Jeremy Corbyn has been re-elected as the leader of the Labour Party, and while it is tempting to simply point and laugh at the mess his party is in, his continuing popularity portends a dark future for the politics of the United Kingdom.
Corbyn is an old-school leftist with a penchant for fraternising with terrorist groups, the dress sense of a librarian and a lack of charisma only slightly less acute than Ed Miliband’s. He has outright stated he would never use nuclear weapons, compared Israel to ISIS, and once didn’t even bother to sing the national anthem during a memorial service for the Battle of Britain – yet still he maintains his popularity. He is the Donald Trump of the left, putting his foot in it every few minutes, making gaffe after gaffe, suffering a constant barrage of criticism from the media yet coming out almost unscathed. This is what should worry you, and leave in your mind the question: if he’s popular, what happens when Jeremy Corbyn 2.0 arrives wearing a proper suit?
In order to answer that question, first we must ask why Corbyn is popular in the first place.
The first factor on his side is his anti-establishment image. He has been identified as the second most rebellious Labour MP of all time, constantly voting against the party line. He is perpetually scruffy, which gives him a quirky-intellectual kind of street cred. He joins groups against wars his own party started, praises openly communist newspapers, and rides on trains and buses as if he were a normal person. In essence, he is Bernie Sanders’ British brother, or at least one of them.
The second factor on Corbyn’s side is the youth vote. Every year a new batch of indoctrinated teenagers become eligible to vote, and progressive education guarantees that they will flock to the support of whichever candidate is the nearest to an outright communist. This is the more worrying factor to consider, as these brainwashed students are bound to grow into brainwashed adults, and all the while common sense is dying with the last of the baby-boomers.
So we return to our original question. Answer: ten more years and a man with a teaspoon of charisma, an ounce of dress sense and essentially the same ideologies as Corbyn will get elected. It might be worth enjoying laughing at the mess that is the Labour Party while we can – in another decade a similar mess could be running the country.
Rational Observations 