Dangerous Hero
Jeremy Corbyn is on the brink of becoming Prime Minister. Tom Bower has written the book you need to read to understand Jeremy Corbyn’s past, his politics and the nature of the Government he seeks to lead. An unmissable account of Corbyn’s life so far… After four unremarkable decades in politics, Jeremy Corbyn stands on the brink of power. Until his surprise election as leader of the Labour Party in 2015, this seemingly unelectable oddball had not been a major political player. Since then, Corbyn has survived coup attempts and accusations of incompetence that would have felled most politicians, including grave charges of anti-Semitism, bullying and not being the master of his brief. Despite these shortcomings, as the Conservatives rip themselves apart over Europe, he is likely soon to become Britain's prime minister. Yet this hero of the far left has done his best to conceal much of his past and personal life from public scrutiny. In this book, best-selling investigative biographer Tom Bower reveals hidden truths about Corbyn's character, the causes and organisations he espouses, and Britain's likely fate under the Marxist-Trotskyist society he has championed since the early 1970s. Based on eyewitness accounts from those who have known Corbyn throughout his life, the book asks whether a Labour government led by Corbyn would transform the country for the better. Has capitalism, as he argues, run its course, and would our lives be improved by socialism? If so, what is Corbyn's brand of socialism? The same as that experienced under successive Labour governments since 1945, or something more extreme? Will his advocacy of more debt, tax hikes and renationalisation reproduce the fate of Venezuela as championed by his own hero Hugo Chávez? Is he a reformer or a revolutionary? Will he deliver a glowing new era or catastrophe? His supporters damn every opponent and critic, calling them 'traitors' or worse. Does this aggression, and the accusations that paint Corbyn as an entrenched anti-Semite and misogynist, override his image as an authentic 'good bloke'? Many are excited by the prospect of Corbyn’s arrival in Downing Street. Others believe that Corbyn as prime minister will prove to be a dangerous hero.
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Tom Bower 2019
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Tom Bower asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008299576
Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008299590
Version: 2019-03-18
To Veronica
Contents
The genesis of this book started exactly fifty years ago.
At the end of January 1969, a group of Marxist and Trotskyist students at the London School of Economics led a stormy protest against the school’s director, an authoritarian from Southern Rhodesia. He had ordered the staff to close a series of gates inside the building in Aldwych to prevent a students’ meeting in the school’s Old Theatre. In the mêlée, at about 5 p.m., a caretaker guarding the gates died from a heart attack and the students instantly started a month-long occupation, igniting similar sit-ins across Britain’s universities.
Throughout that first night of occupation, hundreds of LSE students crowded into the Old Theatre to debate the prospects of a Marxist revolution in Britain. Led by American graduates from Berkeley, California, where the student revolt against the Vietnam War had started five years before, and with speeches from French and German students, battle-scarred from 1968 street fights in Paris and Berlin, LSE’s Marxists and Trotskyists (there were many) told us we were the vanguard of a worldwide revolution – which would begin with the students, and the workers would follow. We believed it.
Aged twenty-three and from a conservative background, I had completed my law degree at the LSE (the country’s best law faculty at the time), and while studying for the Bar exams was employed on legal research projects at the college. Long before that dramatic night I had concluded that English law protected property rights at the expense of the rights of individuals and real democracy. Surrounded by articulate Marxists studying sociology and government, and going to lectures by Ralph Miliband and other Marxist teachers, I became attracted to their analysis of society. In that era, for anyone interested in politics that was not surprising.
In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa in 1960 (I had marched in protest through London with my school friends against apartheid during the early years of that decade) and the anti-Vietnam protests outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square in 1968 (along with others, I escaped with just some nasty blows from the police), I shared the horror at the dishonesty and disarray of Harold Wilson’s Labour government. Added to that, for family reasons I was influenced by events in Germany. In particular I became fascinated by Rudi Dutschke, an erudite Marxist who spoke in graphic terms in Berlin about ‘the long march through the institutions of power’ to remove the Nazis and their capitalist supporters from ruling post-war Germany. In April 1968 an attempted assassination of Dutschke illustrated the raw battle for power between good and evil raging across Europe and America. (I would meet Dutschke later in Oxford.)
Those days and nights of long debates about politics, the economy and society were decisive for many of us involved in the LSE occupation. After a month it all petered out, but that 1968 generation was marked for life. None of us attained high office in politics, industry or education. Instead, that seminal moment in Britain’s social history created cynics: men and women who were dissatisfied, curious, nonconformist and determined to expose evil in the world, of whatever type and wherever it might be found.
