I am a fan of the British magazine The Week. It summarises the stories, comments and features of the country’s many propaganda sheets. With so many organs being published daily, newspapers have had to find a way to differentiate themselves from each other. By and large, objective reporting seems to have been abandoned in favour of pictures of attractive people and viewpoints, leaving it difficult to find something on which they all agree.
In the 4 August 2018 issue of The Week, there was a piece on the Anti-Semitism row that has engulfed Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. Halfway through the article, there was a summary of an article that appeared in the Financial Times earlier in the week. Robert Shrimsley was quoted as saying “you almost have to admire Corbyn’s intransigence” as he really is “ready to risk it all for the purity of his ideals.”
I was struck by the operative pronoun: “his” ideals. So much so, I began to wonder what that could really mean. What if Jeremy Corbyn’s ideals are different from the nation’s ideals that he is left goose stepping out of step with the rest of the country. On this issue, that certainly seems to be the case.
Key word “his”.