Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

There have been a number of significant general elections since the last European Council meeting. I will comment on the results of the elections in the UK and France. In some ways the election in the UK was the more significant of the two. It had a strange result where the winner was the loser and the loser was the winner. At the start of the campaign, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party was way behind. According to one poll the gap was 46% to 23%, or two to one.

The turning point in the campaign was the launch of the Labour Party's manifesto. It was rightly described as the most left wing manifesto presented by a main party in a general election in the UK in a generation. The manifesto's policies included an increase in the minimum wage to £10 per hour, the banning of zero-hour contracts, the building of 500,000 council houses, the abolition of tuition fees, the introduction of a wealth tax to pay for the policies and, importantly, it put back on the agenda the nationalisation of rail, mail, energy and water. That was not a full socialist programme. We would go further in terms of nationalising the commanding heights of the economy. The leader of the Labour Party here was right when he told the Irish Independentthat Mr. Corbyn's policies were far closer to the policies of Solidarity-People Before Profit than to the policies of the Irish Labour Party.

Those policies proved to be tremendously attractive to young people, in particular. This is the first generation since the Second World War that has a decisively lower standard of living than their parents. They are fed a diet of precarious work and face a mountain of debt as a result of tuition fees. They flocked to those policies. That experience was not unique to the UK. There was a similar experience with so-called millennials attending the Bernie Sanders rallies in the United States and rallying to the banner of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the radical left in France. That was a decisive push in that election-----

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