It is a long shot, but if Rishi Sunak had any sense, then he would appoint Jeremy Corbyn as Trade Envoy to Brazil. Business would rightly be delighted. No one else outside Latin America has Corbyn's access there, and in many other places besides.
If Corbyn cannot have a whip that is enforced by Christian Wakeford, then he'll live. To rapturous crowds on every continent, and to packed houses everywhere in Britain, he'll live. Nobody on the Left really cares about the Labour Party anymore, and fewer by the day even pretend to. From outside any party, Mick Lynch can bring the country to a standstill while drawing crowds of thousands.
The Left has unique links, routinely very strong ones indeed, to the vast potential markets of Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific. The Right, by contrast, has been cast into the wilderness for at least 50 years after a six-week stint in 10 and 11 Downing Street that would have lasted only three weeks if the old Queen had not died.
The same people who would relish Corbyn's and his circle's role in relation to Brazil and numerous other countries had to stage a coup to rescue the British economy from Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. When the Suella Braverman detail has been addressed, then that will be the end of the Right for the rest of her, Truss's and Kwarteng's lives. The Left, on the other hand, is only just getting started. With absolutely no reference to the Labour Party.
After all, Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure than had not been in Truss's prospectus to her party's membership, but it supported everything else that even Jeremy Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse. Had the mini-Budget ever been put to a Commons Division, then Labour's whipped abstention would have saved Truss and Kwarteng from Hunt, Sunak, and all the rest of them. Labour is going into the next General Election as the only party that still thought that Trussonomics was broadly, and often very specifically, a good idea.
Starmer versus Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.
They might sign trade agreements they had written with Corbyn or with someone backed by him, no one else could pull that one off. Imagine a trade agreement put in front of them by Kwarteng or some old Blairite.
ReplyDeleteQuite.
DeleteThe Loony Left may as well flee to Lula's corrupt Brazil, since they can't win any elections in this country as the British just don't like them. Corbyn was trounced by Boris Johnson just as Michael Foot was trounced by Margaret Thatcher. Blair was the only Labour leader in decades who managed to win an election (and only by concealing his very leftwing agenda from the public). Nobody in Britain likes the Far Left.
ReplyDeleteSo what? And even if that were true, they like your lot a great deal less. Nobody, but nobody, in Britain likes the Right. Ken Livingstone's old mates in the City staged an almost immediate coup against it.
DeleteJeremy Corbyn will never be appointed to anything again, and his name is no longer mentioned in polite company. The Far Left is so far gone that Labour now sings the national anthem and talks tough on the illegal immigrant crossings.
ReplyDeleteLiz Truss is not and never was “right-wing”: she’s an ex Lib Dem who pretended to go to comprehensive school and fluffed some very minor tax cuts (mostly just reversals of recent tax rises) by failing to think of how she’d fund them. Anyone on “the Right” told her you can’t have tax cuts without accompanying spending cuts and indeed that’s the whole point (transferring money from the unproductive to the productive sector of the economy).
Corbyn is now a mainstream columnist, with plenty more of that sort of thing to come. He will be making documentaries on Radio Four and on what used to be called terrestrial television soon enough. Everyone who agrees with you in what used to be called Fleet Street is about to be quietly but firmly sacked, and the few Ministers who do are being managed out.
DeleteCorbyn is a national embarrassment from the past-now mentioned only as a punchline. Rather like George Galloway. Radio 4 is a good retirement home- especially as no one listens to radio anymore.
ReplyDeleteBroadcasting from home, George has over a million viewers twice a week, and you may no longer listen to Radio Four, but you are hardly the target audience, the mere size of which is beside the point where that station is concerned.
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