Momentum plots salary cuts if it wins first council

SENIOR council officials and other public sector workers could see their pay slashed if Momentum wins control of its first council.

The hard-Left group, which grew out of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign, is expected to win a majority on Haringey Council following the May elections.

It would give Momentum control of its first town hall, and with it the North London borough council’s £800million budget.

The group plans to slash salaries of council officials who earn more than £60,000 by between 5 per cent and 40 per cent, it was reported yesterday.

If all public servants are included that would mean senior teachers and heads, who earn up to £116,000.

‘This is probably aimed at supposed fatcat council officers, but mass resignations by heads would be devastating for our children,’ one of the outgoing Labour councillors told the Sunday Times.

‘You can’t govern in slogans, and Haringey is about to find that out the hard way.’

A purge of sitting Labour councillors has seen 17 replaced with pro-Momentum candidates. The group is also planning a huge hike in council tax for large houses.

Nora Mulready, of Haringey Labour, said: ‘This is going to be quite extraordinary to watch. It may be the undoing of the entire Corbyn project.’

Momentum also denied claims that it has drawn up a ‘hitlist’ of up to 50 moderate MPs who could face deselection.

HERE are three statements that really ought to be utterly uncontroversial. Britain’s nationalised industries were bywords for shambolic incompetence. The Loony Left were a disaster. And the Marxist experiments of the 20th century led to economic stagnation, political repression and the deaths of millions.

Common sense, surely? Not if you ask Britain’s youngsters, for whom the economic disasters of the Seventies or the horrors of Soviet communism might as well belong to ancient history.

Months ago, after Jeremy Corbyn’s strong showing in the General Election, I warned that a generation of young voters were sleepwalking into the arms of the far-Left. And in the past few days, three stories have confirmed my fears.

Purged

The first is the collapse of the construction giant Carillion, which has reawakened calls to renationalise industries. Polls show massive support for public ownership of everything from telephones to water.

At the same time, events in Haringey, North London, reinforce the sense that the Left are on the march. The extremist group Momentum has purged old Labour moderates and is poised to control a budget running into the hundreds of millions.

For the first time since the Eighties, the Loony Left, as they were once called, are calling the shots. One paper reported yesterday that Momentum’s next project is the de-selection of 50 moderate Labour MPs, handing the party to the extremists for at least a generation.

Were that not depressing enough, the third story is the news of a dramatic revival o f Marxism in Britain’s universities. According to one newspaper, more than 3,000 students joined Marxist groups at freshers’ fairs last year.

Appearing on Radio 4’ s Today programme, Fiona Lali, president of the Marxist Society at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), explained that ‘capitalism has outlived its usefulness’.

Asked about the failure of Soviet Communism, she claimed that it had ‘never had the chance to develop’ because of interference from the West.

My real thoughts about Ms Lali’s version of history are not fit for publication. But let’s put her to one side and start with the other issues.

Nationalisation first. The polls offer scant comfort for those of us who believe in private ownership. Even before the collapse of Carillion, surveys found that 76 per cent of voters back renationalisation of the railways, with even higher numbers wanting state ownership of electricity and gas (77 per cent each) and even water (a whopping 83 per cent).

Yet the history of nationalisation in Britain could hardly be less inspiring. In the Sixties and Seventies, British Rail’s very name became shorthand for world- class shabbiness and incompetence.

The car giant British Leyland lost so much money that, in the decade after 1975, the government was forced to hand it more than a million pounds every working day for almost ten years, just to keep it going.

And, perhaps most famously, our telephone system, run by the General Post Office, seemed to have been designed as an exercise in masochism.

In his biography of Margaret Thatcher, Charles Moore records that when he bought his first house in 1981, he waited six months for a phone because of a ‘shortage of numbers’.

As many readers will recall, the sheer lack of competition, absence of market discipline and reliance on public subsidies meant that customers were treated abysmally.

In September 1978, the Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, told his Cabinet that he had called the Post Office about his phone bill. As he put it: ‘I didn’t give my name and I was treated disgracefully.’

So, why this vogue? Many people have forgotten the woes of the past. They equate national ownership with lower prices, and assume that if, say, the railways were run from Whitehall, they would become cheaper, less crowded and more punctual overnight.

Yet history suggests a different outcome. The lesson of the post-war decades is that our utilities would be starved of funds, slow to innovate, subservient to trade unions and indifferent to customers.

But the hard-Left don’t care about any of this. They are interested only in following the precepts of their quasireligious cult. Which brings us to Haringey, where Momentum has taken over the Labour council and is set to control an £800 million budget.

Once again, this sounds depressingly familiar. In the early Eighties, the hard-Left seized control of councils across Britain, most notably Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council (GLC).

They put up rates, often in open defiance of the law. They refused to co-operate with the government’s civil defence preparations, despite the fact that this was one of the most dangerous points in the Cold War. They pandered to Sinn Fein and its IRA friends.

And they handed vast amounts of taxpayers’ money to their allies on the far-Left.

The GLC gave thousands to organisations such as the Lesbian Feminist Writers Conference Planning Group, Troops Out Of Ireland and even Babies Against The Bomb.

Today, people remember the Loony Left as a joke. But they were no joke at the time.

Baleful

As the Labour leader Neil Kinnock told his party conference in 1985, the Loony Left were ‘outdated, misplaced [and] irrelevant . . . You can’t play politics with people’s jobs and with people’s services’.

Unfortunately, the cultists in Haringey regard Mr Kinnock as a Right-wing traitor. Far from forgetting the Eighties, they remember them all too well. The problem is that they think the wrong side won.

Indeed, yesterday’s Sunday Times reported that Momentum plans to slash the pay of all Haringey employees over £60,000 by 40 per cent, and to bring in a punishing new council tax only for larger homes, which would be illegal.

In other words, they plan to proceed exactly as they did in the Eighties, with the same baleful results.

And so to the return of Marxism, the ideological cult that was supposedly buried almost three decades ago.

Contrary to what Ms Lali told the BBC, Marxism was given a perfectly good ‘chance’. The Soviet Union lasted for almost 75 years, while there were once Marxist regimes everywhere from Albania and Angola to Vietnam and Yugoslavia.

Hysterical

The story was almost always the same. Democracy and free speech were stifled; property was confiscated; millions were executed; millions more were sent to prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals.

Marxism’s renaissance, then, could hardly be a more damning indictment of our historical short-sightedness. Indeed, one poll last week found that many 18 to 24- year- olds see ‘ big business’ as a far bigger threat than Communism.

How could this happen? Yes, young people find it hard to get on to the housing ladder — and, yes, as they never tire of telling us, they have to pay towards their university education.

But the Left’s claim that capitalism has ‘failed’ is hysterical nonsense. Today’s youngsters live longer and healthier lives than ever. They are better fed, better housed, travel more and enjoy cultural opportunities their grandparents could barely have imagined.

The truth is that too many people, especially in our universities, are afraid to tell them that no generation can have it all. Politicians, too, often pander to young people, instead of having the guts to stand up for what they really believe.

Yet there are only two ways to beat the hard-Left.

One is to remind people, again and again, of the horrors that they inflicted on millions.

But talking about history can only get you so far. To beat the extremists, the forces of sanity — not just the Tories, but those decent Labour MPs who abhor Mr Corbyn and his works — need to offer a compelling vision of their own. So far, they have utterly failed. They have allowed Britain’s youngsters to be seduced by the apostles of envy, hatred and intolerance.

Our young people deserve better. Our country deserves better. And it is high time somebody carried the fight to the far- Left, before it is too late.