Meet the U.K.’s Bernie Sanders

Like our very own Bernie Sanders, socialist Jeremy Corbyn, who’s likely to be the next leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, has “tapped a deep well of resentment against the mainstream political elite.”

From The Guardian:

Few American voters may yet have heard of Jeremy Corbyn, the previously obscure British parliamentarian who is poised to become leader of the official Labour opposition to David Cameron’s government. But if they have been following the US presidential race, they may already understand the general idea.

Slap a beard on leftwing Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders and make him as casual as a Romantic poet and you have a good approximation of the elderly radical across the Atlantic who is shaking the fragile pillars of the British establishment and could (at least in theory) become Queen Elizabeth’s next prime minister of the not-so United Kingdom.

What is going on here – not among protesters on the street, but in mainstream politics? As with Labour and Corbyn, Sanders is shaking up the Democratic party machine by pulling in vast crowds and tapping youthful enthusiasm in ways that elude opponents in his party, principally the powerful frontrunner, Hillary Clinton.

In Britain, none of the three mainstream candidates to succeed Ed Miliband as Labour leader following his general election defeat in May has Clinton’s record or authority. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, all 40-something Labour MPs, look and sound like lacklustre interim leaders, there to watch the store until someone else turns up.