Posts Tagged ‘Kevin Feeney’

Look at Syriza. Look at Greece. That’s what Jeremy Corbyn would do for Labour and Britain

14/07/2015, 11:38:45 AM

by Kevin Feeney

During a recent twitter discussion about the lessons to be learnt from the latest stage of the interminable saga of the Greek crisis, one of Britain’s finest centre-left commentators, Phil Collins, claimed that it was quite simple; there are in fact no lessons for the British left from Greece.

After six months of hyperbolic nonsense about a war between democracy and austerity from many sections of the Labour party, this is an understandable reaction – especially in light of the colossal differences between the societies, political systems and present economics of the two countries.

Nevertheless, Collins goes too far here – there are in fact two key lessons which we might usefully draw, even if these are more reinforcements of points that might have been guessed before rather than innovations.

  1. The far left can win (just about, if presented with the total collapse of the political system)

Commentators like Collins spend much of their time pointing out to the sort of people now backing Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader that they can’t possibly win a general election. Many of them now respond that Greece’s election of the far left Syriza proves otherwise and it’s true; all it would take would be the complete implosion of the economy, political system and much of civil society and the UK too could have an extremist government.

In Greece, even presented with all of those things and a five year depression under the major parties of left and right, the far left still barely crawled over the finish line on a vote share so low that it was below that won by the second placed party in every Greek election between 1985 and 2009, necessitating coalition with Greece’s equivalent of UKIP.

This is not to suggest that this government lacks legitimacy. The Syriza regime, after all, possesses almost as much legitimacy as Cameron’s Conservatives, who won a higher vote share on higher turnout months later.

Yet it has required an enormous amount of spin and new levels of self-delusion for many on the left to convert a bare mandate from an exhausted and disillusioned electorate reckoning things can’t possibly get any worse into what one columnist hilariously dubbed “the politics of hope.”

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Respect for Tony Benn is right, completely rewriting history is not

10/04/2014, 02:00:16 PM

by Kevin Feeney

When any controversial public figure dies, it is both normal and entirely natural for their followers and those inspired by them to whitewash their image a little in an effort to smooth out their rough edges.

Like most of those within the Labour Party who were rather less enamoured of the legacy of the late Tony Benn than other colleagues, I was entirely prepared to overlook the rather telling gaps in his more sympathetic obituaries. It was fine that they passed over his views on Mao, fine that they ignored his practical impact on Labour’s electability in the 1980s, fine that they left unquestioned his own claims as a tribune of democracy.

These were eulogies in the heat of the moment after a figure who they admired had passed on; the time for full and balanced reflections was later. Equally fine were those seemingly obligatory lists of “Issues where they were right” which we expect with any such figure; Benn certainly many of those, from Mandela to gay rights.

Except after a while, I started noticing something else creeping into that last list in Benn’s friendly obituaries. Owen Jones celebrated him not only for all of the above but also for ‘calling for peace talks when it was controversial to do so’ in Northern Ireland; praise he has reiterated in more than one place. It may be no surprise for Jones to rewrite history in such a manner, but less stridently left-wing voices have done so too; the editor of one prominent Labour website claimed that the presence of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness at Benn’s funeral was a ‘reminder of the difference he made’ as though this were a positive thing.

Indeed, “Northern Ireland” has begun inexplicably to seep into several lists of the man’s positive contributions. These claims cannot be allowed to endure unchallenged; nor can they be allowed to become part of that acceptable list of “good things” we all agree Benn stood for.

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