ROCK ON, JEREMY!

Photo: i2.mirror.co.uk

I was just the right age to get caught up in the idealistic youth culture of the 1960s. We wanted a world built on peace, friendship, mutual respect, understanding and sharing. We wanted an end to wars, an end to all kinds of discrimination and an end to poverty and deprivation.

We saw all that hijacked by commercialism and the drug culture, and gradually it collapsed into selfishness and self-indulgence in the 1980s.

Yesterday, watching on TV as Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn addressed a massive, cheering crowd at the Glastonbury Festival, I felt the old buzz of the ’sixties again.

Mr. Corbyn believes in building bridges and not walls – so do I.

He believes in human rights, peace, justice and democracy – so do I.

He believes that people should not live in poverty surrounded by riches – so do I.

He spoke against the trashing of our environment, and against racism, sexism, homophobia and Islamophobia, and he pointed to a decent, better world where everybody mattered.

You would find these sentiments embedded in Plaid Cymru, Scottish Nationalist and some other smaller parties but rarely in the governing Conservative Party. 

Jeremy Corbyn spoke of releasing the creativeness locked inside children and the yearning for change in young people, and - in a master stroke - he quoted the poet Shelley:

'Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you,

Ye are many - they are few.'

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Colin Jones / email: rhyl.colin.jones@live.co.uk

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