Corbyn's charisma

The greatest Labour leader in the history of the British Labour Party was Clement Attlee. He carried through a transformative program immediately after WW2 - in the face of huge war debts - the worst housing crisis in the biggest cities until now - the need to reconstruct most of UK industry into peacetime production - the threat of vast unemployment because of the returning military forces -  and the overthrow of large parts of what had been Britain's lucrative Empire, as the international anti-colonial movement rose in revolt.

When an advisor told him that Attlee had a modest quality which voters liked, Churchill, the British war leader, busting out with charisma in 1945, said this about Attlee -:
'He has much to be modest about!' Churchill went on to score a deep and dramatic loss in the post war election.

Attlee was modest because millions of returning soldiers and sailors and millions who had fought the war at home were modest, ordinary people, people who had suffered through the 1930's economic crises, but they had just helped to win the greatest war in history. In a modest way, as Tory grandee Boothby said.
'If we do not give them reform then they will give us revolution!'

The modest, ordinary people had lived their dramatic lives with Churchill for 4 years, just getting on with their difficult lives. They understood ruling class charisma. They were sick of it.

The modern British mainstream and much of the digital media screams that Corbyn has no charisma. The self-styled 'bloody woman' Tory leader Teresa May claims the legacy of Thatcher, Elizabeth 1st and Boudica. Why? Because she wants to turn the coming June 8 General Election into a patriotic movement against the EU. It is as ludicrous as that. For the last 7 years Tory governments have driven Britain through austerity. As a result the health service, the NHS, is on its knees, the long term  destruction of labour rights has meant a decline in wages and general living standards to pre-2008 levels, even the police are in trouble and serious crime, declining in the West for decades, has risen sharply.  Only the very rich are better off. May is already adding cuts to pensions and education. And that is before the full Tory Election Manifesto is published

Corbyn is a modest politician after a political lifetime on the margins of the Labour Party. He proposes that Labour should reverse austerity, the NHS and education should be refunded, including reviving student grants, that public energy companies be set up, that pensions remain protected, that taxes on big companies and the incomes of the rich go up to 2005, and general European, levels. It is a modest plan. But will Corbyn have the charisma to fight the war with the EU? That is what the Tories, a huge swathe of the all parts of the media, and a lot of Labour's MPs are reducing the 2017 general election to.

Behind this fatuous posturing over the 'Brexit war', is the alarming prospect of a 'fire-sale' of Britain's social infrastructure, the uberisation of most employment, and the emergence of a new (very old) vision of how the West should 'adapt' to the unstoppable forces of globalisation.