Nothing will ever dim the Left’s faith in Saint Jeremy
They didn’t seem bothered to learn that he’d invited members of the IRA to tea in Parliament, mere weeks after the Brighton bombing. They didn’t seem bothered to learn that he’d referred to Hamas as “friends”, or that he’d accepted £20,000 to appear on Iranian state TV. And now they don’t seem bothered to learn that, before becoming Labour leader, he was a member of a private Facebook group full of people posting anti-semitic messages.
You’ve got to wonder: what would it take for the Left to accept that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t quite the saint they think he is?
Frankly, it’s hard to imagine...
April 2018
News breaks that, far from the lifelong vegetarian he professes to be, Jeremy Corbyn is secretly the CEO of Mcdonald’s.
“This only makes me respect Jeremy even more,” writes Owen Jones, in a column for the Guardian. “He’s dedicated his life to producing decent, nutritious, affordable food, while creating millions of secure, wellpaid jobs for the working class – and it destroys once and for all the Rightwing smear that he knows nothing about business. Also, it’s a longestablished fact that all vegetarians are Tory. Yesterday I ate two dachshunds and next door’s hamster.”
May 2018
Jeremy Corbyn is overheard telling aides that he actually can’t stand “this modern rap nonsense, or jungle, or whatever they call it”, because “it’s just some bloke talking over a drumbeat. Anyone could do that. Whatever happened to real music?”
“Once again, Jeremy Corbyn shows that he’s the true voice of the young,” declares an editorial on the popular Leftwing news site The Skwawkbox. “Grime may have been Margaret Thatcher’s music of choice, but to anyone under the age of 30, it sounds tired, dated, and shamelessly neoliberal. Hardly surprising, given that Stormzy is the privileged, privately educated son of Lord Stormzy – the billionaire Israeli Old Etonian banker, oil executive, newspaper proprietor, arms dealer and Tory donor.”
June 2018
During an exclusive interview on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, Tony Blair removes his mask to reveal that he is, and has always been, Jeremy Corbyn in disguise.
“I have never felt more proud of Jeremy,” says Left-wing Labour MP Laura Pidcock. “To think that, all this time, he’s been the Labour Party’s most successful ever leader, the mastermind behind the glorious expansion of PFI and the fearless military hero who led us into the triumphant Iraq war. And how typically modest of him that he never let on.”
In last week’s column I hailed the awe-inspiring reproductive feats of Sir Mick Jagger: possibly the first man in history to have a child who is younger than his great-granddaughter.
A reader, however, has written to tell me that Sir Mick’s behaviour is irresponsible. The planet, she argues, is overcrowded enough. In 1960, the global population was three billion – but by 2011 it had rocketed to seven billion. High time, therefore, that Sir Mick – and the rest of us – started having fewer children.
On the face of it, a fair point. Interestingly, however, we already are having fewer children. In fact, we’ve been having fewer for decades – in both the developed and developing worlds. Take Bangladesh. In 1975, the average mother there would have six children. Today it’s two. In the world as a whole, over the past 50 years the fertility rate has halved.
Yet the population has kept on rising. One reason for this is that people are living so much longer. Today – thanks to growing prosperity and advances in medical science – there are vast and unprecedented numbers of people living into their sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. And those numbers are only likely to go on growing, and growing.
This is of course wonderful news: we’re living longer and more prosperous lives. On the other hand, it raises difficult questions for the future. For example, how will society fund all these additional pensions, and pensioners’ benefits, and pensioners’ health and social care? As a proportion of our population, the elderly are increasing. According to official projections, in 50 years’ time more than a quarter of the British public will be over the age of 65. Fifty years ago, it was 12 per cent.
So who will pay? It looks as though we’ll have two options. Either we’ll need to raise taxes to painful levels – or we’ll need to increase the number of tax-payers. Which means that instead of having fewer children, we should surely be having more.
Sir Mick Jagger, therefore, is to be congratulated. He’s doing all he can to preserve our standard of living.
I don’t know how many more children he plans to have, but a couple of million wouldn’t go amiss.
We live next to a hill. Last Saturday, it was covered in snow. The next day, it was covered in something else. Plastic.
Broken plastic. Specifically, broken bits of sledges, smashed or crashed. Some a lurid red, some a lurid blue. Walking down the hill, now that all the snow had melted, we counted them. In total, there were nine. The remnants of nine plastic sledges, strewn across the grass, the mud, the pavement. Just left there. Dumped. For all eternity, unless some conscientious passerby cared to collect up the debris. Evidently, the owners weren’t going to.
Supposedly we’re planning a war on plastics. We talk about banning plastic straws and plastic bags. If we can’t be bothered to clear up after ourselves, is it time to talk about banning plastic sledges, too?