Bernie Sanders: ‘Lesson to be learned’ from U.K.’s Corbyn
The leader of Britain’s Labour Party credited Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., with some of his social democratic campaign planks, telling writer and author Naomi Klein that he embraced comparisons with theVermont senator.
“Bernie called me the day after our election here,” Jeremy Corbyn said in an interview published Thursday by the Intercept. “I was half asleep watching something on television. And Bernie comes on to say, well done on the campaign, and I was interested in your campaigning ideas. Where did you get them from? And I said, well, you, actually.”
Corbyn, who won the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 and held it after a 2016 challenge, has frequently been cited by Sanders as an example of how left politics can win. In 2017, a snap election ended with a series of surprise gains for Labour and with Prime Minister TheresaMay clinging topower in a controversial deal with Northern Ireland’s DemocraticUnionist Party.
According to a postelection analysis by Ipsos Mori, over half of eligible British voters under 30 turned out — double the youth turnout rate in some American elections.
That led to surprising Labour gains in cities with large universities.
“There’s a lesson to be learned from what Corbyn did in the U.K.,” Sanders said in a recent interview with The Washington Post. “The remarkable thing about his election — andhe did better than Idid — was that among younger people, the voter turnout was as high as it was among the general population. That was unprecedented.”