Nasty, unapologetic and stuck in the past
TO his fervent supporters – many of them young, middle- class idealists – Jeremy Corbyn is a man of unshakeable principle and integrity, with an exciting vision of how to tackle the country’s economic and social ills.
Others who lived through the 1970s have reason to see him differently. For as they know from bitter experience of those years of union thuggery and national sclerosis, there is nothing remotely fresh about the stale breath of state socialism exhaled by the Labour leader with every word he utters.
nor can they respect the honesty of a politician who offers ever more extravagant electoral bribes, knowing he can’t honour them – a politician, moreover, who poses as a good-natured old buffer, while presiding over the nastiest activist movement in Labour’s history.
Indeed, in his conference speech yesterday – triumphal after the election (you’d think he’d won it!) – Mr Corbyn was at his deceitful worst, rattling off a litany of unkeepable pledges.
Free tuition all round… no more caps on benefits or public sector pay… a £250billion national Transformation Fund, with massive spending on infrastructure and the regions…
A vast expansion of social housing (with 1950s- style rent controls thrown in to kill off what’s left of the private rented sector)… wholesale nationalisation of private concerns…
Yet in a speech lasting 75 minutes, he devoted only these 13 words to where the money was to come from: ‘We are going to ask big business to pay a bit more tax.’
A bit more tax? To raise hundreds of billions more, in a country almost £2trillion in debt? how does he suppose firms will survive to pay any tax in Britain, once he’s unleashed the unions and imposed the dead hand of socialist planning?
As for Brexit, he fudged, making clear only that he wants to keep mass migration. But it was in what Mr Corbyn failed to say yesterday that he emerged at his most sinister. not one word of apology did he utter to the Labour Friends of Israel, who have been subjected to vile anti-Semitic slurs at the conference. he himself snubbed their annual reception, claiming he was too busy writing his speech to attend any parties, when in fact he found time for at least three.
nor did he say sorry for his supporters’ vile threats to female Labour moderates or the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, who had to be protected by a bodyguard.
he even attacked the Mail for holding a mirror to his own twisted, anti-Western extremism and former links with terrorist groups. This paper pleads guilty to showing voters the man behind the election mask. he may not like it, but it’s the duty of a free Press to cut through the spin and deceit.
As for his student fans, fervently clenching their fists as they sang the Red Flag, will they still feel the same under a time-warp, Corbyn-led government – with no hope of a job, public services destroyed and the Bank of Mum and Dad sucked dry?
God spare them from having to find out!