UK Elections: Tory Cynicism vs. Corbyn’s Common Decency

One million people, many of them in work, forced to rely foodbanks; 1 in 4 children living in poverty; homelessness, including rough sleeping, at a 30 year high; real wages down; the worst housing crisis of any advanced industrialised economy; healthcare in crisis; the most ramshackle and expensive rail system in Europe; the highest prison population in western Europe; crime up; suicides up – all this at the same time as the richest 1,000 people in the country saw their wealth increase by 14% the past year. This is not Britain in 1817 we’re talking about this is Britain in 2017, thus ensuring that the stakes involved in the country’s upcoming general election on June 8 could not be higher.

And with the election looming, isn’t it instructive that the Tory political and establishment have been throwing everything bar the kitchen sink at Jeremy Corbyn and key members of his team? Dredging up positions he held on the IRA in the 1980s, demonstrations he attended, along with speeches and statements he made decades ago, it all points to the fact that despite spending the past year dismissing him as the most inept, feckless, and incompetent leader of the opposition there has ever been in decades – that despite all of that the Tory establishment is worried, and with good reason.

Labour’s election manifesto is the most transformative and radical programme for government the UK has seen in over a generation. It is one that plants its colours squarely on the side of…

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