With most of his supporters being hardened Europhiles, Jeremy Corbyn is at ideological odds with the rest of his party.
We have all seen the video circulating social media of a much younger Jeremy Corbyn offering his thoughts on the democratic void that is the EU and this liberal left cognitive dissonance within the Labour Party is not going away any time soon.
The younger millennial pro-EU Labour Party members are all currently engaged in a collective exercise of sticking one’s head in the sand when it comes to Corbyn’s longstanding dispute with the EU’s adherence to democratic process, but they need to understand ‘Old Labour’ has always opposed EU membership for very good reason.
And that reason is, there is no greater expression of socialism’s direst enemy than multinational corperations and banks controlling the state.
Way before the UK even joined the then common market, Tony Benn, Michael Foot and a host of other Labour MPs stood firmly against what they perceived as the Tory drive to lead the United Kingdom into an undemocratic union which would erode our democratic process.
Have you seen, for example, the impassioned speech by Labour MP Peter Shore just prior to the 1975 referendum at an Oxford Union Debate railing against Ted Heath and the then Common Market (video below)?
Hardened Brexiteers cite many possible EU regulatory and legal impositions that encourage pritavatisation and penalise nationalisation and this has always been a thorn in the side of European socialism.
The only reason Jeremy Corbyn has now been forced to abandon fully embracing the old Labour anti-EU stance is the relatively new (in political terms) European ideological ethos of open borders which resonates far too strongly with the liberal left element that now constitutes most of his party.
Freedom of movement is where Corbyn probably will finally capitulate in full and effectively render the EU referendum conclusion null and void via a 'brave new’ customs union.
Can anyone seriously imagine the new ‘Millennial Labour Party' supporting a hard Brexit that will go against the lifetime of pro-EU propaganda injected into them via the education system?
Of course not, and this is where Jeremy Corbyn finds his utopian socialist dream at odds with not only the EU, but also with the newly recruited under 25s that he must now appease – because their votes nearly won him the general election!
Until the millennial left realises that EU membership is not compatible with any definition of socialism, the left will remain at odds with itself.
