From my own experience of him - I do know that Jeremy Corbyn - is a good type of guy - when it comes to Labour Party, politics and the current election for a new leader.
Without any doubt about it in my own mind - I do believe, that he is both a reasonable, fair and an honourable left politician.
It's all good then, that which is happening right now within the Labour Party - I am delighted and I do suspect like a great many, who are following events and this particular leadership election and its eventful outcome, and hopefully, to see in the end game, the departure of the Blairites from the influential and dizzy heights of public life within the organisation they infiltrated and captured.
In the first year of Blair's leadership and at his first party conference, I found myself travelling overnight in a hurry to attend and lend support to Glasgow Maryhill CLP who were trying to holt and to stop the ditching of Clause lV. The eventual changing of Clause IV a year later was seen by political commentators of that time as the defining moment at which Old Labour became New Labour, this ultimately happened the next year and as Blair said it would, such was the hold he was given, which is something worth remembering.
The conference held in Blackpool enabled me to invite Corbyn to travel up to Scunthorpe and address party members at a public meeting, which he did on a very cold winters night. I spent some time with him before and after the meeting, and therefore, I can if you like, vouch for his integrity as a left socialist.
The same could not be said of the other 3 people running for the leadership of the Labour Party along with Corbyn, they are in my own estimation, failing to tell the general public about their policies and exactly what changes they would introduce, this is what I have noticed during the course of this very interesting development in the Labour Party and a leadership campaign with a difference.
Corbyn’s opponents - are those who have gained a great deal of personal wealth, power and status as a result of the present immoral and unequal crony capitalist system and are desperate to promote Cooper, Burnham or Kendall as they see them as being no different to Osborne and Cameron. They do not want any power to shift from the few to the many, even within the Labour Party, which is after all, a willing participant in capitalism and the ‘state’ as it stands. I will always recall Tony Benn even saying - that the Labour Party has never been a socialist party.
Such is the history of Labour
Labour lost the plot in the seventies and has been in a downward spiral since then.
Turning its back on principles and propping up consumerism at every opportunity, and then to start lead and lend support to US imperialist wars and campaigns of terror around the globe.
Now they cannot produce an original thinking leader to move them forward as they become another Conservative party.
An opposition party (in this cesspit of a parliament) is generally assumed to produce effective opposing ideas and policies not abstain and thereby support an oppressive government. They may or may not split, or they may change their direction, the drubbing by the SNP north of the border should have woken them from their slumber. I myself cannot see them ever returning to the party of the poor, oppressed and needy. There is no money in supporting those at the bottom, they are more concerned with gaining appeal to bankers than workers.
Jeremy Corbyn's campaign has the right wing inside the Labour Party frothing at the mouth - his successors have gone wading in - and in the hope, that it will impade and change the mind and motions of thousands of ordinary members in this leadership election. However, Corbyn has drawn if not lit up a new path for thousands travelling in the direction (very different) to what has been on offer from New Labour thus far. Sick to the back teeth with the politics of austerity, the invasions and wars of the Blair and Brown years, that have left behind in its wake a much poorer and a worse off youth in this 21st century, who have been targeted used and abused by both New Labour and now the Tories.
How out of touch would you have to be to think Gordon Brown would stop people voting for Jeremy Corbyn?
Corbyn is galvanising support from all sections of the working classes as he speaks out against the attacks whether on benefits or the NHS. He calls for affordable housing, so desperately needed by millions faced with high house prices and rents or sleeping rough out on our streets.
Almost four in ten homes sold through ‘right to buy’ are now in the private rented sector (Inside Housing). Now housing associations are supposed to become ‘agents of aspiration’ according to the housing minister Brandon Lewis as the government extends right to buy to housing associations.
These are indeed interesting times for an outsider like myself to watch the developments within the Labour Party and this election for a new leader, the one thing that can be said about Corbyn is that he is a principled, honest representative of the left wing of old Labour. Like Bevan, Foot and Benn who came before him, Corbyn is an eloquent spokesman for the cause of parliamentary ‘socialism’.
History and a study of past events within this party and in government show that all the old Labour governments of the past have loyally served the British capitalist and ruling class which brings to mind the story of Ramsay MacDonald the first Labour Party Prime Minister, leading a government in 1924 had a meeting with the then King who asked MacDonald if he could try to persuade his members in Parliament to refrain from singing the Red Flag in the chamber
.
While the platform and demands posed by Corbyn are indeed supportable, they cannot be achieved through the old Labour parliamentarism of the past, a history that has surely taught us all - that much?