Revolution is in the air. This is an emergency

In February 1968 the Beatles and their partners headed to India to become trainee transcendental meditationists under the tutelage of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. While there the band wrote many of the songs that became the White Album, recorded on their return to London. Their love affair with mysticism soured in India on the basis that their  spiritual guru in white robes had temporal designs on some of the women in their party, and only Harrison stuck with it in later life.

The key composition that emerged from that period was Lennon’s Revolution, recorded in London in two and half versions. There was a slow, bluesy version on the White Album, then an unlistenable sound collage (the half), and a blistering rock and roll masterclass that was the other side of the Hey Jude single.

What made the song important, other than the tight playing and the production punch it packed in the faster version, setting new standards for rock music, were the lyrics. They were written against a backdrop of youthful revolutionary fervour. Youth culture had suddenly become radicalised by Vietnam and in early 1968 demonstrations against the war spread across university campuses in the US. In March there was the famous demonstration in London outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Street Fighting Man Mick Jagger was there (did he park his E-type Jag round the corner?) and there were reports that he was seen throwing a bit of brick. Jagger was far too sensible to linger and within a couple of years he had wrested control of the Rolling Stones business affairs and then with the help of his advisor Prince Rupert Lowenstein turned the band into a well-run moneymaking capitalist machine that it is today.

John Lennon was an even more hopeless political revolutionary than the astute Jagger. The man who wrote Imagine, a song in which he dreamt of a world with no possessions, while occupying a large country home on 72 acres near Ascot, was intelligent and gifted but woefully undereducated and prone to adopting whatever crackpot theory he had just heard.

He did, though, in 1968, have several moments of clarity. Revolution was a sceptical song. He wanted to see “the plan” of those seeking to crack skulls and smash up the system, although he played around with the notion of whether he could be counted “in” or “out” of revolutionary violence. These doubts infuriated the radical middle class left. Woolton’s working class Beatle John (never as working class as he claimed) had betrayed the impending revolution. Lennon later recanted and by the early 1970s he was wearing a Chairman Mao badge and marching in support of the old Marxist maniac mass-murderer, right before Yoko Ono took over managing Lennon’s money and become rather skilled at making investments in agriculture and on the stock market to their mutual advantage.

Back in China people weren’t so lucky, until the old fraud Mao died and China later began to be opened up to market economics. As many as 45 million people were starved or worked to death in labour camps under Mao, the poster boy of the late 1960s middle class idiot left before many of them went off to work in advertising, consulting, or the media in the 1970s and 1980s.

Revolutions not only eat their own eventually. They eat the rest of us first. That’s the problem. A lot of people get hurt.

The reason I mention all this now is that revolution is in the air in Britain. Far fetched? Nope. The far-left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is ahead in the polls after a disastrous Tory election campaign. His shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, cites Marx, Lenin and Trotsky as his influences. McDonnell’s rhetoric is troublingly violent and last weekend he termed Grenfell Tower a “murder,” that is premeditated killing. He is a bad man, who gloried in students “kicking the shit” out of London and has walked back from his calls for taking the fight to the streets perhaps because a demo that turned into a fight with the police (popular and under pressure on the security front) risks alienating some of the recent converts to the Corbynite cause. Nonetheless, he and his leader share a commitment to industrial democracy – distinct from parliamentary democracy – and push the politics of the street.

Around Corbyn and McDonnell are a cluster of communists. Really, that is not hyperbole. One of Corbyn’s key aides – Andrew Fisher, of Unite – only resigned from the Communist Party of Great Britain last year.

Moderate Labour MPs now face a fight to avoid deselection ahead of the next election. Momentum, the Corbynite campaigning organisation, is flooding constituencies and also targeting Tory MPs with newly vulnerable majorities. On the back of legitimate concerns about student debt and the housing market, and public services, the far-left is pushing a classic “time for a change” mantra that disguises its real purpose.

This is an extremely dangerous moment, and it is extraordinary how many super-affluent people seem unable to see it clearly. They appear like first class passengers on the deck of the Titanic in the minutes after the initial collision with an iceberg. The ship can’t sink, surely? Not because of a little bit of ice? The Labour manifesto was quite mild, surely? Quite Swedish really. It’ll fizzle out this Corbyn thing, won’t it?

Further down the income scale – and I have now had countless such conversations in recent weeks, at speaking events and so on, with terrified 40-something and 50-something parents – there seems to be a greater realisation of just how bad the situation is. Corbynism has caught the mood of the young across the classes, partly because of student fees and also because of a sense that the oldsters have gamed the property market against them. They have more than a point on both scores, although it is mystery why socialism – the end of the market mechanism – should be any more successful this time in tackling these problems when it has failed everywhere it has been tried. Reason no longer seems to apply.

You need your head examining if you are banking on the restoration of sense anytime soon. Go ask President Hillary Clinton. The new Corbynites who were anti-Brexit do not even seem too bothered that Corbyn, always a Bennite anti-EU type, is for Brexit. Regardless, he seems to symbolise change, hope and shaking up the order. Corbyn enjoys a “halo effect” by which anything he says or does is deemed by definition by devotees to be inherently good.

It is really not difficult to work out what happens if this persists, if the government falls (and Theresa May goes into a difficult economic stretch already minus authority) and then Corbyn the Marxist wins and starts nationalising the economy and hiking taxes.

How would international investors respond? Would British debt become easier to issue and sell or harder? Go on, take a guess. Taxes would go through the roof.

There is a way to respond to money rushing for the exits, a process called capital flight. The far left’s response would be capital controls, or exchange controls. You think McDonnell would balk at this, banning money leaving, under the cover of an emergency, why exactly? You have some money (property, pension, savings) and think I’m exaggerating? Sure, Hitler can be controlled. And the Germans in 1940 will never make it to Paris. History is pockmarked with examples of people thinking the seemingly unthinkable could never happen and then finding out too late they had not prepared properly.

Ah, but it’s okay because, because… Corbyn has a beard, clownish views and an allotment?  And Corbyn just can’t win a majority, it is said.

Anyone who still thinks the situation has not changed dramatically has not looked at the electoral map since June 8th. The surge for Labour in voters under the age of 45 opens up all sorts of possibilities for the party in England. A couple of hundred thousand extra votes in the right places would probably do it.

In Scotland there are at least 20-25 seats the party can take. The SNP is stuffed on a number of fronts, not least because young voters who lean left like the shiniest new thing, that is St Jeremy. I do wonder if the young Mhairi Blacks of the independence movement are content to watch Labour lefties have all the best fun while the SNP slides. We’ll see soon enough.

Either way, Corbyn and his gang can win and must be stopped.

There is a counter case to the apocalyptic scenario I have described, of course. In the late 1960s there was a backlash from the “silent majority” that did not want insurrection and smashing up. That year of demonstration and revolution, 1968, culminated with the Republican Richard Nixon winning the Presidency in the US. In France, after an interim, and an election, the moderate conservative George Pompidou succeeded de Gaulle in June 1969. In the UK, the Conservative Ted Heath was the surprise winner of the 1970 general election.

That is cold comfort. If your hopes rest on doing as little as possible in response and waiting for a repeat of Nixon and Heath, you should realise you are taking a gamble on history repeating itself, badly in the end.

The situation in contemporary Britain is even worse and more unstable than it looks. A Marxist cabal has taken over the main opposition party, a party that would win a general election tomorrow. It is run by insurrectionists who advocate street politics and far left control of the economy and our institutions.

Those who still believe in our system of institutions, and in the desirability of markets – proved in area after area of human activity to produce extraordinary improvements – can either stand about waiting to see what happens or get busy responding.

For the Tory party that should mean a complete overhaul. They need their own extra-parliamentary campaigning force, and the kind of mass membership – think National Trust on a mission fused with social media – that can spread the word, if the Tories can ever get back to working out what the “word” is. Try aspiration, opportunity, housebuilding, sanity and hope, for starters.

For Labour moderates this situation requires knocking on tens of thousands of doors and recruiting moderate Labour voters to take over local Labour parties against Momentum. If that fails they must get ready to split as modernising centrists aiming to deprive Corbyn of a majority and to counterbalance the Conservatives.

And the rest of us? This is an emergency. Start praying, or speak up, join in, make the anti-Marxist arguments and argue for an optimistic and sane alternative before it is too late.