Why I joined the Labour Party

I am very proud to have joined the Labour party with Jeremy Corbyn as leader. I am not radically left and I don't regard him as being radically left. (In Scandinavia he would be so normal he would blend into the background.) Instead, this country's politics has been driven hard to the right (egged on by an awful media and unchallenged corporate interests) so he just seems left-wing by comparison!

Today, the neoliberal project put into action by Thatcher & Reagan is lying in smoldering ruins. Desperate and directionless, large swathes of voters have been voting the way the media tells them, and this is in a very right wing direction, blaming the poorest and most vulnerable, instead of the corporate and political elite.

Trickle-down economics and austerity have been shown, finally, to be utterly bogus and, as many esteemed economists have described it, 'economically illiterate.' Instead, struggling economies need to be pump-primed from the bottom to ensure infrastructure works to support the growth above it and to this end, I agree with Jeremy's plans for a National Investment Bank. Again, it's only a radical idea in countries such as the UK where it threatens the vast wealth of the 10% who hold 90% of the wealth.

I sincerely hope that the party as a whole can whole-heartedly change direction and get behind Jeremy's vision for a fairer country and pull some of the forgotten people and communities away from the lure of the right. To ignore what has happened with Brexit and in the USA would be monumentally stupid. In the US, the pragmatic way for the Democrats was to get behind Hilary Clinton, which is what they did. The ideological way would have been to get behind Bernie Sanders. If they had done this, we almost certainly would now be looking forward to welcoming President Sanders next year. The Labour party need to take note, and take the ideological route to power.