Corbyn addresses a mass rally just before the election
By Martin Gregory
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has delivered a stunning blow against the Tories and British Labour’s rightwing Blairites. Theresa May might not survive as Tory leader. With most of the British general election results declared the upshot is a hung parliament.
Who is this man? Our sub-editor’s files note that he doesn’t have a ‘Chinese-sounding name’, but other than that we can’t find any information about him.
The general election has dramatically shown the power of simple leftwing policies “For the Many, Not the Few”, to quote British Labour’s election manifesto title. This is the prescription we need in New Zealand to rouse working-class people to vote and kick National out in September. For the NZ Labour-Green alliance to win a clear victory it must drop its conservatism and belief it must appeal to the middle ground. It must drop pandering to the racism it perceives against immigrants. It must take a leaf out of Corbyn’s book and stand for a clear difference to National’s neo-liberal, pro-business policies.
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From the archive
Anzac Day: Against the Carnival of Reaction
On Anzac Day 1967, at the height of New Zealand involvement in the ‘American War’ in Vietnam, with New Zealand troops taking part in the suppression of the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation, members of the Progressive Youth Movement in Christchurch tried to lay a wreath following the dawn service in memory of those killed by imperialism in Vietnam. They were arrested and charged with disorderly behaviour. Feminists a decade later faced down a media-driven public outcry when they laid wreaths to the victims of sexual violence during war.
Lest we forget? It’s more like lest we remember. Anzac Day serves as a carnival of nationalist reaction, a day of public ritual aimed at promoting forgetting: forgetting the real legacy of New Zealand imperialism and militarism in favour of a sentimental nationalism, an anti-political celebration of national unity. [Read More…]
