Dissent to be celebrated

CONTRARY to those critics featured in Viewpoints, I never claimed to be ‘annoyed’ about the ‘extremist’ smears aimed at Jeremy Corbyn

(‘Now you know how we feel,’ M.E.N. Viewpoints, July 19).

My letter simply cited some actual facts, such as the type of economic policies Corbyn’s Labour advocates on state industries etc were also favoured by postwar Tory Prime Ministers such as Winston Churchill, and also continuously by our West European neighbours in Scandinavia, Germany and France.

Unable to contradict actuality, these critics instead resort to more mud-slinging.

The word Marxist is thrown into the mix.

Even if we knew Corbyn had read Marx, that is hardly something to regard as a pejorative. Manchester is a university city.

You would hope that, here of all places, the reading of the great modernists – including Freud, Nietzsche, Maynard-Keynes etc – would be regarded as a positive?

We are, after all, not Americans practising McCarthyism.

The irony of importing this foreign anti-intellectual tactic is that the other correspondent questions Corbyn’s patriotism.

The great virtue of living in British democracy is that hopefully, unlike a dictatorship, you’re not compelled towards deference, to bow or to salute the flag.

Given that Britain has a history of slavery and colonial genocide the normalising of dissent is something we should celebrate.

Would you prefer to ‘patriotically’ slavishly follow the next Tony Blair into another war, or to value active critical citizenship?

Sometimes it’s more patriotic to defy institutional power.

Gavin Lewis, Manchester