FraserWords

WELL, the world is ending. Jeremy Corbyn, according to reliable sources, is made of bees. His beard contains particles of food eaten in 1955 that could cause anaphylactic shock to babies if he is in the same town as them. He beat his rich parents with sandals made of lentils because they sent him to a prep school. He has scales on his feet. He grows no nasal hair. He hates sweet little puppy dogs. He’s teetotal because if he drinks, the bees he’s made of crawl out of his navel and sting kittens. Sting them to death. He loves terrorists and the IRA so much he wants to have their babies. He’s a vegetarian, the freak. He is, in fact, a complete and total bastard. It’s a fact. It’s all a fact.

The BBC seems especially appalled by all this: somebody who’s not telegenic, doesn’t particularly want to be on the telly every minute of the day, refuses to speak in ten-second sound bites and says he wants to listen to what other people have to say. He went to a charity fun day in his constituency on Sunday rather than be interviewed by His Holiness Andrew Marr! He’s asked electors what they want David Cameron to be asked at Prime Minister’s Questions! He must be made of bees!

So the media is about its work, spraying repellent all round the dangerous stingy bee-man. Already, the shadow chancellor is ‘IRA sympathiser John McDonnell’, Corbyn is ‘Comrade Corbyn’ and Labour are ‘red and buried’.

What? Discuss the ideas? Stop the personal abuse? What? Are you mad? What do we want with the ideas of a man who’s made of bees and can grow no nasal hair, the freak? What do we want of a country with a free national health service, a free university education, public services provided for the sake of warmth, light and heat rather than for profit? What’s all this peace, love and understanding? There’s no money in any of that! Listen to your betters. Listen to them!

The mad bee-man is a threat to our very national security! It’s obvious. What with the swingeing cuts to the Army and the Air Force and now that our Police force consists of a few armed coppers and a handful of harassed ‘community support officers’ and now our Royal Navy is two hairy-arsed matelots in a rubber dinghy circling the Isle of Wight, we know all about compromising national security through failed economic policy. Listen to your betters!

Corbyn’s leadership will be an exquisitely painful ordeal for the left, of course it will. And he has no chance whatsoever of power not because he’s too left wing or because his policies are foolish, but because the electorate is too stupid and too easily led by a right-wing male elite and its servants, the media. Why would they think? I have a right-wing friend who bemoans the fact that we make nothing and have endless meetings and focus groups and trendy management speak running our economy and he dislikes the modern world and he doesn’t get it at all.

Already, the media’s swinging obediently into line: the reaction today to news of a cabinet split equally between men and women has not been to compare it to Cameron’s rich, white, male cabinet but to complain that women didn’t get any of the ‘top jobs’. As if health, education and international aid are the cabinet equivalent of making cups of tea, love, for everybody else.

Already, their tag line is being relentlessly pushed: Corbyn will take us back to the 70s. Not the 70s remembered by my father as a time when he had a holiday for the first time, when his wages rose, when his standard of living improved, when the life chances of his children, both of whom won careers and bought their own homes, got better. No, Corbyn will take us back to the 70s the rich people who are our government remember – the 70s when working people demanded fair treatment and improved lives, the 70s when those who could afford it paid big taxes. Gosh, didn’t they suffer, the rich! Look how many of them went bankrupt! It’s a wonder there were enough of them left to keep Eton going and grow a new generation of selfish greedy shits to tell us what to do, isn’t it?

Now, where were we? Ah yes, the bee-man, buzzing us back to the 70s so he can steal our grannies and rape our cars. The bastard.

Well, for now I’m just enjoying the discomfort of the fat, lazy, wealthy elite whose golden cage is being rattled. I’m just enjoying the fact that business leaders who think they can abuse staff with zero hours contracts are frightened of peaceful protest. I’m enjoying the accusations that a politician may victimise a sector of society, coming from politicians busy victimising the poor, the jobless and the disabled. I’m enjoying the smell of rich people’s fear.

It will turn to dust, of course – the generation that saved Cameron at the last election will have a vote for a while yet, with which to deny young people the lives my sister and I were gifted by my father and his generation.

But it’s all increments. Jeremy Corbyn’s win is a step on the road. Each step counts.

That’s how the right got into the position it occupies today – step by painful step, dismantling the consensus of that golden generation of 1945 that built our socially just, prosperous country on socialist principle with policy that was once the mainstream.

The right moved bit by bit, inexorably, to the place it is in today, where power is taken for granted. The left will do the same. The world turns. The world remembers that in extremis – economic depression, famine, war, banking collapse, refugee crisis – it turns to socialism, collective action, state intervention, democratic will socialism. It always turns to socialism, and socialism always works.

One day, once again, it won’t be barking mad to suggest that water falling from the sky is a common asset essential to all human life that shouldn’t be owned by a few shareholders for personal profit. One day it won’t be crazy to suggest that somebody who sweeps shit off the roads is just as valuable to society as a hedge fund investor who gambles on the price of peapods in two months’ time. One day it won’t be crazy to say that everybody should have an equal chance in life and the way to give them that equal chance is through a state-run free education system. One day it won’t be crazy to suggest our National Health Service doesn’t exist to enrich private contractors, pharmaceutical corporations and PR consultants.

It will all happen. It might not happen with Corbyn. But just as histories will one day tell us that the world’s descent into a selfish swamp of greed and corruption which caused immeasurable harm began with Thatcher and Reagan, they will one day tell us that the hopes of a new generation for inclusion, democracy and social justice found one of its turning points in Corbyn’s election.

Until then. Bring on the bees. Bring on the fucking bees.