Editorial Comment:
Donald Trump is right to warn Britons of the harm Jeremy Corbyn could do in office and, as Nigel Farage weighs up his own future, the Brexit Party has got to confront the dangers of splitting the Leave vote and putting Labour in power. At his campaign launch yesterday, Mr Corbyn waged divisive class war while, in an interview with Emma Barnett, Lloyd Russell-moyle MP laid out an eccentric economic rationale. He said: “I don’t think that anyone in this country should be a billionaire.”
Ms Barnett pointed out that it is the billionaires who would finance Labour’s gargantuan spending pledges: “The highest one per cent of income tax payers accounts for 27 per cent of all income tax.”
But no matter, because the hard-left appears to believe that there is a fixed sum of money in the world and that it is a few people having a lot that prevents anyone else from having more. If the state expropriated that cash from the prosperous, Mr Russell-moyle seemed to suggest, “everyone” can be “very wealthy”. This is embarrassingly bad economics – but Mr Corbyn has embraced an “eat the rich” message not only because he believes in it, but because he wants to deflect from Brexit.
There is a feeling that this election is about taking on the establishment, which is usually Mr Corbyn’s strong suit, except that by embracing the Remain camp and a second referendum, he has suddenly become part of that establishment. Labour thus is trying to pivot back to the Robin Hood themes of yesteryear: steal from the rich to pay for the welfare poor. This is a formula that worked in 2017, partly because the Tories did not bother to answer it.
This year, however, the Tories have a leader of sufficient intellectual heft to point out the terrible flaws in the Left’s logic. Boris Johnson defended capitalism even during the financial crisis and has signalled that he is willing to do so again, couched in the argument that it is only by growing the economy and supporting aspiration that Britain can afford to invest in public services. Mr Farage, himself a former City trader, must agree.
The economy has to be dynamic and encourage risk-taking in order that individuals can be selfgoverning and charitable. Mr Corbyn’s vision of a society founded on theft of private property is not only idiotic, it is damaging to the moral fibre of state. If one wants a sense of what happens when a radical movement confiscates wealth, look to Venezuela – where business has died and the people starve. But the communists, of course, live rather well.