LITTLE JOHN
John McDonnell is often described as a Marxist, so I presume he’s familiar with one of his ideological hero’s more famous pronouncements.
Karl Marx once wrote: ‘ history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’
That quote came to mind as I watched McDonnell outlining labour’s economic programme, which revolves around renationalisation of the railways, water and energy companies.
It was an action replay of the 1983 manifesto, ridiculed by the late labour grandee Gerald Kaufman as ‘ the longest suicide note in history’.
That consigned the party to the second of four successive general election defeats. Tony Blair would have to scrap the Clause Four commitment to public ownership in a symbolic gesture designed to reassure voters that labour could be trusted with the economy.
Back in the eighties, McDonnell was a member of the hard-left Ken livingstone cabal running london like a suburb of Fidel Castro’s havana.
no one could have imagined then that one day he would become Shadow Chancellor, still less that he would be pitching for power on the basis of socialist policies utterly discredited more than three decades ago.
Then again, who could have foreseen that Jeremy Corbyn, an obscure backbencher, would rise to become leader of the party and a cult hero to a generation of middle-class millennials?
As a young industrial correspondent, I observed first- hand the battle for labour’s soul. I even played a small walk-on part, helping to expose Communist and Militant infiltration of the trades unions and constituencies.
now the very same sort of hardliners who were routed back then are running the show, unopposed. For Militant, read Momentum.
What’s astonishing to those of us who lived through the Seventies and eighties is the new leadership’s belief that wholesale renationalisation of vast sections of the economy is a vote winner. The frightening thing is that they may well be right. no one under 40 has any recollection of what life was like in Big State Britain, or seems to have the slightest curiosity about anything which happened earlier than the day before yesterday. PRIVATISATION
hasn’t always worked out as intended, but it’s been a vast improvement over what went before. At least the customer, if not in charge, is in with a shout.
Under nationalisation, all the utilities were run for the benefit of those who worked for them. In fairly recent memory, you could only buy a cooker from the gas or electricity boards, and then had to wait weeks for a unionised workman to come round and plug it in. It could take months to get a telephone landline installed.
Try telling that to youngsters who are used to instant gratification at the press of an app on their latest Samsung Galaxies and iPhones.
Modern railway services are admittedly expensive and still, if you live south of london, plagued by strikes. But they’re clean, safe and reasonably efficient.
Under British rail, rolling stock was clapped out, filthy and unreliable. on- board catering was limited to little more than warm beer and individual fruit pies. The British rail sandwich was a standing joke. Mainline stations were disgusting and wildcat industrial action was commonplace.
The private companies who now run the public utilities can be remote and arrogant, but they are profitable, accountable to shareholders and, to a lesser degree, to their customers.
When they were owned by the State, they belonged to nobody in particular, made massive losses and were effectively answerable only to themselves. Most of the time they didn’t give a hoot for the people who paid their wages.
This is the world to which John McDonnell wishes to return us. renationalisation would once again give the unions the whip hand. Do you really want Unite’s len McCluskey running the country?
When I first came across McCluskey, he ran with Derek hatton’s Militant Tendency on Merseyside. Today, he’s the most important man in the labour Party, controlling the purse-strings and dictating policy.
Militant were a bunch of Toytown Trots compared with the modern Momentum crowd, who have taken political intimidation to a whole new level.
The left have always had their fair share of thugs, from Arthur Scargill’s flying pickets to the boot boys of the Anti-nazi league. But labour was never infested with the kind of vicious behaviour which is par for the Corbynista course today, especially from cowards who hide behind the anonymity afforded by social media giants like Twitter. Despicably, the left are prepared to resort to sickening threats against women who don’t toe the party line.
The BBC has even had to hire an ex-military bodyguard to protect political editor laura Kuenssberg at this week’s conference in Brighton. She has been the target of outrageous physical threats and sexual abuse — online and in person.
McDonnell yesterday tried to make light of the threats and said intimidation of women journalists was ‘unacceptable’. Yet he’s the same man who joked about ‘lynching’ a female Tory MP, and said that he would like to go back in time and assassinate Mrs Thatcher.
he has the menacing demeanour and dead eyes of the IrA godfathers he so admires. It’s no wonder, then, that his disciples think threatening violence against women is a way to behave. WHAT
’S most depressing is that all this seems to go over the heads of the gormless youngsters who see Corbyn as some kind of avuncular messiah, and cheer wildly when McDonnell promises to turn the clock back to the Seventies.
Maybe now that london’s labour mayor — and, reportedly, a host of other left-wing councils — intends to deprive them of their cheap Uber taxi rides home, the penny might drop, and they will get a proper insight into what socialism has in store for them.
Karl Marx almost had it right about history repeating itself, but looking back at the last time the hard-left ran labour, it was a bit of a farce, even though it didn’t seem like that at the time.
At least there were sane voices within labour and a strong, united Conservative Party to stop them.
not so much now. labour’s surviving moderates have all gone missing in action, and the Tories are a squabbling shambles, tearing themselves apart over Brexit and who is going to take over from Mother Theresa.
If the country is stupid enough to elect a Corbyn/ McDonnell government, this time it really will be a tragedy.