Militants cheer as Corbyn spells out ‘a recipe for ruin’
JEREMY Corbyn was accused last night of aiming to plunge Britain into a dark era of “unemployment, recession and debt”.
The Labour leader used his keynote speech to the party’s annual conference to set out a hard-Left blueprint for Britain that he calls the “socialism of the 21st Century”.
It includes sweeping public ownership of industry, soaring taxes to fund a £500billion spending spree, scrapping sanctions to curb benefit cheats, unlimited immigration and a foreign policy based on “peace, justice and human rights”.
Mr Corbyn told delegates: “Our aim could not be more ambitious. We want a new settlement for the 21st century, in politics, business, our communities, with the environment and in our relations with the rest of the world.”
His ambitious plans were savaged last night.
Dr Adam Marshall, of the British Chambers of Commerce, said: “Many will be concerned that Jeremy Corbyn is already reaching for the tax lever.”
John O’Connell, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “This was a prospectus for poverty, unemployment, debt and recession. It beggars belief that Corbyn wants to pile up the bills for future generations even further.
“These aren’t new ideas, just the same hare-brained policies that have caused misery wherever they’ve been tried.”
Mr Corbyn was given a rapturous standing ovation by his hardLeft supporters and closed the conference in Liverpool by leading the socialist anthem The Red Flag, with delegates raising their fists communist-style.
He used his speech to goad moderates who had failed to oust him from the party leadership, saying he was “honoured to have been re-elected with an even larger mandate”.
The renewed backing meant he was ready to impose his own 10-point policy programme.
It includes scrapping the outsourcing of local services, abolishing curbs on strikes, higher business taxes to fund school visits and a block on arms sales to countries accused of human rights abuses.
He admitted there was a “mountain to climb” but added: “We can build the electoral support that can beat the Tories.”
Last night, Mark Littlewood, of the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank, said: “This was a speech full of discredited policies which could only be paid for through extreme tax hikes.”
AFTER days of bitter infighting, neurotic navel-gazing and adolescent rants the Labour conference in Liverpool plumbed new depths with Jeremy Corbyn’s speech as leader. His address was not an exercise in serious politics – on the contrary it was a delusional call for the return of full-blooded socialism to Britain. His fundamentalist rhetoric may have been acclaimed by his brainwashed followers in the auditorium but it will have no appeal to the mainstream electorate.
If any voters thought he might provide a coherent vision for our country, then they will have been sorely disappointed. Instead Corbyn pulled the Labour delegates even deeper into their Left-wing comfort zone as he pounded his gospel of undiluted radicalism. The entire occasion resembled a gathering by an obscure religious sect.
So deep is the fanaticism of the Labour members that they see Corbyn not as an absurd Left-wing extremist but as the potential saviour of our nation. That is why they cheered rather than laughed when he ludicrously claimed that Labour is now “the voice of the many” at the very time when the party’s ratings are at their lowest point in modern history.
YESTERDAY Labour activists showed in their hysterical fervour, demonstrated through repeated standing ovations for every Corbyn platitude, that they have lost all grasp of reality. They refuse to see that he is dragging their party to oblivion through his woeful, divisive leadership. They treat him like the Messiah but he has not a shred of real charisma, authority or competence. He is utterly prosaic in method and ideas.
Corbyn proclaimed in his speech that he was “not looking backwards” but that is exactly what he was doing. He is stuck in a 1970s time warp, wilfully ignoring the truth that over the past 40 years his cherished creed of socialism has miserably failed right across the globe from North Korea to the defunct Soviet Union.
With pathetic, blinkered nostalgia he harks back to an age of punitive taxation, untrammelled union power and massive state control. For most people the Winter of Discontent, with all its mayhem and economic paralysis, was a disaster for Britain. To Corbyn it was a golden moment of class consciousness. The picket line is his natural home, the megaphone his preferred method of communication.
All that sort of hardline nonsense was on display from him again yesterday. Even though the economy is booming after six years of Tory-led government, with unemployment down and living standards up, he painted a bleak picture of a miserable Britain scarred by food banks, Government cutbacks, rampant inequality, poverty wages and housing crises. His solution to this supposed nightmare is socialism on an epic scale. In Corbynland, taxes on businesses will go up, restraints on trade union strikes will be lifted, state borrowing will be vastly increased and council housing massively extended.
In a festival of new expensive bureaucracy there will be a National Investment Bank, a National Education Service and a nationalised railway system. Inevitably he opposed the creation of new grammar schools, which he described with his usual air of class-war resentment as a form of segregation.
Corbyn is aware that he is rightly seen by the public as profoundly unpatriotic because of a host of incidents such as his refusal to sing the national anthem. So in one desperate passage he tried to turn his brand of acquisitive socialism into a form of national pride. “There is nothing more unpatriotic than not paying your taxes,” he declared to wild cheers. Really? More than calling for a minute’s silence to honour dead IRA operatives, as Corbyn did in 1987?
But an even more offensive moment came when he referred to immigration. As a diehard believer in open borders and undiluted multiculturalism, he tried to portray the demand for greater controls as a form of bigotry. “We will not sow division or fan the flames of fear,” he piously declared before he launched into the usual phoney claim that Britain would collapse without mass immigration. “The NHS is kept going because of migrants,” he said, ignoring the fact that the NHS functioned better before the last Labour government opened the floodgates.
THEN in the next breath he contradicted all this by pledging a big increase in the Migrant Impact Fund to relieve the stress on communities caused by the foreign influx. But why on earth would neighbourhoods need such support if, as Corbyn pretends, immigration is such a boon to Britain?
Corbyn is a prize hypocrite. He prattled again about unity in the Labour Party yet his regime has been an engine of division. He railed against antiSemitism and misogyny yet his supporters have been addicted to both. He paraded his supposed honesty and frankness yet he had nothing of any substance to say about Brexit, by far the biggest issue facing the country.
Nor did he openly address the question of Trident renewal, avoiding the chasm between his unilateralist views and the more robust outlook of most of his parliamentary party. Corbyn’s failure to come up with a credible defence policy should, on those grounds alone, disqualify him from senior office.
Ultimately his was a pointless speech. He spoke of his hopes for government but as long as he remains in charge Labour thankfully will never be allowed near power.
‘Corbyn is stuck in a 1970s time warp’