawing off the strengths of both the market and co-operative systems, and we will only get a proper synthesis through discussion and debate.
So the press and the Tories should stop worrying about what Mr Corbyn did in the 1980s. He was a different man then and it is hardly likely that his views remain unchanged. It is the ideas which he and those around him currently espouse which need to be tested. Will they work or not? That is the question. Probably the answer is that some of them will, but if so we need to know which ideas have merit so that future administrations, be they Tory or Labour, can take the best bits and build on them.
