Labour leader: “It was always a political choice”
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s powerful speech in Corby this morning showed the party’s confidence in offering hope and credibility against Boris Johnson’s ‘snake oil’ promises and plans to make life even harder for the many.
One passage in particular illustrated why a panicked Establishment has stooped to ever-greater depths to smear and malign Corbyn’s Labour – because he has won the argument on austerity that nobody else dared make:
Corbyn is absolutely right. If Johnson can go to the ‘magic money tree’ because he is desperate to fool the country into thinking he gives a damn about the anguish, misery and suffering he and his party have inflicted on the country for almost a decade, then austerity was always a political choice and not a necessity.
Labour’s so-called ‘moderates’, who still feebly claim they represent ‘serious’ politics, did not have the courage even to make that suggestion. The decision by Harriet Harman in 2015 – at the time stand-in Labour leader and again being touted by ‘centrists’ as a potential ‘interim PM’ – to order Labour MPs to abstain on benefit cuts rather than stand up to the Tories was a low point of abject cowardice in Labour’s history that led directly to the mass support for Corbyn’s leadership bid that summer.
Jeremy Corbyn was one of the Labour MPs – and the only leadership candidate – who defied the order. Four years on, he has not only defeated his leadership opponents but also the whole edifice of ‘necessity’ that the Tories and supine media set up to justify years of ‘conscious cruelty‘.
If, as many expect, there is a general election this autumn there is only one choice for any in the nation who want principle, credibility and genuine change. It’s a historic opportunity that must not be squandered.
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