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Thirty years ago, when the West was celebrating the collapse of the Berlin Wall, one could have added to the merriment by suggesting that in 2019 Britain would find itself dependent on the whim of a tiny proportion of voters to avoid succumbing to Marxist government. Tee-hee – what a caution: that would have been the universal response to any implausible Cassandra who forecast then the menace that overshadows us now.
This election is “boring”: that is the fashionable posture being adopted by commentators. It has an element of justification insofar as the politicians, especially the Conservatives, are deploying a safety-first strategy that stifles debate. Who would ever have predicted that a general election at which Boris Johnson was Prime Minister would be deplored as tedious and uneventful? But that is merely a presentational factor.
Boring? Tomorrow the British electorate will decide whether democracy continues as our political system by the honouring of a referendum result; whether Britain finally departs from an oppressive European empire of growing integrationist and even military pretensions and recovers national sovereignty; or whether a Marxist government will take power and renationalise all major utilities, strip us of our nuclear deterrent, abolish immigration controls and impose its dogma upon the population in every area of life – all this within the context of the economic collapse that is inseparable from all Marxist governance, everywhere.
How boring is that? Not even in 1945 or 1979 was there a comparable existential emergency confronting the British electorate. Conventional wisdom predicts a Conservative majority, but with less confidence than usual, due to the unprecedented unpredictability of this election. The Best for Britain pro-Remain campaign group claims that tactical voting by just 117,000 voters could defeat the Conservatives. That seems almost too modest a claim.
There are 27 constituencies where fewer than 2,000 tactical votes could undo the Tories. In Keighley just 29 Green or Liberal Democrat voters switching to Labour would notionally dish the Conservatives. Some other calculations, admittedly dependent on mathematically contrived hypotheses, suggest as few as 40,000 electors could determine the fate of the nation. Beyond that, with amateur tacticians following advice from conflicting websites there is room for intervention by that most ominous electoral statute, the Law of Unintended Consequences.
The reality is that there is a perfectly credible, if not very likely, prospect of Jeremy Corbyn being Prime Minister by Friday afternoon. Commentators have so routinely attached the terms “disastrous” and “catastrophic” to the notion of a Corbyn premiership that it has blunted the public appreciation of how extreme the danger would be. Jeremy Corbyn is the last man on earth, apart from Kim Jong-un, who should be prime minister of Britain.
His record is more of a caricature than Private Eye’s Dave Spart. Against party opposition he brought the notorious International Marxist Group (IMG) activist Tariq Ali into Labour. He opposed the expulsion from Labour of the Trotskite entryists of the Militant Tendency, saying: “If expulsions are in order for Militant, they should apply to us too.” That, at least, was fair comment.
Corbyn was monitored by Special Branch for twenty years and in the 1990s MI5 opened a file on him to track his links with Irish republicans. These were extensive. According to the Sunday Times, Corbyn was involved in more than 72 events connected with Irish republicanism during the IRA campaign. He was arrested protesting outside the court where one of the Brighton bombers was convicted.
He opposed the Falklands War and rejected a Commons motion supporting British troops, calling the war a “Tory plot”. Considering how greatly it jeopardised the future of Margaret Thatcher’s government until its victorious outcome, that was a truly Byzantine conspiracy theory.
Corbyn was a columnist on the Morning Star, successor of the old Daily Worker newspaper of the Communist Party, and similarly sustained until 1989 by bulk purchases from Moscow. When Corbyn was elected Labour leader the Morning Star regarded the event as so significant that it printed its first ever Sunday edition, on 13 September, 2015, to hail the elevation of the dear leader. Corbyn said that “the Star is the most precious and only voice we have in the daily media”.
Corbyn has been an inveterate supporter of Communism. He lauded the Cuban leader: “Castro’s achievements were many.” Since those achievements included the shooting of 16,000 political opponents and the imprisonment of more than 100,000 people in concentration camps, it seems Comrade Corbyn is not too squeamish about human rights if the abusers are on the left side of history.
Throughout his political career he has been in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament. As prime minister he would not allow nuclear weapons to be used, thus abolishing their deterrent value, but he has suggested a sophisticated compromise of retaining the submarines, but without nuclear weapons. He has long wanted Britain to leave Nato, but in face of the strength of public opinion opposed to such a move he has changed his stance to aiming to “restrict its role”. We did not need Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth, caught on tape this week, to tell us Corbyn is a threat to national security.
On the practical, economic side of this election the extravagance of Corbyn’s manifesto was so extreme that objective costing of it was disadvantaged by the fact that the figures were so eye-watering it was difficult to persuade the public they were genuine.
Labour has pledged to increase the NHS budget by 4.3 per cent on average per year and to spend £75bn on the biggest council house building programme since the War. This would come out of a £150bn “social transformation fund” that would also support upgrading schools and hospitals, while moving the investment arm of the Treasury to the north of England (the latte-swilling Remainers in Whitehall would relish that migration).
A fire safety programme would consume a further £1bn, small beer compared to the £250bn allocated to a “green transformation fund” which would contribute hugely to the bankrupting of Britain through a “green economy” pandering to climate hysteria. There would be an extra £10.5bn over three years for schools and tuition fees would be abolished at a cost of £7.2bn (to energize the snowflake vote). Extra provision of free childcare would cost another £5.6bn annually.
Benefit changes would cost, at Labour’s estimation, £8.4bn a year. Then comes the Big One – back to the future – the renationalisation of all the key utilities. The CBI calculates that the immediate cost would start at £196bn. The concealed costs would lie in the endless problems of implementing the policy, followed by the enduring strain on the economy of the proven inefficiency that plagues all nationalised industries. Separately, broadband nationalisation would cost a further £20bn.
Not to worry: all those astronomic costs would be borne exclusively by the top tier of taxpayers, of whom as many as two dozen might remain in the country under such a regime. Labour’s impractical programme – and this is the sinister aspect – is not inspired simply by fiscal illiteracy but by dogma of the Stalinist genre. This agenda is possible because the party says it is the only path to take, therefore we will make it happen, regardless of the costs.
That is how economies are broken beyond repair, as witness the eastern half of Germany, incorporated for thirty years within what was until recently the most dynamic economy in Europe, yet still lagging miserably behind as a legacy of Marxist determination to push water uphill.
If you realistically assess the vista of Corbynism as a lunar landscape, there is one further disfiguring feature to take into account: rampant and unapologetic antisemitism. Just as most people entertained delusions that they were entering a post-Marxist age in 1989, there was a general assumption in 1945 that antisemitism must be extinct, following the revelations from the liberated death camps.
The sheer volume of evidence condemning Labour as antisemitic, including 11 allegations directed against Corbyn personally by the Jewish Labour Movement, is irrefutable. What would Clement Attlee have thought of this squalid situation? Or Aneurin Bevan? Or Hugh Gaitskell? Is this a party deserving of support by British voters?
There is, however, a further dimension to this Marxist challenge that goes far beyond Corbyn, the Momentum gang and the Labour Party. Globally, the vicious cult that is Marxism murdered more than 100 million souls in the 20th century. It deserves to be as universally abhorred as Nazism. But it is not. Instead, it is idealized, even as more than a million Uighurs languish in Chinese Communist concentration camps, while North Korea is the nearest place to Hell on earth.
Corbyn’s economically illiterate Marxist manifesto was popular with much of the British public: its publication gained Labour a small rise in the opinion polls. Young people are expected to vote largely for Corbyn. Why? Because they have no notion of the evil that Marxism represents. Such knowledge has been denied them in our universities whose library shelves groan beneath the weight of tomes of Marxist (in the weasel usage, Marxian) drivel. Morally it is atrocious; intellectually it is pathetic: no political or economic system in history has ever been so comprehensively discredited as Marxism. It is proven economic illiteracy.
Hundreds of thousands of young voters registered to vote last month; if their suffrage gives Corbyn power, the Tories will have been punished for their irresponsible indifference to a major threat: the indoctrination of a generation.
If our liberties survive this election it must become the highest possible priority to reform education in this country, restore balanced debate and expose Marxism as the squalid totalitarian cult that it is. We shall know by Friday morning whether we have left it too late.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.