You’re never too old to be on Strictly

IT IS just plain racist and some have even suggested that it is a deliberate attempt to woo Muslims alienated by the Palestine problem. Then there was the statement by Labour Friends of Palestine on Twitter that a two-state solution would be “the final solution”. Dear heaven.

We also need to separate calls for freedom of speech from outright anti-Semitism. I had some sympathy with the speaker, Miko Peled, who at a Labour event said people should be allowed to deny the Holocaust.

As far as I am concerned people should be allowed to say the earth is flat, which is about as sensible though nothing like as objectionable. THERESA MAY has not, as some commentators suggest, moved Left towards Corbyn. Helping home ownership has been Conservative policy for decades. Indeed Margaret Thatcher introduced tax reliefs to encourage us to buy our own homes.

Nor is it something new to encourage higher education and the overhaul of tuition fees is somewhat overdue. An overhaul, of course, is a very, very long way from abolition of I have long championed free speech in this column. Yet my sympathy disappeared when he compared Zionists with Nazis.

It is easy to say that the Jewish fees or writing off existing debt as proposed by Corbyn and then reneged on when he was finally forced to admit its cost.

Conservatives should now go on the offensive against Corbyn in two ways. The first is that we need to build on Hammond’s approach this week and spell out in figures a foot high the costs of his policies on student debt, renationalisation, and reclaiming PFI schemes to name but a few. This will have resonance with all grown-up taxpayers.

The second should be aimed at the real reason the young vote Labour which owes less to practical and more to ideological considerations. They seriously believe Corbyn offers something new, instead of something which has already been tried out thoroughly in the past and was thoroughly discarded when it failed

OH, no, Lulu. The wonderful, impossibly young-looking singer tells the Daily Express that people over 50 should not do Strictly Come Dancing.

I was 63 and loved every minute of it, nay, every second. Age matters not a jot compared to fitness and attitude and having fun.

community should not get too jumpy because these opinions are so far removed from the mainstream in this country, but attacks on synagogues, graffiti and some of the Twitter comments do not help. Labour is taking some belated action to clean up its act but only time will tell if its charge-sheet is really clean.

CONSERVATIVES NOW NEED TO GO ON THE OFFENSIVE

disastrously. Nor was it tried out only here, as many may think when they hear my generation recalling the 1970s, but in many countries with equally unhappy results.

Worse, what Corbyn proposes is not just socialism but outright Marxism which has been an even greater failure.

We have nearly five years to hammer that message home and we should not let up.