Robert King

Jeremy Corbyn has spent a lifetime attaching himself to lost causes abroad and failed movements at home. Now, as the still-unnamed ‘Your Party’ continues to tear itself apart, Corbyn quietly slipped away from the domestic drama to South Africa and neighbouring Namibia, where he has been doing what he does best: surrounding himself with trade unionists, pro-Palestinian activists and any podcaster willing to lend him a microphone. For Corbyn, South Africa has long been a stage on which to project his political fantasies For Corbyn, South Africa has long been a stage on which to project his political fantasies. In the 1980s he was a fixture of the anti-Apartheid movement and was even arrested outside South Africa House.

Britain is not lacking in trade unions – if anything, they have become one of the country’s few reliable constants. The latest example: the London underground workers who are set to go on strike for seven days in September. In theory, trade unions exist to protect workers from the overreach of power – and in some areas, particularly pay disputes, they still serve that purpose. Yet in other, more insidious ways, many unions have become instruments of power themselves, enforcing ideological conformity rather than defending workers’ rights. A culturally conservative trade union would have a simple purpose: to defend the British worker from ideological coercion and economic dispossession.