Nick Timothy and Editorial Comment:
At one point in his lengthy speech to the Labour faithful in Brighton yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn said politics today was “like being stuck in a time-warp”. He can say that again. His speech was straight out of the Eighties’ Left-wing playbook. If anyone is rooted in the past, he is. The party that says it looks to the future in fact plans to renationalise public utilities, revive trade union power, impose new regulations on commerce, put up taxes, increase public spending to record levels, requisition private property and impose rent caps and price controls. The party of the future also wants to shut down Uber in London and tax new technology.
A more comprehensive package of measures guaranteed to bankrupt Britain would be hard to imagine. It is closed, inward-looking and protectionist. It is also an unsettlingly illiberal, paternalistic, threatening and aggressive creed promoted by bully-boy ideologues who brook no opposition, not even from within their own ranks.
Labour has started to revel in the “money tree” accusation levelled at them by the Conservatives; and the £1 billion deal with the DUP to prop up Mrs May’s minority administration has helped them turn the tables. But this is just a rhetorical device to hide the fact that this conference has been one spending promise after another, all to be paid for by taxing the wealthy and the corporations that already provide the lion’s share of the nation’s revenues. Labour delegates simply do not understand or care that their policies will leave the Treasury with less money to spend on the health, education and welfare programmes the party promises to expand.
Without irony, Mr Corbyn has purloined the Blairite slogan “For the many, not the few”, to give the impression to the centrist voters he still needs to win over that not much has changed and there is little to be frightened about. But there is. Labour would impoverish the country because, for the Left, equality always trumps prosperity.
They claim that when “true” socialism is embraced, the world will see its merits. As an example of this Mr Corbyn always used to cite Venezuela, now an economic shipwreck steered by his hero Hugo Chavez. This comparison was missing from his speech yesterday.
Furthermore, his “new politics” is nothing of the sort. Like opposition leaders down the ages, he wants to be all things to all people. Half-truths, dissembling, evasiveness and wilful omissions have always framed leaders’ speeches, and his was no different. His use of the tragedy at Grenfell Tower to burnish his class-warrior credentials was especially egregious. And while he denounced the abuse of individuals, he failed to specify either the anti-semitism currently seeping through the party or the tactics of his Momentum followers in seeking to undermine moderate MPS.
Most audacious of all was his claim to have appropriated the political centre ground. A Left-wing agitator who, until two years ago, was on the fringes of his own party – and whose MPS overwhelmingly wanted him out – claims to speak for the mainstream. He argued that the political axis was shifted by the 2008 financial crash and politics is now catching up with that near-death experience for capitalism. This is wishful thinking.
Mr Corbyn has not changed his views in 40 years of political campaigning, but he is no longer willing to remind us of them all – not least unilateral nuclear disarmament, which he favours even if his party doesn’t. He is also a long-standing opponent of the European Union, yet his party’s position on Brexit remains confused, as it tries to give the impression that Labour would fulfil the referendum result while effectively staying in the EU.
But no one can deny that there was an air of triumphalism in Brighton. It was summed up by Len Mccluskey, leader of the Unite trade union, who said: “To those merchants of doom, the whingers and the whiners, who say we didn’t win – I say we did win!” Well, they didn’t; and the Conservatives need to remind them of this reality. For all that Mr Corbyn laid claim to the mainstream, the Tories won more seats and votes than Labour in June. However, the momentum is with Mr Corbyn and he needs to be stopped.
When the Left last held sway in the early Eighties, they faced a Tory government led by a prime minister whose certainties were more than a match for their own. Now, as then, the Conservatives need to set the agenda, not follow it, and make the case unapologetically for enterprise, low taxes, wealth creation and all the other policies that have made the country infinitely better off over the past 40 years.
In one sense Mr Corbyn is right to say politics seems to be stuck in a time-warp: it has become necessary to make the arguments for freedom against socialism all over again. In Manchester next week, the Conservatives must show the same confidence in themselves and their values if they are to counter Mr Corbyn’s brazen claim to represent the mainstream.
Most audacious of all was his claim to have appropriated the political centre ground
It has become necessary to argue for freedom against socialism all over again