Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn in Budapest: 'There has to be a cease fire followed by serious negotiations about what the relationship is going to be like between Russia and Ukraine'

Jeremy Corbyn — My support is for Lula, the Pope, the Chinese president, and the general secretary of the UN, who are trying to get a peace process going on.

British politics in tumult

Labour should grasp the Brexit nettle

By Alan Davies

March 17, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Socialist Resistance — Claims of ‘unity’ by Theresa May after her ‘keynote’ Mansion House Brexit speech on Friday March 2 had stopped by Sunday when Michael Heseltine had dismissed it as just more ‘phrases, generalisations and platitudes’.

La política británica en transición: la austeridad, Brexit y el desafío Corbyn

British politics in transition: Austerity, Brexit and the Corbyn challenge

By Phil Hearse February 28, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — In the middle of the harshest winter for more than a decade, Britain finds itself still gripped by the icy fingers of neoliberal austerity. Both the health service (NHS) and local government stagger from crisis to crisis, as savage spending cuts by Theresa May’s Conservative government make the provision of adequate services – those used mainly by the elderly, disabled people, the ill, the poor and the homeless – impossible. Eight years of austerity and harsh pay restraint among public sector workers have pushed economic growth into a nosedive, sharply reducing tax income, thus giving a further twist to the knife of Tory cutbacks.

Theresa May’s Katrina: Grenfell Tower and the election outcome that wasn't supposed to happen

By Sheila Cohen and Kim Moody June 23, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Solidarity (US) — We live in a north London street which, despite its impressive 19th century architecture, is peopled mainly by “council tenants” (public housing residents). This is largely due to the left-of-center politics of the local council (government), which bought up large areas of such housing in the 1970s, limiting “development” and gentrification, and preserving much of the working class population. Perhaps as a result Labour MP Emily Thornberry, a strong supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, was re-elected with an increased majority of over 20,000 votes--63% against the Conservative’s 21%. Nationally, Labour won 30 new seats and increased its vote by 3.5 million and the Conservatives lost their majority.

They told us ‘elections are won from the centre’. We’ll never believe them again

By James Fox June 15, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Red Pepper — Jeremy Corbyn has just gained the most support for the Labour Party since the 1945 election of Clement Attlee. A post-election poll from Survation, one of the pollsters that called the election the most accurately, now puts Labour ahead of the Conservatives by 6 percentage points, stating that Corbyn would win 45 per cent of the public vote (against the Conservatives’ 39 per cent) – 5 points up since the election only a few days ago.

Richard Seymour on British elections: Where we go from here

Earning optimism after pessimism: Salvage editorial on the British general election

Socialist Resistance: For a Labour victory on June 8

By Socialist ResistanceJune 7, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Socialist Resistance — Labour’s election manifesto launch has boosted Corbyn’s campaign, which has been drawing thousands to rallies across the country. Debate has shifted to a new level, replacing endless ridicule of the Labour leader with a serious discussion on an alternative policy; not to only to end austerity but seeking to reverse it – for the many, not the few.

Local and mayoral elections in Britain: Brexit election delivers carnival of reaction

By Phil HearseMay 11, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Left Unity — The huge Labour losses in the local council elections are just what the Labour Right was hoping for. Peter Mandelson said as much late last year, when he stated he was hoping for Theresa May to call an early election that would result in a disastrous Labour defeat and therefore the removal of Jeremy Corbyn. It’s exactly what all Corbyn’s reactionary detractors in the press and television wanted as well.

Britain: The Tories, the general election and neoliberalism’s second phase

By Neil FaulknerMay 9, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Left Unity — ‘Ignorance never yet helped anyone.’ So raged Karl Marx as he leapt from his chair and thumped the table so hard that the lamp shook. The occasion was a meeting in Brussels in 1846 of the newly formed Communist Correspondence Committee – the tiny acorn from which, over the next 150 years, so many mighty oaks would grow. The target of the tirade was a somewhat vacuous activist called Wilhelm Weitling, who professed to believe that socialist theory was unnecessary. This was, Marx fumed, ‘equivalent to vain dishonest play at preaching which assumes an inspired prophet on the one side and only gaping asses on the other’. Theresa May’s decision to call a general election should not mean that socialists stop thinking and mumble platitudes. To become uncritical cheerleaders for a cack-handed reformism can only foster illusions and false hopes at the expense of equipping activists with the understanding they need in the struggle to change the world. Left websites which are simply shouting support for a Corbyn victory – without discussing any of the contradictions in play – are the modern Weitlings. Corbyn is not a prophet, activists are not gaping asses, and a general election should not be the occasion for putting our brains in deep freeze.