Marxists have momentum – May and the EU stuck on Irish border nonsense

Long Live the Leader of All Progressive Humanity Chairman Corbyn! I am happy to report – it says here – that there has been an important shift of direction at Reaction.

Comrades! A worker’s Soviet of disgruntled sub-editors, as directed by Comrade Milne, has now taken charge of all British media on the order of Prime Minister Corbyn. The editor of Reaction is being held at a secure facility with other members of the running dog capitalist mainstream media, along with traitor to the revolution and dangerous free thinker Paul Mason, formerly of BBC Newsnight. Owen Jones is under house arrest for his association with the capitalist Guardian “newspaper”. Once it really gets going the revolution always eats its own, eventually. Just you wait and see.

Sorry. Nothing sinister like that will ever happen if Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister and his gang of Marxist hoods get their hands on Number 10, the Civil service, the Bank of England, the free press,  GCHQ and MI5 and MI6. It could never happen here because… because… it could never happen here, runs the theory.

I keep hearing that writing anti-Marxist stuff is somehow counterproductive, as  they’re not really full Marxists and ancient British institutions are resistant to tyranny.

Fine, let’s hope so but I’d really rather not chance it, if that’s okay with you, and at Reaction we alongside all our other writing on all manner of topics will continue to simply point out the words and long-established views of senior Corbyn advisers such as Andrew Murray, a Communist, Communications director Seumas Milne, and shadow Chancellor John McDonnell.

Underpinning the strategy is the clever Marxist understanding about where all this leads. By co-opting the mainstream and then exploiting emergencies they can advance towards the goal, that is a socialist revolution, the abolition of private property and the establishment of supposed worker control, always in the end directed by a strong central control. That is the game. Read the Communist Andrew Murray on Lenin and “leaps” and then imagine this man advising Corbyn in Number 10.

Many good people are taken in during the lead up to a tyranny. We all know the historical movie meme. It’s that moment in the cinema when the audience watching, knowing what is coming, thinks “get out, leave while you still can, soon it will be too late” but the characters stay put because it will never get too bad, will it?

In that vein, I’m re-reading Michael Kennedy’s definitive biography of the composer Richard Strauss and have just arrived at the chapter in which are described Strauss’s early associations with the emerging dictatorship in Germany in 1933. Strauss became President of the Nazi’s Reich Music Chamber.

Kennedy, with some justification, largely exonerated Strauss on the basis that he lacked the benefit of hindsight. After the arts cuts and chaos of Weimar, some artists calculated that there would be an improvement. Hitler knew music well. He controlled the funding of the Wagner festival at Bayreuth. From his own funds, accumulated from the proceeds of writing the deranged Mein Kampf, he promoted the work of Bruckner.

Strauss was not alone in falling for it. Wilhelm Furtwangler, the leading conductor of the period who later fled to Switzerland, described why he accepted the post of vice president to Strauss in the Music Chamber.

“At that time in Germany many people believed that the Nazis would only be able to establish themselves totally when all decent people had shirked their responsibility.”

Look what happened next.

You can, if you like, say this is an example of Godwin’s Law – in which mentioning the Nazis means you lose the argument – but history is peppered with useful examples of how revolutions snowball and make the unthinkable reality, from the English civil war on, through the defining experience of the French Revolution in 1789, and on into the 20th century and to Venezuela (Corbyn’s favourite regime) today.

Best take clever men like McDonnell at their word, surely? It would be daft to do anything else. Ask yourself if you believe the new and opportunistic spinning and spouting about workers rights from McDonnell when he can smell power. The decades of proper Marxism are surely a better guide to his true feelings about freedom and the role of the state.

In the face of this threat, unless the Conservative party gets its act together under a new leader, some variation of this far left horror show awaits Britain – either in the form of emerging tyranny or economic collapse as they attempt bit by bit to abolish the market system and the basic means of exchange. The latter attempt if it gets far enough always leads to tyranny anyway, because some people object to the theft of their businesses and property and must have their skulls cracked to prevent them from saying so and encouraging others.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to start writing about Corbyn and the threat to freedom but, after the events of the last week at Labour conference, it just came out.

There were even MPs demanding a General Strike to bring down the elected government; and a member of the Shadow Cabinet competing in the most stupid comment of the year competition (lots of entries this year) praised the actions of the appalling far left council in Liverpool that almost bankrupted a great city. Liverpool is now flourishing again thanks to a new generation of leaders, businesses who invested, employees, and Tory peer Michael Heseltine who got it all rolling.

Speaking of the old stager Hezza, we can be only a matter of hours away from his latest Stop Brexit intervention. Tory conference begins this weekend, and the fanatical europhile Hezza never misses a chance to go on television to urge the country to dump the result of the referendum and go back – Oliver-style, “please sir, can we have some more?” – to Donald Tusk and to President Macron.

Get ready this weekend for a blizzard of Brexit interventions on both sides of the Tory divide. I’m not sure any of them will change much or generate more than media sound and fury signifying nothing, but we’ll see. Conference is an interlude, before parliament returns and the Brexit negotiations reach a denouement.

The position is as follows. I won’t labour it on Brexit. Life is short. It’s almost the weekend. You need a gin and tonic. So do I. And no-one wants another essay on sodding Brexit, and I say that as someone who is keener than ever to leave the EU.

Right, quickly, before the bar opens…

– May’s position is that she really is sticking with Chequers, her compromise plan even though the EU killed it at the Salzburg summit. The problem is that the people saying she is sticking to it also expected a breakthrough at Salzburg. The opposite happened. Oops. Prime Ministerial plausibility level lowered.

– Even so, with the Labour threat level high the cabinet and and much of her party is giving her room to get through conference with dignity by saying it’s Chequers or no deal. That’s the idea.

– But the cabinet can then demand a change after that, to a different kind of deal. The key figure here is Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, the most powerful person in the government because he cannot be fired and has the whip hand in relations with the civil service whose Brexit plan blew up at Salzburg.

– So, there will be conference shenanigans and then a crunch around the October meetings when the EU will either rehabilitate Chequers (seems unlikely) or hand May a picture of Chequers being read the last rites. At which point the Prime Minister will need to pivot – suggesting Canada plus with a fudge on the Irish border, or maybe Norway but she could only get Norway through by splitting her party. Don’t think the chief whip, cabinet, and donors will let her.

– This all sticks on the Irish border and the stupid backstop. The EU thought it was being clever in making this the hook. Now it is hooked to. Only in desperation did May sign up to it in December to keep the show on the road, thinking the Irish border could be fudged later.

– Neither side is moving. In recent weeks I’ve been shouted at by a series of usually nice and well-informed Germans that we must surrender on Ireland or we will suffer – food shortages, no access to German cars, no more Kraftwerk albums, the lot. A fatal miscalculation has been made, I fear. They think the Brits will do what we’re told. Don’t think we’re going to. The political premium right now on doing what we’re told is zero. Even Labour’s Hillary Benn says he could not vote for a solution that divides the UK as the EU demands.

– Right now, without an EU shift it points to no deal even if May moves – as she must do to Canada plus. They won’t even accommodate that which leaves her or another PM having to either stand up for Britain or do what the fanatics of the People’s Vote suggest, that is side with Brussels. Perhaps siding with Brussels could be popular, but in the end I doubt it will.

Have a good weekend.

Iain Martin,

Editor and Publisher, Reaction