A lesson in overconfidence
“Be it Clinton or May, arrogance shown by an office bearer is an insult to the judgment of the people. If Jeremy Corbyn is, in fact insignificant, he is only as insignificant as the people, who elected him, consider him to be.”
As the world sinks deeper in religious fanaticism and political demagoguery, a few good men roll their sleeves up and prepare to take hate head on with their sanity and principles, even if that comes at a great political cost.
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party’s defeat in the recent general elections in England has been another success story of sagacity over ridiculously ill-founded mantra of nationalism and politics of race. But Corbyn’s success is far from just an overnight phenomenon. It is a victory that has come only after most of the MPs of the party that he leads had abandoned him and forced an intraparty election, one that he won by a considerable margin. Winning an election after an unsettling turn of events that in this case was the outcry by the labour MPs against him, is analogous to weathering a storm that only a man with non-negotiable principles can. When Corbyn was being mocked and scorned over almost everything he did by the obnoxiously arrogant David Cameron, he must have known that the reason behind this unbridled scorn was his inability to maintain popularity among the Labour ranks. This unpopularity was depicted, by both the media and the labour MPs, as a result of Corbyn’s mild opposition to the leave campaign during the Brexit fiasco. The non-parliamentary segment of the labour party, the most important fragment of any democratic party; however, quite rightly thought that the opposition to Corbyn came only due to his rigid opposition to the more populist ruckus of the Conservative party. They believed that their elected leader was being cornered by a bunch of egotistical rabble-rousers, who in their delusion were convinced that the public would easily be fooled and fall for their connivance. So, in an electoral outburst of their resentment towards the anti Corbyn group, they gave a heavier mandate to Corbyn than the one he got when he was first elected as the leader of the Labour Party. Today he stands as a more popular leader than Tony Blair in 2005, who only managed 32.5 per cent of the total votes cast, compared to Corbyn’s 40 per cent.
British politics over the last two or three years has been an outcome of rampant confusion in the society. With rising unemployment and slowing economy, a stream of nostalgia has taken over because after all, nostalgia leads to the past; no doubt a glorious one for the British.
But a time machine seldom works, as much as the bonny prisser of the humorous Prime Minister – Boris Johnson – wants it to. And with luck running out or the machine just not connected to the power source, the Tories are stuck in the present; adorned not with the breeches under shirts with pleated cuffs, made of muslin grown in British India, but by the more common: shirt and tie. In such hideous clothing, of course the Etonian gang of politicians, at least as long as Cameron was around, was going to pile up on the most convenient ‘dead duck’ they could find to redeem their apparently lost aristocracy. But as it turned out, even if the Labour party as a whole was a dead duck, its leader was no pushover. No matter how hard they tried, the Tories failed to mock their way out of a mess that the British economy has become under their nose. They could have, had it not been for the ridiculously stringent opposition, even without the Labour parliamentarians’ backing, by the rather composed Corbyn.
Many lessons have surfaced as the recent election campaigns in the West have ended; lessons that vary with the outcome of the election. For instance, with trump’s victory, the lesson that the Americans must have learned is that electing a disgraceful leader is not inviting ‘daisy cutters’ or even ‘mother of all bombs’ for that matter. The lesson learned from the French election is a fairly simple one: even if women and French politics are antithetical towards one another, France is not a sexist state. The lesson from the British election that all must ponder over is that one must never leave what one can do in ‘May’ for June. Yes, that is how ridiculous Theresa’s decision to hold an election on the basis of her popularity was.
But the one learned lesson that is common to all of the said elections is that arrogance is loathed in democracies. Be it Clinton or May, arrogance shown by an office bearer is an insult to the judgment of the people. If Jeremy Corbyn is, in fact insignificant, he is only as insignificant as the people, who elected him consider him to be. He holds a seat in the parliament and deserves respect that he did not buy, but rather earned, through the grace of the people, that in-turn are the very heart and soul of a democracy such as that in Britain.