The Mail on Sunday

Why I, a Jewish Labour donor, despise Corbyn and his STURM ABTEILUNG*

* that is the SA, the Nazis’ stormtroop­ers

- By MICHAEL FOSTER Michael Foster is a Labour Party donor and a former parliament­ary candidate.

SATURDAY of last week in my home town of Camborne, the Corbyn Circus rolled into town. A crowd of 2,000 disciples came from all over Cornwall to cheer and clap and worship. One after another, Momentum speakers praised ‘Jeremy’ and spoke of the hope he gave them, the socialism he would bring to Britain.

Then the mood got much darker, with each speaker declaiming their personal persecutio­n by unnamed sources and to round it off, all but one named me as the villain who via the courts had tried to rob them of their right to have Jeremy Corbyn as the Leader of the Labour Party.

From where I stood in that evangelica­l crowd, I saw what we have all witnessed across Britain for a year.

A brand of politics alien to this country, defined and delivered by a divisive, aggressive holierthan-thou cadre of hard-Left socialists with no real policies to speak of, no defined social and economic objectives, just a call for the committed to take this journey with them down the Yellow Brick Road.

In the midst of this, something is rotten. You are either with them, or you are labelled as being against them and so excluded, briefed against, often threatened and intimidate­d.

If you are like me, a Jewish donor to Labour, you are smeared as a Blairite conspirato­r, plotting to falsely use the accusation of anti-Semitism to damage the Left.

It matters not whether you are Angela Eagle with a brick through a window, Stella Creasy with a mob outside her constituen­cy office, or Labour general secretary Iain McNicol with a letter threatenin­g court action unless he secured victory for Corbyn at an NEC vote.

Corbyn and his leadership team have no respect for others and worse, no respect for the rule of law.

THEY clearly have no moral compass, and in Corbyn they have a leader who wants to abolish the House of Lords yet is happy to confer and defend the granting of a peerage on Shami Chakrabart­i, whose detailed report into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was anything but independen­t.

We are asked to accept wave after wave of inappropri­ate, democratic­ally damaging and wrongful actions by the Corbynista­s as the new way by which politics will be conducted.

It is why I, as a lifelong Labour supporter, funder and former parliament­ary candidate, last month took Jeremy Corbyn to court to have the law decide whether the leader of the party could self-nominate for leader.

To me, respect for the rule of law is fundamenta­l to a democracy. Once political parties believe they are above the law it ends with all opposition silenced, whether it is my grandparen­ts in Dachau, or the Left in Erdogan’s Turkey rounded up and held uncharged in prison.

The courts decided that the MENACING: SA soldiers attacked political opponents of the Nazis rules as they stand allowed it. This decision advantaged Corbyn and his Sturm Abteilung (stormtroop­ers), but on Friday afternoon the Appeal Court handed down a big decision for British democracy.

It disallowed the attempt by arriviste followers of Corbyn to flood the Labour electoral college. This caused the mask of reasonable­ness of the Corbynista leadership to slip even further.

Suddenly the most holy of holies, the NEC, was labelled a shoddy organisati­on capable of using a ‘grubby little device’. Cross this lot and you are straight into the firing line.

Corbyn no longer has a clear path in his bid to destroy the Labour Party as we have known it in Government and in Opposition for the past 70 years.

Rather than start a party of the Left, he wishes to steal for the Left the respectabl­e cloak of the Labour Party brand.

For these schoolboy, idealistic revolution­aries, perpetual opposition is the weak and acceptable substitute for perpetual revolution. Let these people win Corbyn this election and Labour as a political force in this country will be heading for terminal decline.

The Labour Party secretaria­t – knowing that Corbyn spells disaster for an effective and

Cross this lot and you are straight into the firing linee

legitimate Opposition in Britain – have taken a stance against the bullying by men such as Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and Unite leader Len McCluskey.

They were rewarded for their bravery by a victory secured with the backing of the High Court. We must reward that by backing Owen Smith against Corbyn and end the civil war bought to Labour’s door by the bullies and arm-twisters of the hard-Left.

Smith now has a real chance of winning this contest. He is supported by the vast majority of his parliament­ary colleagues.

The Corbynista­s know Smith will win the union affiliate vote because what matters to working union members (ie, not union leaders) is economic competence and no one has ever heard Corbyn speak about the economy in terms of output and productivi­ty.

Corbyn, as with many economical­ly illiterate people of the extreme Left, looks at the economy only as a means to gather revenue to redistribu­te, not as a way to rid us of poverty, to grow wages and increase employment.

Smith will most likely win the £25 sign-up vote too; as many right-minded middle class and working class people, are tired of the Corbyn rhetoric that has bought almost nothing in the past ten months for the people Labour is meant to serve.

They have realised that effec- tive opposition to a Conservati­ve Government’s austerity programme will never be made to work by the divisive and blinkered extremes of a Corbynled cadre of second-rate minds.

Those who do not share their view of the world are dismissed as neo-liberals or worse as ‘Blairite’ elitists hell-bent on protecting capitalism’s vested interest.

If MPs declare their opposition to Corbyn, bully boy McCluskey threatens to target them with deselectio­n.

OPPOSE them as a Jewish donor and the riposte from Seumas Mi l n e , Co r b y n ’s mouthpiece, is that you are part of a Blairite, Right-wing ‘conspiracy’ (the ancient racist rhetoric is that Jews don’t act alone, the malevolent Jew always conspires) to destabilis­e the democratic­ally and legitimate­ly elected leader.

The Corbynista dream of government is our nightmare.

Britain is not a land of extreme politics. From the Reform Acts of 1832, 1868 and 1884 and even the Attlee Government of 1945, Britain’s people have always rejected extremism.

It is why sensible Labour members will vote now for a strong opposition, and for Smith in order to preserve constituti­onal democracy i n this country and consign to a footnote in history the socialist revolution led by the good burghers of Islington, The Guardian and other extreme political recidivist­s.

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