“A Case for Jeremy Corbyn”, The New York Times

Roger Cohen, Op-Ed Columnist, June 5, 2017

[This prescient column written just before the election was discussed last night by Cohen with Charlie Rose on PBS.]

For a long time I could not bring myself to write about the British election. Trump-coddling, self-important, flip-flopping Theresa May, ensconced at 10 Downing Street without ever being elected prime minister, was going to sweep to her hard-Brexit victory and take the country down her little England rabbit hole.

There were more important things to think about, like the end of the American century in 2017, one hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution. A boorish clown named Donald Trump brought down the curtain.

In Britain, anyway, there was no story: The June 8 vote was a formality. The Labour Party was in meltdown, having exited the Blairite middle ground for leftist orthodoxy under Jeremy Corbyn. The British, their ludicrous vote to leave the European Union gradually sinking in, had morphed into sheep. May would get her mandate to do her worst, with Boris Johnson, a foreign secretary who long since forsook any claim to be taken seriously, cheering her on.

Then came two unspeakable terrorist attacks, one in Manchester and one in London. As I’ve argued before, the Islamic State should be driven out of Raqqa, whatever it takes (and if you have any doubt, watch Matthew Heineman’s new movie “City of Ghosts” about the citizen-journalist group “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently.”) Iniquity has its capital. From there it will emanate until crushed.

Of course Trump tried to make cheap political capital from the blood on London’s streets. He quoted London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, out of context in a flurry of tweets aimed at buttressing the case for his bigotry. The president of the United States just felt like insulting a prominent Muslim.

Trump bears about the same relationship to dignity as carbon dioxide to clean air. And this is the man May and Johnson have coddled, in the name of offsetting the Brexit debacle with increased U.S. trade.

Johnson, by the way, assured the world a couple of months back that British seduction of Trump had been so effective that efforts to convince the president not to quit the Paris climate accord “will succeed.” After all, Trump had been offered a state visit, horse-drawn carriage, the queen; all that British pomp for His Neediness. We know what the word of Johnson, who was for the European Union before he was against it, is worth. It’s worth zilch. No wonder Trump’s finger-to-the-planet Paris decision prompted scarcely a British whimper.

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Disgust, at some level, must find an outlet. Suddenly, we have an election after all. The expected Tory landslide has evaporated. May has led an abysmal, blundering, eat-your-peas campaign.

The prime minister embraced a hard Brexit at a moment when some people are finally experiencing buyers’ remorse. She came up with a “dementia tax,” the essence of which was to punish people for living too long; it did not go down well. She has exuded “this sense of entitlement,” in the words of Parry Mitchell, a member of the House of Lords who quit the Labour Party last year over Corbyn’s radicalism.

Corbyn, by contrast, has made no campaign mistakes. His slogan — “For the Many not the Few” — was no less effective for having been borrowed from Tony Blair. The ardor of his followers, particularly the urban under-30s, is remarkable. To them he is a near Messianic figure, the righter of capitalist wrongs; the proud socialist who will nationalize the railroads, make universities free again and inject billions into the National Health Service (while somehow balancing the budget). Like Bernie Sanders, and indeed Trump, he’s the man who will upend the system that brought you the Iraq war, the 2008 financial meltdown, the euro crisis, rampant impunity and ever-more-unequal societies.

Opinion polls now put Corbyn within a few percentage points of May. There is the possibility of a hung parliament.

Elections take place in the real world; they often involve unpleasant choices. I dislike Corbyn’s anti-Americanism, his long flirtation with Hamas, his coterie’s clueless leftover Marxism and anti-Zionism, his NATO bashing, his unworkable tax-and-spend promises. He’s of that awful Cold War left that actually believed Soviet Moscow was probably not as bad as Washington.

Still, Corbyn would not do May’s shameful Trump-love thing. He would not succumb to the jingoistic anti-immigration talk of the Tories. After the terrorist attacks, he said “difficult conversations” were needed with Saudi Arabia: Hallelujah! He would tackle rising inequality. He would seek a soft departure from the European Union keeping Britain as close to Europe as possible. His victory — still improbable — would constitute punishment of the Tories for the disaster of Brexit. Seldom would a political comeuppance be so merited.

The New York Times