Is a shift quietly underway in British politics?
Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
As Nigel Farage dominates headlines, Jeremy Corbyn is being overlooked by the media – just as he was in 2017
In May 2017, British Conservative prime minister Theresa May called a snap election three years early, despite having a comfortable majority in Parliament and having told the country she would not do so.
May was polling well and assumed it would be easy to push Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour opposition to a crushing defeat, winning an even bigger majority that would strengthen her hand in Brexit negotiations. Most pundits agreed this was the likely outcome.
But on polling day, May failed dismally. The Tories lost their majority. Corbyn, despite having faced bitter opposition from within his own party since being elected leader two years earlier, somehow managed to reach out over them to speak to a much wider public.
Something had happened to the body politic that had been missed by the media. Now, with the announcement of Corbyn and former Labour MP Zarah Sultana’s new party, a similar shift is underway – and is once again flying under the radar.
As I wrote for openDemocracy at the time, back in 2017, Corbyn was drawing large crowds across the country ahead of the election. When his rallies and meetings were held in public spaces, thousands turned up, often at short notice. If scheduled for indoor venues, these would be full to bursting, and he often had to repeat his speech to those waiting outside.
In one sense, there had already been signs of something going on below the political surface. When Corbyn first ran for the party leadership in 2015 – a contest in which he was the runaway winner – there were early indications that he was attracting considerable support from the grassroots.
A year later, strong opposition from within his own party led to a leadership challenge that he won, again achieving a hugely positive reaction at public meetings in spite of his internal critics.
History is repeating itself. Corbyn and Sultana’s new left-wing offering – not yet officially named but for now known as Your Party – may be a work in progress, but the enthusiasm with which it has been greeted is palpable.
Some 800,000 people have signed up to support the idea. If just a quarter follow through to become members when it is formally established, it may well become the UK’s largest political party by membership overnight, given the collapse in Labour membership.
The idea that a new decidedly left party could come to the fore and acquire serious political power may seem impossible, given Westminster’s First Past the Post voting system, but just look at what is happening across the UK political scene, especially in England.
It’s hard to say how many groups have sprung up across the country to form local concentrations of support for Your Party in the past four or so weeks, but it almost certainly runs into the many hundreds. In the West Yorkshire council where I live, two groups have already met, with two more due to do so in the next week, all with loose coordination yet covering the whole area of the metropolitan council.
In contrast, Labour’s practised and experienced membership bureaucracy is seeing support ebbing away. Accurate, up-to-date figures are not easy to come by, but the party reportedly had 309,000 members six months ago, down from a peak of 532,000 under Corbyn in 2019. Some constituency party treasurers are reporting recent membership losses of up to a third over the past year alone.
There are many factors involved in this decline, not least the Labour leadership maintaining a marked degree of austerity and failing to confront Nigel Farage and Reform UK head-on. But perhaps the key problem is the party’s even greater failure to confront Benjamin Netanyahu and his Israeli government over the appalling genocide they are inflicting in Gaza. This issue, probably more than any other, is leading Labour activists who would normally be at the forefront of projecting its policies to leave the party in droves.
Can Labour’s decline and Your Party’s rise, not to mention the current considerable strength of Farage and Reform UK, lead to a radical re-ordering of the political environment in England? Several things suggest it could be possible.
For a start, we’re likely three years away from a general election being called. That gives enough time for Reform’s weaknesses to show themselves.
The party is substantially trading on fear, principally of migrants, but which commonly extends to a more general ‘fear of the other’. Corbyn is particularly effective at countering this head-on with hope, which is thoroughly appealing and especially so to younger people, as can be seen in new polling showing that one in five 16 and 17-year-olds would vote for Corbyn and Sultana’s new party.
Reform is also vulnerable in its attempts to claim it is standing up for the ordinary person against a woke and distant elite. That simply doesn’t add up; given the considerable wealth floating around the Reform leadership and its funders, it is not difficult to present them as the true elite.
Finally, a serious weakness for Reform and the Tories is their Cnut-like denial of climate breakdown and their addiction to fossil carbon. The folly of that stance may well come to haunt them over the next three years, as more and more ordinary people across the UK experience floods, or wildfires, or other climate crisis-related weather phenomena.
Then there is the other side of the political scales, starting with the election this week of Zack Polanski as the Green Party leader. Polanski has not yet ruled out working with Sultana and Corbyn, and there is time for local electoral pacts to be negotiated in forthcoming elections, especially the many local elections and the Scottish and Welsh national elections taking place next May.
We also should not discount the Liberal Democrats, who have considerable geographical concentrations, north and south of the border. In Scotland, in particular, there are plenty of new, younger politicians coming through, just as there are in the Scottish National Party. Your Party is also likely to lead to the emergence of new political figures on the progressive left in the coming months, while others may decide to defect from Labour to the party.
A couple of other elements are worth watching, too. Sultana, Polanski and Corbyn are all highly committed politicians and very effective communicators. Expect to see a lot more of them, even on the legacy media.
Of them, Corbyn is key. He is not remotely a rabble-rouser, yet for the past ten years, he has maintained a formidable and dedicated network of supporters – even at very difficult times. It is very easy to dismiss what he stands for as being from the past, but perhaps it is actually from the future.
Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
20 years since Katrina: How the US refused Cuban doctors as New Orleans drowned
Original article by Manolo De Los Santos republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
As the people of New Orleans suffered from mass devastation and state neglect following Hurricane Katrina, Cuba’s offer of solidarity was rejected
Two decades ago, Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast of the United States, a Category 5 monster that exposed the raw nerves of inequality, racism, and governmental neglect in the United States. While the storm itself was a force of nature, the true disaster was the response – or lack thereof – from the world’s wealthiest nation. Yet, amidst the chaos and despair, a beacon of international solidarity shone brightly, emanating from an unexpected place: Cuba.
The images are seared into collective memory: rooftops submerged, desperate cries for help echoing through flooded streets, and the Superdome stadium transforming into a squalid shelter. New Orleans, a city with a majority Black population and a vibrant hub of Black culture, bore the brunt. As the levees broke, so too did the illusion of American exceptionalism. Over 1,800 people died, and millions were displaced. The federal government’s response was not only slow but also virtually nonexistent in the crucial initial days. President George W. Bush, vacationing at the time, seemed detached, famously remarking to his FEMA director, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” even as the crisis deepened.
Cuba’s hand of friendship
In New Orleans, as desperately overworked healthcare providers struggled with a critical lack of medicine, equipment, and personnel, the Cuban government made its formal offer on September 2. The Senate Majority Leader at the time, Bill Frist, a physician himself who was visiting the flooded city, acknowledged the crisis, stating, “The distribution of medical assistance continues to be a serious problem,” and confirmed reports that scores of people were dying as a result. As the US government faltered, a small island nation, blockaded and vilified by Washington for decades, extended an immediate and comprehensive offer of aid. Fidel Castro announced that Cuba was ready to send a medical brigade of 1,586 doctors, equipped with 36 tons of medical supplies, to assist the victims of Hurricane Katrina. This wasn’t a conditional offer, nor was it for profit. It was a gesture of unconditional solidarity, rooted in the values of the Cuban people, in offering help to those in need, whether suffering from natural disasters or colonialism.
“We would be honored to send our doctors,” Fidel declared. “We could move them by air in groups of 100, and they could arrive within 12 hours of permission being granted.” The doctors were prepared to work in the most challenging conditions, bringing not just medical expertise but field hospitals of their own and decades of experience in providing free and socialized healthcare to millions of people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They were even willing to brave the dangerous waters to reach those stranded. This was the nascent stage of what would soon become the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade, a testament to Cuba’s unwavering commitment to global health.
The Henry Reeve Brigade
The Henry Reeve Brigade, named after a young American volunteer from Brooklyn, New York, who fought for Cuban independence in the 19th century, was officially formed shortly after Katrina. Its mission: to provide medical assistance in disaster situations and serious epidemics anywhere in the world. While the Bush administration ultimately rejected Cuba’s offer of aid for Katrina, citing “logistical challenges,” the reason given was a lack of full diplomatic relations with Cuba, a claim that rang hollow given the Bush administration had just accepted aid from Taiwan, with which the US also lacks full diplomatic relations. It was a thinly veiled excuse rooted in geopolitical animosity.
Still, the brigade went on to become a global force for good. From the devastating earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 to the cholera epidemic in Haiti, and most recently, the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Henry Reeve Brigade has been deployed to over 40 countries, treating millions and saving countless lives. These doctors often work in remote, dangerous, and impoverished areas, where most Western charities and aid organizations usually fear to stay. They embody the Cuban principle of prioritizing human well-being over profit or political gain. They are a living, breathing condemnation of the often generalized idea in the United States that healthcare is something to profit from.
The contrast between the US government’s response to Katrina and Cuba’s offer of aid couldn’t be starker. For decades, US foreign policy has been predicated on the idea that Cuba is a threat to US democracy, even landing on the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Yet, when its own citizens were drowning, Washington chose to maintain its Cold War attitude over the necessity of saving the lives of its own citizens. A Katrina survivor, recounting the harrowing days after the storm, once lamented, “Where was our government? We were left to die.” This sentiment encapsulates the raw betrayal felt by many of the city’s Black residents.
The rejection of Cuba’s aid wasn’t just a missed opportunity; it was a damning indictment of the US’s priorities. While ordinary Americans were suffering, the Bush administration was more concerned with maintaining its anti-Cuba stance than with saving lives. This is the inherent flaw of a system that prioritizes capital over human lives, that sees solidarity as a weakness rather than a strength.
From Katrina to today: the enduring relevance
Twenty years later, the lessons of Katrina and Cuba’s offer of aid remain profoundly relevant. In today’s political climate, the US continues its aggressive stance against Cuba, even attempting to discourage other countries in the Global South from accepting Cuban medical brigades. The Trump administration, for example, actively campaigned against countries receiving aid from Cuban doctors, labeling them as “human trafficking” – a cynical and baseless accusation designed to undermine Cuba’s international standing and maintain the brutal economic blockade.
Read more: Why Cuban doctors deserve the Nobel Peace Prize
Yet, despite these efforts, Cuba’s medical internationalism continues to inspire. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as wealthy nations hoarded vaccines and medical supplies, Cuba developed its own vaccines and continued to send its doctors to the most remote corners of the globe.
As people across the Gulf Coast commemorate the 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, may the example of the Henry Reeve Brigade be a powerful reminder of Cuba’s solidarity with the people of the United States.
Manolo De Los Santos is Executive Director of The People’s Forum and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His writing appears regularly in Monthly Review, Peoples Dispatch, CounterPunch, La Jornada, and other progressive media. He coedited, most recently, Viviremos: Venezuela vs. Hybrid War (LeftWord, 2020), Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro (LeftWord, 2021), and Our Own Path to Socialism: Selected Speeches of Hugo Chávez (LeftWord, 2023).