IT is a privilege to be leading the Scottish campaign to help make Jeremy Corbyn the next Labour Party leader. The past few weeks have electrified and inspired hundreds of thousands people to join, re-join and register support for Labour. They have been given hope by Jeremy's vision of a better society that challenges austerity instead of meekly surrendering to it.
Politics of course should be about policy, not personality, and there is no doubt it is his policies that are connecting, but it is also the decency of the man himself as he refuses to be drawn into a political slanging match as insults are hurled by failed political “strategists”, media commentators and politicians past and present whose fingers are slipping one by one from the power they once held. The attacks have been often vicious, occasionally laughable and regularly absurd. Unfortunately, this absurdity has continued with the party apparently turning down applications from some of the very people we need to win back in order to gain power again.
And yet the more they smear and the more desperate they appear, the more people support Jeremy. It shows just how out-of-touch these supposedly skilled political campaigners and strategists are. They are out of step with those who are crying out for a break from the failed politics of austerity, spin and insult. People desperately want Labour to have a vision of hope and ambition for our future and a vision that reflects our timeless values of community, solidarity, equality, justice and peace.
For the past 25 years I have put my heart and soul into Labour and it hasn’t always been easy. There have been leaders who have stretched members’ loyalty but I and others got our heads down and campaigned for what we deemed to be the wider ideals of the party and the movement. I remained and remain 100 per cent committed, believing it has been, and will again be, the greatest vehicle for social and economic change. It was Labour which created the welfare state, the NHS, the national minimum wage and the Scottish Parliament. So just as I respected the views of the party membership in selecting leaders and candidates who may not have been “my cup of Tetley”, I expect all members, councillors, MPs and MSPs to respect the choice of party members and supporters this time. To do otherwise would be an anti-democratic outrage with potentially catastrophic consequences for the party.
Jeremy Corbyn has tapped into a desire for change which is not unique to the UK. We can see it now in the USA with the Bernie Sanders presidential bid, we saw it in Greece and in Spain and we saw it last year here in Scotland.
This time last year I was out knocking on doors and addressing meetings arguing the socialist (not Better Together) case for a |No vote in the referendum. I’m still strongly of the view it was the right thing to do. For many I know independence wasn’t about nationalism, it was about a desire for change. Telling people on zero-hours contracts or those using food banks to survive that they were “Better Together” meant nothing. I argued for a very different strategy and a year on, I see even more clearly why I was right – those negative tactics didn’t work then and similar tactics applied to the Corbyn campaign are not working now. You don’t put out a fire by throwing petrol bombs at it!
Jeremy Corbyn offers a great deal more hope than was ever on offer by the Yes side. His outlook isn’t limited to constitutional change – he wants radical change across the whole of the UK. Change that is chiming with huge numbers of young people, people returning to Labour and people who thought the party had abandoned them.
Whatever the contest’s result, it’s clear politics has changed. People have a desire for a fairer and better society that looks after their needs and gives everyone an opportunity to realise their potential. Jeremy gets that, and that is why I desperately hope he wins.
Labour's big guns are warned: 'It's time to respect the choice of party members’
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