Elections
can be strange events. The British one last month produced a mixture of
results but one thing it showed was that a genuinely democratic
socialist government there is a distinct possibility after the next time
the nation goes to vote again.
For
the first time since the mid-1940s, the Labour Party in the United
Kingdom, led by underdog Jeremy Corbyn is offering a collection of
policies that are not a softer, pale imitation of the Conservatives and
roughly supporting the economic and social status quo.
This
Labour party with its election programme (or ‘manifesto’) was full of
plans to tax the richest in society and increase company tax to pay for
better public funding of schools, hospitals and social care, all of
which have been cut away horrifically by the Cameron and May governments
since 2010. In truth, many of these severe austerity policies had
actually begun under previous Labour leaders in power.
Corbyn
however has moved his party clearly to the left and many of his ideas
proved to be popular during the last few weeks of the election campaign.
Theresa May lost her majority in parliament but we simply cannot know
for sure how much this was due to her bumbling campaign and how much
credit Corbyn can rightly claim.
What
we do know is that over 70 per cent of young voters in the 18 to 24 age
bracket voted for Labour candidates. Partly, this must have been due to
Corbyn’s policy of guaranteeing free university places for all, instead
of the current system which demands exorbitant annual fees but it seems
that his appeal was wider than just this one promise.
His
more concrete and costed commitments to put the rail network back in
public control and reverse the creeping sell off of the NHS public
health system also appear to have found support from the young to the
old. Labour’s pledge to raise the minimum wage to 10 pounds an hour was
another vote winner. It showed that they have once again gone back to
their red roots and are not afraid of being labelled radical by the
establishment-controlled media.
Another
progressive iconoclast who has lived by his left-wing beliefs and
regularly paid a price for doing so is Barcelona-born writer Juan
Goytisolo [pictured above], who sadly died at the age of 86 at his adopted Moroccan home
in June of this year. As a critic of General Franco and conservatism in
general, he was known across Europe for his books such as “Campos de
Níjar,” a travelogue that detailed the harsh social and economic
conditions in 1950s Andalucia (translated into English by Peter Bush.)
As a writer, I was also inspired by Goytisolo’s autobiography,
“Forbidden Territory”. It is rare to read such brutal honesty about his
own evolving sexuality and highly-personal inner landscape. Through
creamy prose, he makes a sharp dissection of the “ill-formed universe”
of his bourgeois upbringing. We can only hope to see others follow in
his wake.
[This article was first published under the title "The rallying of the left" in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2017.]
