Feature

Will 2019 go down as a year of mass revolt? Perhaps it is too early to say, but we can now add Chile, Catalonia and Lebanon to the likes of Hong Kong, Sudan and Algeria as places that have been rocked by mass protests this year. A notable feature of the protests has been a generalisation from an initial trigger — a WhatsApp tax or metro fare hike — into demanding much wider change.

Against a background of global revolts, some of which are outlined on the following pages, voters in Britain have also been given the opportunity to add their voices to the demand for a world transformed.

The best thing about your book is that it is based on an optimism that Corbynism can bring about change. But you acknowledge that the last couple of years have not really lived up to the feeling we got in 2017. How optimistic are you at the moment?

A century ago, after four long years of war, Britain was on the brink of revolution. Strikes raged across the industrial heartlands such as Glasgow, Liverpool and Belfast. Martial law was declared to quell a revolt in Luton. But vicious race riots also erupted in several British ports, resulting in four people being killed and hundreds badly injured.

On 1 October China was set to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. Massive parades are organised, children will sing patriotic songs whose lyrics they have learned by heart but do not understand, military hardware has been polished. The multi-millionaires who run China will admire themselves in their new hand-made suits and dresses.

“It can no longer be presumed that Scotland would vote No again in an independence ballot,” said the respected pollster professor John Curtice last month. He was commenting on the first poll taken after the resignation of Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson in late August.

“The economy is the BEST IT HAS EVER BEEN! Even much of the Fake News is giving me credit for that!” With this tweet, Donald Trump greeted news this summer that the US economy had achieved the longest period of expansion in its history — 121 months of growth.

The precarious working and living conditions of the millions of migrant labourers who have moved from rural to urban areas of China over recent decades made the development of an organised labour movement harder. Have the circumstances of these workers become more stable? Is their increased stability helping to develop class consciousness?

Given the escalation of strikes as part of the protests, what is the class composition of the Hong Kong protests?

Earlier this year the Lancet medical journal published what they called the “planetary health diet”. They claimed that if their universal scientific targets for healthy diets were adopted, not only would it save at least 11 million lives but would also help avert global environmental catastrophe and prevent the collapse of the natural world. Their central message was that “the world’s diets must change dramatically” to both save ourselves and the planet. The diet they recommended was largely plant-based, and therefore boosted the claim that only by going vegan can we save the planet.