Chances are – unless you live in his north London constituency or are an unusually avid follower of politics – you’d never heard of Jeremy Corbyn until a few weeks ago. He’ll be a couple of weeks short of his 71st birthday at the next General Election. And if you thought allegedly “Red” Ed was a soft target for press mockery, how is a genuine Red likely to fare? Especially a bearded, sandal-wearing, vegetarian Red.

These are all strong arguments against Corbyn assuming the leadership of the Labour Party. Or, should that come to pass, ever becoming Prime Minister.

The press attacks have already begun. The once-sober Daily Telegraph thinks it would be a hilarious wheeze to get its readers to join Labour just so they can vote in a “joke” candidate. The Sunday Times caricatures him in a Che Guevara beret. Even The Independent calls him “weird”.

And new LibDem leader Tim Farron joins in with a poor quip sneering at “Comrade Corbyn”, which does little for his own shaky credibility.

All this, frankly, says more about the right-wing nature of the national press than the left-wing nature of Corbyn.

For what are Corbyn’s supposedly “loony” policies and beliefs?

He opposes the present Government’s policy of austerity. As do an increasing number of the world’s most eminent economists, as does the SNP, as the Labour Party should have done from the start.

He opposes the capping of welfare benefits. As any party calling itself Labour should do without hesitation or doubt.

He opposes bombing Syria – just as he opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a position that looks more mainstream now than perhaps it did then.

He warns of the dangers of immigration control. As any reasonable thinking person should.

He wants to scrap Trident. So do you think it makes sense to pay billions for a weapon that can never be fired?

He wants to scrap university tuition fees. So do you think it’s right for new graduates to be embarking on their adult lives already saddled with huge personal debts?

He wants to re-nationalise the railways. As, if my frequent conversations with fellow disgruntled travellers are any guide, do most rail users.

He wants to protect the NHS from rampant privatisation. Doesn’t everyone, apart from those with a vested interest in profits from private health firms?

In all of these things he goes against official Labour policy – something he’s made a long habit of doing. And in every one, it’s Corbyn’s position that reflects traditional Labour values. Or, you might simply say, values.

It seems to be a widely held view that electing Corbyn leader would be the Labour Party’s suicide note. Perhaps.

But what is the point of a Labour Party that’s merely a pale copy of the Tories? An Opposition that fails to oppose.

Somehow the view seems to have taken hold that Labour lost the election because it was too left-wing. I suspect the truth is different. That it failed because it let the Tories set the agenda and offered nothing coherently different.

It would be interesting to see how a Corbyn-led party would fare, but we won’t see it.

He may top the leadership poll in the first round, because the other three candidates will split the Blairite vote between them. But when second, and maybe third, choices are taken into account, we’ll be left, boringly, with Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper. Still awaiting the resurrection of a party that used to know its purpose.



The No 1 feelgood sporting hit of the summer


Well, the Ashes have been interesting so far, haven’t they? And the golf… well, the weather at St Andrews was entertaining anyway. But for me the one truly enthralling sporting spectacle of this summer – as every summer – has been the rolling circus that is the Tour de France.

What a pity the ongoing jawdropping achievements of the sensational Chris Froome should continue to be undermined by slurs and innuendoes. It is, perhaps, an inevitable hangover of the event’s drug-ridden days.

But it’s not just because I want to believe Froome and his Sky team are riding clean that I do believe it. Dave Brailsford’s outfit have made such a point from the first of their anti-doping stance that if it turned out otherwise they’d be proven even bigger liars and hypocrites than Lance Armstrong. And they appear very confident no such proof will ever turn up.

Froome is a fascinating character. The story of his rise from the rutted tracks of his native Kenya to leadership of the world’s best-funded cycling team was well told in last week’s ITV documentary Sports Life Stories.

The programme had a strong contribution from David Walsh, the journalist whose dogged investigation eventually exposed Armstrong. He is convinced that natural talent, determination and honest, dogged endeavour – a lot of it – took Froome to the top. And if Walsh believes it, I do.

Now, can we just get over the slurs and the envy and simply enjoy the brilliant sporting contest? And, of course, the glorious French scenery.

Next month will mark 70 years since the big bang that changed the world.

The explosion that ended a world war – and fired the starting gun on the Cold War.

The great experiment that was greeted here and among Britain’s allies with celebration and relief. Mixed, surely – among the far-sighted and humane – with tinges of foreboding and guilt.

The cataclysm that become known by its survivors as “pikadon” – flash and bang.

The page from which I learned this simple Japanese coinage also includes these words, however: “ I had never heard this noise before… There can be no word for what we heard that day. There must never be. To give this sound a name might mean it could happen again.”

It has in fact happened since – an incredible 1,872 times by 1993 – but only twice in total in what you might call anger. Or, more accurately, in meticulously planned mass murder.

On August 6, 1945 over Hiroshima and – the event movingly described in the book I just quoted – three days later at Nagasaki. Two Japanese cities destroyed, their civilian populations obliterated, maimed, traumatised in a pikadon.

This we know. And in the horror-filled context of the 1940s, it’s not easy to condemn either the physicists who developed the atomic bomb or the airmen who delivered it. The historical argument is complex, the moral one unresolvable.

But what is lost in discussion of physics or history is the human angle, the human scale, the sense of ordinary people’s lives lost or disrupted forever. And that is what journalist Jackie Copleton restores in her extraordinary first novel, A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding, published this week.

The dozen or so pages describing the immediate aftermath of the Nagasaki bomb are unflinching, as they need to be.

But while the event is crucial to the lives of all the novel’s main characters, it does not expunge all that came before, or suck all meaning from what comes after.

Some of the most evocative chapters in the book depict life in Nagasaki between the two world wars. The very human conclusion, which is exactly as it should be, takes place in the 1980s.

As the focus moves back and forth – as memories do – among the events of the narrator’s long life, the interweaved stories of love, loss and human failings are as captivating as any novel I’ve read in years. It’s a real page-turner because you care about the people.

In some ways it is comparable to last year’s Booker Prize winner, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan. But while its timescale is similar, it is less self-consciously “literary” in construction, its language plainer – and all the better for that. The central character is both more plausible and easier to empathise with. Despite the ghastliness of the central subject, the tone is gentler, less showy.

The post-war world I grew up in was one that had largely forgiven the Germans for the unspeakable horrors unleashed on Europe by the Nazi regime. Yet in which the Japanese were still routinely depicted – in war-story “comics” like Victor and Valiant, in films such as Bridge on the River Kwai, and TV series like Tenko – as innately sadistic and vile. I wonder how much this racism owed to a buried guilt about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a psychological need for justification.

The war-time Japanese did, of course, treat their British, American and Australian prisoners atrociously – as described in The Narrow Road, whose title refers to the same Burmese railway that featured the infamous Kwai bridge. The comparatively decent treatment of Allied prisoners by the Germans may also partly explain that discrepancy of attitude.

Yet nothing the Japanese did was worse than was inflicted by the Germans upon the Jews, the Russians and Slavs. Nothing could be.

In fact, the official Japanese attitude to the Chinese was very like German anti-Semitism. The worst extremes of Nazi butchery of Jews followed closely Japanese treatment of Chinese prisoners.

In immersing us in the lives and loves of her Japanese characters, Jackie Copleton does not skate over this uncomfortable fact. Her book’s most shocking single moment – all the more powerful because passed over swiftly, almost casually – concerns human vivisection.

The long-term effect on the perpetrator – “only following orders” – is one of the novel’s key themes. There is no room here for goodies who are purely good or villains who are purely evil. Copleton’s characters are complex, as people are.

One review quoted on the cover says of The Narrow Road to the Deep North: “Not just a great novel but an important book in its ability to look at terrible things and create something beautiful”.

That is even more true of A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding, though for “beautiful” I would perhaps substitute the word “human”.

Though both books set the same conflict in a long-term context, as the turning point of their protagonists’ lives, it’s perhaps unreasonable to compare. Read both.

Above all, consider this entry from Copleton’s eponymous “dictionary”:

“Japanese people believe that love, affection, compassion and sympathy are the most important feelings that all human beings should nurture. This assumption emanates from the fact that one of the virtues that Japanese society emphasises is cooperation among people.”

Now that, people, is wisdom.

 

What were you thinking during the minute’s silence for the victims of the Tunisian beach massacre?

If the victims had all been footballers, or football fans, would we have marked their passing with a minute’s applause?

What a strange tradition the minute (often inflated to two minutes) of silence has become as a way of marking shocking events. Is it supposed to help us close the incident, pack it away?

Or is it – like the tide of roadside floral tributes to people we never knew – just a symptom of Britain’s growing sentimentality?

My first thought on hearing news of the Sousse shooting was of course horrified sympathy for those caught up in it. The killed and wounded, and those who loved them. The witnesses who will never be able to forget.

My second thought was to wonder if this is the beginning of the end of the age of mass tourism. I wonder still.

David Cameron, following Foreign Office advice, wants us to go on holidaying in Tunisia. Not just his way of packing Sousse away but a signal – to ourselves and the Islamists presumed to be behind the attack – that we (Britain and Britons) will not cower from terror. Which must be right, and yet…

If terrorism is seen to work, by shutting down Tunisia’s tourist industry, will that encourage more outrages elsewhere? Or will it encourage more attacks if this one turns out not to have achieved its aim?

I’m assuming here that damaging – perhaps utterly wrecking – Tunisia’s economy was the aim. In that, I fear it may succeed.

It was also, of course, an attack on Western / British / European “decadence”. Perhaps revenge for military involvements of mostly disastrous kinds in the Middle East and North Africa, the invasion of Iraq, air strikes against ISIS and all the rest of it.

Who knows what was going through Seifeddine Rezgui’s mind as he walked up that beach with his blazing Kalashnikov? Apart from cocaine.

Coke, in this instance, actually being used as a performance-enhancing (or enabling) drug.

As any student of history knows, when powerful leaders are toppled, the ensuing power vacuum will be bloody. Even if the leader was a ghastly tyrant. Especially then.

When the leaders of Europe and America celebrated, and assisted, the so-called Arab Spring – which actually began in Tunisia – did they have any idea what was being unleashed?

The one clear thing about Rezgui – as with any suicide bomber – is that he was as much a victim as those he killed. Those who chose and delivered him to his fate are the real monsters.

What makes monsters of humans? More to the point, what allows the monstrous among us to thrive?

It may be clothed in religious or political ideology, but the root cause is inequality.

And it’s a fact – which we all have cause to fear – that the world is getting more unequal. The rich richer, the poor relatively, if not absolutely, poorer. And more numerous.

The wealthy gated community surrounded by a poor quarter is a feature of most capital cities – London has its not-fair share. It’s more than a powerful symbol.

And it has its equivalent in holiday resorts around the world – in the West Indies, in Rio, in Egypt, in the Gulf. In Tunisia.

It’s the luxury hotel complex shut off from the poor and exploited beyond its walls. Sealed off on all sides except where the beach meets the sea.



The sick bully of Europe


After nearly a lifetime of support for Europe, I’m starting to have doubts. I’m not sure I want to go on being a member of a club which bullies one of its members into poverty and chaos.

A club of austerity-obsessed Eurocrats which behaves towards Greece the way a dodgy loan shark behaves towards a stricken client. Pushing them further into the gutter to keep the ever-increasing interest payments rolling in.

Forcing up levels of unemployment, child poverty and death, disease, hunger and suicide to keep the fat cats in cream.



On the road


The Tunisian beach attack was horrifying – as it was meant to be. But there’s a hidden grim truth that won’t make the same kind of headlines or send the same shudders through our collective spine.

More British holidaymakers will be killed abroad this year in road accidents than by terrorism.

So perhaps we should be grateful – rather than irritated or amused – by the safety-conscious new laws that came into force last week on French roads.

It is now illegal in France to eat while driving. So no more Camembert and tomato baguettes at the wheel, then.

And no applying make-up either. Which may come as a blow to the woman I saw recently piloting two tonnes of Land Rover along the A1 at 70 while using her rearview mirror to get her lippy straight.