Jeremy Corbyn

Welcome to the Future: The Age of Uncertainty Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, February 28th 2016 Politics and public life are meant to follow neat, tidy, predictable patterns. Experts and forecasters are supposed to be able to give informed analysis on future change. This doesn’t always work out. Even experts have a continuity bias, while sudden events or factors can emerge, seemingly from nowhere that no one foresaw. We are living in a time where the art of prediction is becoming more difficult. Think of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, the insurgency of Bernie Sanders in the

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The Wider Syria Debate: Challenging Britain’s ‘Empire of the Mind’ Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, December 6th 2015 Britain is off to war again. The parliamentary debate did not live up to the billing. Cameron and Corbyn underperformed. Hilary Benn stole the show and headlines. Great rhetorical moment this was not. This wasn’t of the quality of 1939 and the outbreak of World War Two, 1940 and the resignation of Chamberlain as PM, Suez and Anthony Eden comparing the Egyptian leader Nasser to Hitler and Mussolini, or even more recently, the Falklands war, when at the outset Margaret Thatcher’s political

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Corbyn and Anger: Rage Against the Machine is understandable but never ever enough Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, September 20th 2015 Jeremy Corbyn has dominated the news headlines this week. Let’s start with the obvious - the failure of mainstream politics. Conventional British politics are bust. The Labour right, the Blairites and soft left have nothing to offer their own party, let alone the country. More seriously, the Cameron Conservatives after five years in office have yet to find a convincing governing mantra. ‘Big society’ and ‘compassionate Conservatism’ are long dead, leaving little that represents Cameron and Osborne beyond living within

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Let Us face the Future: Labour, Jeremy Corbyn and the Power of the Past Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, August 21st 2015 This is the most exciting and cataclysmic Labour leadership contest in a generation. The nearest comparison must be the Benn insurgency for the Deputy Leadership of the party in 1981, where he narrowly lost to Denis Healey. This marked the peak of the left’s influence in Labour - until now. What is occurring in the Labour contest, with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the diminishing of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, is little more than

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Kezia, Jezza and Indy: Where are the Big Ideas of the Next Scotland? Gerry Hassan This week the SNP hit a new high mark in the polls - 62% for next year’s Scottish elections. Elsewhere Kezia Dugdale was elected Scottish Labour leader as the Jeremy Corbyn bandwagon came to much acclaim north of the border. What do you with popularity? It is a question politicians seldom have to answer. The nearest equivalent to the SNP now is Blair’s New Labour – which, less we forget, was once hugely popular. There is the question of where opposition comes from and what

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A People’s Revolt in Labour but where will it end? Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, August 2nd 2015 ‘The Labour Party has gone mad’. ‘It has abandoned its senses’. ‘This is a summer of insanity’. These and suchlike comments made about Jeremy Corbyn are now familiar refrains in the Westminster mainstream. Before that this disdain was targeted northwards - asking ‘has Scotland gone mad?’ Jeremy Corbyn’s rise and emergence has caught the Westminster bubble by surprise, but isn’t hard to fathom. The other three challengers are dire. What passes for Labour stars are sitting it out. Labour members are dismayed and

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‘You’re Fired’: Jeremy Corbyn and what Voters Want to Say to the Political Classes Gerry Hassan Sunday Mail, July 26th 2015 This week Tony Blair compared Scottish nationalism to ‘cavemen’ and told supporters of Jeremy Corbyn who wanted to vote with their heart to ‘get a transplant.’ You always know something is up when the political insults start flying. Labour have no idea what has happened in Scotland, and to compound matters for the party establishment, this week saw the rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership challenge. The trigger was a poll which put Corbyn not just ahead of the other

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