Five Things Jeremy Corbyn Has Right

I’m not a big fan of Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the British Labour Party. A product of the sectarian Labour politics of the nineteen-seventies and -eighties, he has often appeared to be stuck in a time warp, refusing to budge. Hitherto, he has shown little aptitude for, or even any inclination toward, the messy business of governing. Some of his foreign-policy views are naïve, and, as the Guardian’s left-leaning economics editor, Larry Elliott, pointed out a couple of weeks ago, many of the numbers in his economic program don’t add up. Moreover, Corbyn too readily dismisses the achievements of New Labour, which ended eighteen years of Conservative rule, oversaw big investments in Britain’s public services, introduced a national minimum wage and free daycare, guaranteed maternity leave and four weeks of paid holiday, introduced civil partnerships, quadrupled the international-aid budget, and reintroduced free entry to museums and art galleries.

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