Ross Clark
by Jeremy Corbyn in the past year, who cheered as he described the free market economy as facing a “crisis of legitimacy”.
Or maybe I do history teachers an injustice. I can see that even if you have studied communism, if you are 25 and are struggling to afford a decent home, then Jeremy Corbyn’s speeches must come across as superficially appealing.
For one thing he has become a good public speaker. He is good, too, at identifying some of the things which have gone wrong in our free market society. The housing market in London is in crisis thanks to too little building and to international investors being allowed to use the housing stock as casino chips. That needs putting right.
But what Corbyn stands for goes way beyond the adjustments which need to be made to make free markets work for everyone. He clings to the socialist dogma – which until recently seemed to have become virtually extinct – that societies work better when the state organises the economy and spends our money for us.
His vision of a high-tax, highspend government and an economy dominated by nationalised industries and unionised workforces would take us back to the 1970s – an era when,
MOREOVER, you have to be in your mid-40s to remember the miners’ strike when the National Union of Mineworkers tried for a whole year – and just failed – to hold the country to ransom.
Its justification? It wanted the government to carry on generating electricity by means of filthy coal plants rather than move towards cleaner North Sea gas.
The Left likes to forget the issues of the miners’ strike now, trying to turn it purely into an issue of police behaviour.
It is no accident that the pivotal age at which people in the last election were more likely to vote Conservative than Labour was 46.
If you are younger than that, then the main economic crisis you will remember is the one caused by reckless banks in 2008/09. How easy then, to swallow Corbyn’s assertion that it is capitalism which has the inherent faults.
Although of course there is one socialist crisis which you don’t have to be middle-aged to remember – the one being played out in Venezuela at the moment.
It is 35 years since politics in Britain was a genuine battle of political ideas between capitalism and socialism, between a free market and a command economy.
The Blair and Brown governments spent too much money but they believed in markets and they didn’t believe in confiscatory tax systems.
For years, elections in Britain were fought between rival brands of free market economics. No longer. What we have now is a genuine battle of ideas. With Corbyn’s vision bound to lead to ruin the stakes could not be higher.
‘Jeremy Corbyn clings to socialist dogma’