I wrote today about the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party winning a new election in Britain:
It’s hard to exaggerate the threat represented by Corbyn and Co. taking control of our most important ally. In U.S. terms, Corbyn is a mashup of Bernie Sanders and the Squad, mixing orthodox socialist economics with a hostility to U.S. foreign policy and Israel.
He is a lefty caricature. George Orwell once complained of “the smell of crankishness” in the socialist movement, and wished he could send every vegetarian and teetotaler home “to do his yoga exercises quietly.”
Corbyn is, indeed, a vegetarian who rarely drinks. One British newspaper relates that his favorite restaurant is a spot “where he likes to eat hummus after taking part in demonstrations in Trafalgar Square.” His first wife reports that he never took her out to dinner, preferring to eat beans straight from a can to save time.
He is a figure that time is supposed to have forgotten. He inveighed from the back benches against Labour’s turn away from the old-time religion under moderate prime minister Tony Blair. When he mounted an unlikely leadership bid in 2015, he found an audience, much as Bernie Sanders did in 2016. Now the old-time religion is a few lucky breaks away from power.