Corbyn’s socialism is sinister balls

When Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens were both working at the New Statesman in the late seventies, they came up with a neat and typically sinuous phrase for the tendency of self-professed leftists to come across as semi-malignant weirdos.

Amis in his autobiography ‘Experience’ writes: “During an interview Neal Ascherson … came up with the following: ‘Anyone who resists the closed shop is going to get the biggest bloody nose of all time.’ I said afterwards that this was sinister balls … ‘no sinister balls’ meant no vehement assertions of a left-wing tendency.”

Since 2015, Labour has had a severe case of sinister balls.

Let me count the ways the Labour leadership is sinister balls. Corbyn is pop culture phenomenon sinister balls: John Mcdonnell is “the peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA” sinister balls; Seamus Milne, “the new Belgrade administration dug up corpses to order” in the Balkans sinister balls; Jon Lansman, another Wykehamist and therefore sinister balls, Ken Livingstone, “he was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews” sinister balls and the most sinister balls of the lot, Andrew Murray, “our party has already made its basic position of solidarity with People’s Korea [North Korea] clear” sinister balls.

In today’s Sun, we have some more evidence of sinister balls. This time it seems that Corbyn met an agent of the Czech state security apparatus a few times in London. The meetings were preliminary and did not go beyond the sharing of some rather limited information. Corbyn was not an influential politician at the time; he had very little of value that he could share.

Just another case of sinister balls. This shows with absolute clarity that a vote for Corbyn is not simply a vote for limited increases in public spending across the board, it is a vote for a particular (and extremely) nasty reading of the twentieth century, that ignores the crimes perpetrated in the name of socialism, that forgets its victims.

We remember the barricades in Paris in 1968; we forget the Prague Spring of 1968 – a genuine democratic revolution which sought to throw off the yoke of Soviet rule. And I wonder, I wonder if Corbyn, when he met his new Czech friend, that friendly man from the embassy, stopped for a moment, paused and thought of the men and women who were imprisoned, murdered and blotted out in the years that followed ’68, and how many writers, poets and artists were banned from work, and how many lives were diminished and destroyed.

Did he hell. It’s sinister. And it’s balls.