Nasty, unapologetic and stuck in the past

TO his fervent supporters Jeremy Corbyn is a man of unshakeable principle and integrity, with an exciting new vision of how to tackle 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 his stale breath of state socialism.

Nor can they respect the honesty of a politician who offers ever more extravagant electoral bribes, knowing he can’t honour them. 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.

Yet, 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 at all, once he’s unleashed the unions and imposed the dead hand of socialist planning from Whitehall?

As for Brexit, he merely fudged, making clear only that he wants mass migration to go on. 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 antiSemitic persecution at the conference.

Nor did he say sorry for his Momentum friends’ vile threats to female Labour moderates or the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, who had to be protected by a bodyguard.

He even blamed the Mail for fuelling trolls by reporting his anti-Western extremism and 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 Corbyn-led government – with no hope of a job and the bank of mum and dad sucked dry?