American Dreams

Just a short blog this morning. It's Sunday and everybody needs a day off.  

Not Jeremy Corbyn and Angela Eagle though.  Both on the telly this morning.  Jeremy looking very calm and collected in the face of Andrew Marr's questions.  He looked rested and pretty unflappable.  How does he manage it?  I don't think I could. He said he was disappointed that Angela was set to run against him.  I wonder if he really is as calm inside?

I haven't managed to see what she had to say to Andrew Neil this morning so I will reserve judgement until tomorrow.  I tried catchup but it was not available but I caught her on the news saying she had decided to stand to unite the party.  Wow! Thanks Angela, nothing quite unites the party like a leadership challenge following the mass resignation of most of the front bench.

The idea seems to be that they, the PLP have no confidence in Jeremy.  They didn't give him much chance to prove himself in that case.  If he is so awful, they had four and a half years before the next election after he was elected.  Would the sensible thing not have been to have given him two years to hang himself and then challenged his leadership if he turned out to be useless?  

Well I suggest that yes, this would have been a good strategy if that was their real worry. But I'm pretty certain that was not at all the reason for them not wanting him. They opposed him during his election, they attacked him as soon as he won and they made it quite clear they didn't want him as leader. The PLP had become overwhelmingly a centrist group with left leanings.  What Jeremy was offering and what the Labour Party at large seemed to want was something a bit more socialist than that.  After years of free-market neoliberalism, which had benefitted the well-off at the expense of the disadvantaged, some people, notably those in the Labour Party as a whole had decided that enough is enough.  Something needs to be done before the damage is irreversible. 

The Health Service is dying on its feet because of raised health expectations, lack of funding and constant tinkering with its organisation. The safety net provided by the benefits system is full of holes, many of them deliberately created to force the unemployed and disabled back to work. And I know a net is essentially lots of holes joined by string, but these new ones are big enough for people to fall through.

It was abundantly clear from the election result last September that the party had lost its appetite for the conventional ways and wanted something more inclusive.  I have never understood the attractions of the market as a model for running public services and I would suggest that just about every instance of privatisation which has taken place in this country has not improved the services at the point of use, and in in many cases has made it worse.  

We need to remember that we are not America, and that we should not aspire to be America.  For the disadvantaged in the US life is awful.  It need not be, nor need it be here but if we carry on as we are doing it will certainly not get better. 

Let's see what happens on Monday.

Love Tim xx