The fervent Corbyn chanters have never seen old Labour in power

There’s a good reason why the Tories keep hold of the over-sixties...they can still remember the Left at work

An infernal ear worm is lodged in my head. That tiresome chant “Ooh, Jeremy Corbyn” heard at Glastonbury to the tune of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army has been stuck there since last Saturday when I wandered into London in time to be swallowed up by “anti-austerity” marchers on route to Trafalgar Square.

What a bunch they were. I could just about empathise with the youngsters blowing their whistles, banging their drums and shouting “Tories Out!” since as a student I joined similar demonstrations. In those days, mind you, our anger was directed against the Labour government because it represented “The System” to which we were opposed for reasons that seemed obvious at the time but which have become hazier with age, tax and family responsibility.

Here, for me, it was the older protesters who stood out – the flinty faced, superannuated Trotskyites in their fifties or sixties but still wearing jeans and denim jackets festooned with badges declaring antipathy to everything from capitalism to badger culling.

Their hero is Mr Corbyn because he is of the tribe, an unreconstructed Marxist activist who has gathered around him a Praetorian Guard of groups such as the Socialist Workers and Communist parties whose banners were much in evidence on Saturday. On the fringes of British politics for so long, these veteran revolutionaries (I actually saw one wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt) can hardly believe that they are now within striking distance of power.

How has it come to this? Part of the problem is that the collective memory of the Left’s past failures is on the decline. A breakdown of the vote on June 8 shows that Labour comfortably beat the Conservatives in every age group up to 50. Among first-time voters the lead was 66 per cent to 22 per cent, hardly surprising since they are forever being told that their futures have been stolen from them by their elders.

More unexpected is that Labour had a 55 to 29 per cent lead among voters in their thirties.

The Tories won the most seats because they commanded such high levels of support from older voters, with a lead of 58 per cent to 27 per cent among sixtysomethings, and 69 per cent to 19 per cent among those aged 70 or older. These age groups did not vote Conservative in order to subject younger people to a lifetime of penury. They did so because they know the consequences of handing the country over to a Left-wing Labour government.

They remember only too well the calamitous final few years of the James Callaghan administration; when rubbish lay uncollected in the streets for weeks, half the country was on strike, annual inflation ran at more than 20 per cent and the International Monetary Fund had to bail the UK out. Once, the Tories merely had to refer to the Winter of Discontent for the electorate to know precisely what they were talking about and what had to be avoided. Tony Blair only won power because he disavowed Labour’s past. And remember: Callaghan and his Cabinet were nowhere near as extreme as Corbyn and his followers. The hard-left regard the Seventies Labour government with contempt and many cut their political teeth in the early Eighties attacking everything that it stood for.

We are not, then, witnessing a sepia-tinted revival of an oldfashioned, avuncular and patriotic socialist Labour Party in the Clement Attlee mould, wedded to union rights, nationalisation and high taxes. This is a revolutionary movement with scant regard for democracy and it needs to be treated as such.

The Labour moderates, who 12 months ago wanted to kick Mr Corbyn out but have now decided to keep their mouths shut after he did so well at the polls, had better decide soon what they intend to do about the hard Left’s grip or they will live to regret it. Ian Lavery, the party’s new chairman, made it clear at the weekend that the non-believers will be hounded out as the Left uses its newly acquired authority to bring about the mandatory re-selection of MPS that they have sought for the best part of 40 years.

The reason why 172 Labour MPS refused to support Mr Corbyn in a vote of confidence last year is that they regarded him and his Momentum activists as dangerous, and still do. Yet they have entered a Mephistophelean bargain with the Left that will destroy them. Since they cannot win a leadership election among the mainly Left-wing membership, they are going to have to break away and form a new party. True, the Labour moderates have seen off the hard-left in the past, notably during the purge of Militant Tendency in the Eighties, and doubtless think they can do it again. But they are deluding themselves.

The Conservatives also have a responsibility here. Instead of falling over each other to match Mr Corbyn’s promises, they need to make the case loud and clear for enterprise, low taxes, wealth creation and all the other policies that have made the country infinitely better-off compared with the late Seventies.

During the election campaign, Theresa May’s team relied almost entirely on the demonisation of the Labour leader while failing to promote the free-market creed that has proved the most powerful counterweight to the Left because it works and socialism doesn’t. Of course people don’t like austerity – always an ill-judged, hair-shirt word for describing a heavily indebted country trying to live within its means. But it appears that the economic arguments we had as a nation in the Eighties will have to be joined all over again.

Last time, the Right won – so conclusively, indeed, that the Blair government never reversed a single privatisation nor overturned one Thatcher-era trade union law, even if Gordon Brown did eventually go on a spending spree and over-inflated the public sector.

The reason the Left lost was because most voters back then still remembered the damage Labour had caused to the economy and to the fabric of the nation. Unfortunately, the younger generation inanely chanting “Ooh, Jeremy Corbyn” haven’t got the faintest clue what the consequences would be if he ever takes power.