Mark Wallace:
It was a monumental error to think a painful but brief dose of Corbynism could somehow eradicate it
It is never wise to describe your opponent as “unelectable”. Given the right circumstances, and a sufficiently disastrous rival, all sorts of unsavoury characters are all too electable. Look at Jeremy Corbyn: lifelong useful idiot for a devilish pick ’n’ mix of terrorists and tyrants; shorttempered messiah of limited note; the magnet attracting open anti-semites back to mainstream British politics. If anyone were unelectable, it should be a Labour leader who wins praise from the former leader of the British National Party and an ex-grand Wizard of the KKK.
His opponents in the Labour leadership race and in the 2017 general election certainly thought so. They believed the charge was self-fulfilling. It didn’t work; indeed, it backfired by helping to reassure voters who had doubts about the man’s competence that it was safe to vote Labour as a riskfree endorsement of the vague values which form his halo.
Four in 10 voters cast their ballot for Corbyn to be Prime Minister. We haven’t heard the end of it since: the man they said was unelectable, on the brink of entering Downing Street. His fans remain cock-a-hoop, while his internal critics – rarities like Frank Field aside – are utterly cowed. Those commentators on the Left who once voiced mild concern about him now anoint his image and brook no dissent, either seeking advancement or fearing defenestration.
Who is to blame? The Labour Party, to a degree, which has catastrophically failed in its civic and national responsibility to maintain at least a semblance of reason and decency in the front line of British politics. Primarily, though, the fault belongs to the Conservatives.
If the state’s first and most fundamental duty is to defend its citizens from foes, the Conservative Party’s is to defend the nation from socialism. Yes, it has a positive agenda it would like to pursue, albeit one that varies somewhat with time, leader and circumstance: reforming and slimming the state; developing the economy and liberating the individual; forging a better nation to pass on to the next generation; defending institutions and values. These are all worthwhile and desirable goals, but they are all second-order priorities when compared with the eternal task of preventing the harm that would be done by socialism.
A Tory government that simply kept the ship steady would be doing a useful job, just as a prison protects the innocent by keeping criminals off the streets even before it begins rehabilitating them. A positive Conservative agenda might aid in staving off the Left, or it might be a beneficial result of successfully doing so, but it must never be prioritised above the essential mission.
There is another school of thought in some Tory circles, however. Perhaps, its proponents reason, a cautionary dose of Corbynism would be a tonic, reminding the nation of the problems with the Left and why the Right’s solutions are preferable. After all, the Seventies are too long ago and Venezuela is too far away to be convincing proof of the harm Corbyn and Mcdonnell’s dogma would do. The Winter of Discontent made Thatcher’s revolution possible, these Tory Leninists argue. Therefore we need a short, sharp shock – a painful but brief exposure to the contagion in order to inoculate against it.
This is a dangerous miscalculation. Vaccination requires a weakened form of the disease – something Militant unwisely handed to Neil Kinnock in the Eighties by making Liverpool City Council a grim case study of their misrule, but which today’s Corbynites have cannily refused to provide.
Exposing the nation to hardleft government would neither be localised, temporary, nor easily recoverable. It would kill jobs, ruin lives, generate vastly more debt, weaken our defences in the face of a rampaging Kremlin and fatally undermine institutions like the free press and liberty before the law. Such damage would take decades to overcome, even after Corbyn or his successors had been unseated – a task made harder by the inevitable legal and institutional attacks mounted against the opposition. That would not be a valuable lesson, it would be a costly ordeal, a hazing weighed in human misery, and no Conservative could responsibly advocate it.
Consider the harm already incurred by the Tories’ failure to properly defeat Corbynism last year. What ought to have been a oncein-a-generation error has become a challenge that will likely take a full generation to overcome. Allowing the “absolute boy” to come so close to power – not through his own genius, but by the ineptitude of the Conservative campaign and manifesto – has encouraged his followers to double down rather than reconsider. The thugs of “gentler, kinder politics” believe their behaviour has been validated. Apologists are able to dismiss concerns about racism and obscene associations with extremists on the grounds that voters do not seem to care. Instead of choosing between indecency and electoral success, Corbynites have been allowed to believe that the two are interlinked.
They have taken the opportunity to entrench their position, purging and hijacking the Labour machine, and have now commenced deselection campaigns against MPS deemed guilty of ideological impurity. Any Tory who thinks Corbyn would be easily removed from Downing Street after a brief tenure would do well to study the experience of Labour’s institutions. The hard Left are past masters at gripping organisations from within, once invited across the threshold.
Corbynism has been given a chance to spread, and its advocates are not wasting the opportunity. Labour continues to lead in the polls, even as its leader’s past is exposed in ever more unpleasant detail. Things that would previously have been career-ending for a would-be prime minister have become tolerated and even celebrated.
The Conservative Party let this happen, and it has a responsibility to right that wrong sooner rather than later. It must stop thinking of 2017 as a regrettable blip that can be easily corrected next time with no harm done. Defeating Corbyn himself might once have been enough, but his creed is now embedded. We must steel ourselves for a sustained battle to defeat it in detail, wherever it is to be found. Muddling along, tolerating mediocrity and settling for getting by is not sufficient. Arguably, it is what caused this mess in the first place.
Allowing him to come so close to power has encouraged his followers to double down rather than reconsider