Could the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the new head of Britain’s Labor Party have a silver lining? Hard to imagine at first blush — he’s anti-American, hates Israel, is friends with Hezbollah and is a Marxist who wants to curb private enterprise in the United Kingdom.
“Disastrous” is the word the Financial Times, a liberal paper, uses in an editorial about Corbyn’s emergence at the head of Labor. It warns he’d nationalize the railways and utilities. The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane reckons that “Corbyn makes Bernie Sanders look like Ted Cruz.”
So what is this silver lining? Well, it turns out that Comrade Corbyn can’t stand the European Union. He dislikes it for different reasons (not enough socialism) than the conservative critics dislike it (not enough capitalism). But if Corbyn stirs up Labor against the EU, things could get interesting.
That’s because Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative who is the Pillsbury Doughboy of British politics, has promised a referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union. That “in-or-out” vote could take place as early as next year.
What worries the Financial Times is that with the opposition Labor Party now in turmoil, the Tory members of Parliament will “lose discipline” — especially, the FT says, on the issue of Europe. It wants Britain to stay in Europe but calls the issue “neuralgic.”
To say the least. It’s been plain since the days of Margaret Thatcher that something about the European project doesn’t sit right with the British people. They stayed out of the European currency, the euro, and Thatcher herself issued a famous warning in 1988 at Bruges, Belgium.
“We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels,” said Thatcher.
Not that anyone was listening in the European capital. The European Union is like a hydra of Barack Obamas that edges leftward with every crisis. It has yet to solve the collapse of Greece, and the euro has failed to paper over Europe’s problems.
The current refugee crisis has thrown all this into the sharpest relief yet, exposing how hollow have been Europe’s high-minded promises of open borders. There has yet to emerge a coherent, humane, European answer to the refugees.
What a ghastly panorama. Dead babies are washing ashore. Refugees are clinging to sinking boats. Mobs are running down freedom-seekers. Borders are being closed. Right-wing parties are starting to sound like the Europe in which fascism flourished — and from which Britain has always stood apart.
No wonder the latest poll shows that Britain “is edging towards the EU exit door,” as it was put this week in the London Independent. It reports that the percentage of those who want to stay in is just three points ahead of those who want out.
A poll earlier in the week, moreover, showed the “out” camp in the lead by two points, 51 percent to 49. That, the Independent says, marked the “first time a majority of British voters have backed leaving the EU.” It sets up a dramatic situation.
Corbyn’s skepticism of the European Union puts him in what Lane calls a “peculiar league with many on the right of the Conservative Party.” Which is precisely what’s so newsworthy about this moment.
What an opportunity for America. If the United Kingdom, home of the Mother of Parliaments and a fountainhead of classical liberalism, is desperately looking around for a way out of Europe, why aren’t we extending a hand? Or a strengthened trans-Atlantic partnership?
President Obama seems trapped by his own hostility to Britain. Yet the idea of a more formal British and American alliance, along with such other liberty-loving nations as Canada, Australia, India and Israel, has never looked more logical.
Where are the Republicans? None of them seems alive to this issue, even as the dream of Europe fades.
Yet here we are. Britain is teetering on whether to disappear into Europe or take a gamble on declaring its own independence. It’s an opportunity for America, and if it takes Jeremy Corbyn to bring that opportunity forward, there’s your silver lining.
Lipsky@nysun.com