The recent election on September 12, of 66 year old Jeremy Corbyn as the new leader of the British Labour Party has made many people to take critical look at emerging trend in western democracy and its leadership generally. Jeremy Corbyn has been in parliament for 32 years representing Islington North, a borough of London. He studied in a London polytechnic and made a career for himself as a trade union organiser before being elected into the House of Commons. He is cast more in the image of a previous Labour leader Michael Foot, a member of the remarkable Foot family that included the famous lawyer, Sir Dingle Foot, MP, and their brother Hugh Foot, Baron Caradon, Governor of Cyprus and later ambassador and permanent Representative of the UK at the UN and John Foot MP, later Lord Foot and their sisters Margaret and Elizabeth.
Like Michael Foot, Jeremy Corbyn is a political iconoclast who never voted along party lines in parliament and disobeying party whips 500 times. Up till two months ago the man never even thought of contesting for leadership of the party until some friends nominated him to broaden the debate on leadership of the party. Ironically those who nominated him claim now that they did not vote for him. So what kind of man is Jeremy Corbyn? He appears to be an idealist who believes in global justice, peace and development. And at home in the UK, he would work for equality of opportunities, and strengthening of the welfare state so that nobody is left behind in the race of life. He feels there is too much inequality in the UK and that every Briton should have free access to higher education and affordable housing. He does not believe in the free market and he will roll back nationalization particularly of the railways and public transportation and will ask the Bank of England to print money to reflate the economy rather than follow the austerity programme of the Tories which Corbyn claims has impoverished the Britons particularly the poor people. He is saying everything that reasonable people can associate with but when he says he will remove British nuclear deterrent by abolishing the Trident and withdraw from NATO, people who are willing to tolerate his idealistic socialist programmes begin to get worried that he may be risking the security of Great Britain.
The reality now is that Corbyn has been elected and he won in all the critical groups of the unions and affiliated members, regular members, and new members who have recently paid to join the party. The parliamentary party apparently distanced itself from him but any attempt to remove him will destroy the party because 59.5 percent of registered members voted for him. The question now is can this unconventional politician lead Labour to victory in 2020 when the next election is due? The answer is in the air. Many pundits feel Labour has signed its death warrant by electing Corbyn. This is the feeling of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown two former Labour leaders and prime ministers of the UK. But others feel Jeremy Corbyn has energized the politics of Britain to the extent that young people who were disinterested in politics are now flocking to the banners of the Labour Party. If this is true then the emergence of the new Labour Party leader may usher in a new trend in the politics of Europe where the typical lying politicians are shunted off and replaced with politicians who are honest, truthful and authentic and not those telling the people what is apparently palatable for the moment.
Unlike in the UK, the outsider who wants to lead the Republican Party and become president of the USA is Donald Trump a loud-mouth billionaire who is saying the wrong things and yet is riding very high in the polls. His solution to illegal immigration through Mexico is to build a high wall running for thousands of miles across the southern border of the USA with Mexico and somehow make the Mexican government pay for it. His solution to the ISIS insurgency is seizing the oil wells in Iraq to deprive the caliphate source of income. He would also force Japan and China to buy as much from the USA as the USA buys from the two countries. As for Putin’s Russia, Trump will build up the United States armed forces that the whole world would be trembling before it and even Putin, the Ayatollah Khamenei or anyone else will not mess with the USA again. There is of course Bernie Sanders who has declared himself a socialist running against Hilary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination. He is attracting a lot of crowd of people but it is probably out of curiosity for the elderly man who has committed suicide by declaring himself a socialist in the USA where socialism is like original sin.
Compared with what is happening in the UK, the American situation is not only pathetic but laughable. One hopes a man like Trump or any one like him will not become president of the USA with his hand on the nuclear button. We have seen this before in 1965 when the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater, a rabid Cold War warrior who said extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice and moderation in the defence of freedom is no virtue and threatened to use American nuclear arsenal to overawe American enemies. The Americans rightly voted against him by electing Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The point that comes to my mind is the general decline in the quality of political leadership in the West generally particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world including even Germany where Angela Merkel does not really inspire much enthusiasm thus the grand coalition between the Social Democratic Party and her own Christian Democratic Union/Christian Socialist Union ruling Germany in a grand coalition without a party in opposition.
For me these people hardly compare with people like John F. Kennedy, General Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Nikita Khrushchev, Harold Wilson, Chou En-lai, Mao Zedong, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Ahmed Sukarno, Josip Broz Tito, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sekou Toure , Abubakar Tafawa Balewa , Jomo Kenyatta and Julius Nyerere to mention a few. I may be a bit nostalgic but it is difficult for me to accept the current leaders are on the same pedestal as those of yester years.
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