Labour’s utterly delusional thinking over Corbyn led nationalism to victory

AND so the Tories have romped home with a massive majority, clearing the way for any kind of Brexit they feel like. No longer will the UK parliament be able to put any brakes on the Brexit train. No longer will there be any effective opposition to the runaway ambitions of the ERG and the far right within the Conservative party.

And it was all entirely predictable really. It was obvious far in advance of the election. Despite the electorate knowing that Boris Johnson was untrustworthy and had at best a tenuous relationship with the truth; despite the fact that he was promising all sorts of massive public spending when intuitively that flies in the face of conservative ideology; despite the fact that during the campaign he became increasingly shifty and bumbling — the electorate still preferred him to Jeremy Corbyn.

As is their right.

Polls since the 2016 Brexit referendum have consistently shown that Corbyn is not liked by the electorate. You can blame the media — and it’s true they have been harder on Corbyn than on Johnson; you can say it isn’t fair — Corbyn is a decent guy. But you cannot discount Corbyn’s lack of oration skills, his lack of charisma or his shambolic policy platform on both Brexit and in the run-up to this general election. Nor can you discount the foolhardy, wilful refusal of Corbynites to accept that their man was unpalatable to voters.

One tweet I saw by a prominent Labour activist read: “Thank you to Jeremy Corbyn for inspiring me, giving me hope and standing up for what is right. The country didn’t deserve you.” That summed up a huge part of the problem. The electorate didn’t like Corbyn but the Labour purists loved him so didn’t care. They didn’t seem to think that actually winning the crucial election was as important as having a socialist purist at the helm. And that purity project has backfired spectacularly.

The far right doesn’t rise in isolation. It happens in tandem with the far left rising, and a polarisation of politics in general. People often compare the times we are living in now to the 1930s and the rise of fascism. It is a fair comparison, but they forget that communism rose at the same time as fascism and that one fuelled the other. To stop the lunatics in the extremes from running the asylum, the centre has to hold.

And Labour’s lurch to the left alienated that centre grouping — while also propelling many further right. The centre left has been seen as almost dirty by the British Labour party — and indeed many left wing parties here — since the Blair era. And to be a Blairite is perceived by many in Labour as worse than being a Tory.

So the Corbynistas, instead of hammering the opposition, trawled back looking at how long-standing Labour MPs had previously voted, looking for evidence of centrist rot. The upshot? A divided left which was ineffective in tackling the right — and spent most of its time watching the house burn down while they argued over what shade of red the fire extinguishers should be. But it also meant that any voterfriendly, centrist policies that might have enamoured Labour to the electorate were seen as unacceptable.

‘‘Nationalise everything!’’ they cried. Despite most voters believing nationalisation of big industries means a bloated and inefficient public sector and higher taxes than people want.

‘‘We’ll tell you about our Brexit policy in a while!’’ they said, while the UK was already two years into the end game trying to negotiate with the EU.

They argued about antiSemitism and the decades-ago Iraq war rather than focusing on defeating the Conservatives. And the reality is, had the Tory party been in power at the time of the Iraq war, do you think they wouldn’t have supported the US? Of course they would. And do you think for a moment they’d still be berating each other for that now? Of course not. Labour’s ludicrous obsession with ideological purity put them at a remove from the issues of the day. And they have no one but themselves to blame for finding themselves with the worst election defeat since 1935 on their hands — despite the

Tory party being in utter chaos since 2016.

So where to now? Well, the clear outcome of this election is a win for nationalism in general. Northern Ireland and Scotland have inched closer to independence from the UK and the little Englanders are on course to ‘‘Get Brexit Done’’. This mirrors the ‘‘America First’’ mantra from the other side of the world.

But nationalism is almost by definition a recipe for international division and instability.

Couple that with an emboldened Boris — who British parliamentary democracy struggled to contain even when he was head of a minority government — and I believe we are in very dangerous waters.

But it will not be the far left who defeat the far right. They are two sides of a coin. The right will persecute you for who you are. The left will persecute you for what you think. The centre is where civil discourse, peace and prosperity lie. It is there the fringe mentalities can be defeated.

But we are in an unstable power-grab situation now.

And I’m not convinced that Labour will learn the lesson that its obsession with people’s worthiness and a faffing form of socialism that’s ineffective and unappealing is not what’s required to defeat a far more ruthless Tory machine.

It remains to be seen if the middle ground can reassert itself and withhold the pull from the poles. Or if the purity project will continue.

‘It will not be the far left who defeat the far right. They are two sides of a coin’