Will Lloyd

A night with Bernie Sanders’s brother

Larry Sanders, Bernie’s literal bro, moved to England in the late 1960s and settled in picture postcard Oxford. I was told that Bernie visited Larry there some time ago and was taken to historic Blenheim Palace. Bernie walked around the galleries, he viewed the state apartments, he breezed around Hawksmoor’s library and strolled through Vanbrugh’s colonnades. We do not know if he stopped at the room where Winston Churchill was born. But we do know that Bernie, according to Larry, was not impressed by Blenheim. It didn’t do much for him. He had other questions. He pointed at the great lake in the grounds and asked who dug it, what tools they used and whether they were treated well. Whether Bernie expected 18th-century English workmen to have health coverage is not known. He may have been disappointed with the answer.

At the late age of 84, Larry, an occasional politician himself, is still energetically and (somewhat) cogently stumping for his brother on this side of the Atlantic. Last night he was in London to tell a ragtag assembly of the British left to begin the countdown to President Sanders. Alongside Larry on the panel were two of Corbynism’s biggest standard bearers — author-filmmaker-activist Paul Mason and activist-writer-tweeter and communist Ash Sarkar — as well as a guy in a t-shirt who looked like Zach Galifianakis. A promising evening beckoned.

Readers may recall that since 2017 many on the left-wing of the Labour party believed that History was proceeding — gorgeous, near-spiritualised and inevitable, without a downward glance at reality — towards a Corbyn majority government. In this glorious new era: Brexit revoked, the nuclear deterrent junked, the working week reduced to four days, the borders opened, the railways nationalised, the Scots given another vote on independence.

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