From Ed Miliband to Jeremy Corbyn

Ed Miliband was no radical. But he helped lay the groundwork for Jeremy Corbyn's rise, New Left Review’s Robin Blackburn argues.


Britain’s Labour Party has elected as its leader Jeremy Corbyn, a man branded a dangerous socialist and pacifist. The national press warns he is completely unelectable, but is still panicked by the thought of Prime Minister Corbyn.

Corbyn is not a demagogue but soft-spoken and studiously polite to opponents. His landslide victory — he won quarter of a million votes out of just over four hundred thousand casted — is a striking repudiation of Tony Blair and his New Labour project, with its foreign wars and neoliberal domestic policies.

The sixty-six-year-old Corbyn is faithful to the old-time religion of Labour socialism, a force the party heads thought they had rid themselves of years ago.

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