It’s not just national security, Corbyn’s Labour also poses a grave threat to national prosperity

HE warning against Jeremy Corbyn which The Mail on Sunday publishes today is powerful and shocking. Sir Richard Dearlove was f or five years in charge of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and was also stationed behind the Iron Curtain in the deep-frozen years of the Cold War. He has seen Left-wing tyranny, with its everpresent secret police, censorship and repression, at first hand. He knows what it really means.

He cannot believe that a man who sympathised with such a tyranny in those times could conceivably be a serious candidate for high office now. Warnings such as this, from people of such seniority and experience, are rare. Anyone with any understanding of the world should take heed. A free society will not long remain free if it pays so little attention to its safety as to put Mr Corbyn and his friends in the seats of power.

But there is another equally frightening danger that would face this country if Mr Corbyn and his colleagues come to power. As well as a threat to national security, Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party poses a major threat to national prosperity.

The red-tinged version of socialist economics embraced by Mr Corbyn and his comrade, John McDonnell, has been thrown together by a party which plainly suspects it cannot win. Almost every interest group beloved by the Left is offered a big fat parcel of money or a hugely costly gift.

We had already been told about the universal free broadband. But there are so many more baited hooks alongside it, from 100,000 new council houses a year to a million new jobs in a ‘green industrial revolution’ and an ‘investment blitz’ supposedly restoring the manufacturing industry lost in the 1980s.

Schools are to get a new ‘arts pupil premium’ and more free meals. Over-65s are promised free personal care as part of a social care package costed at £10.8 billion, public sector workers are pledged £ 5 billion in pay, town halls are told to expect £6 billion, and the NHS almost £7 billion.

The vote- grubbing pledge to abolish student tuition fees, combined with new maintenance grants, comes in at £13.6 billion. The Educational Maintenance Allowance is to return in a ‘skills and lifelong learning’ parcel costing almost £5 billion.

The fanciful billions keep on rolling by like waves crashing on the seashore, one after the other.

But where are these billions – so easy to speak about, so hard to find – to come from? Obviously there will be stinging taxes aimed at high-earners, because (unlike the truly rich) they cannot easily escape the taxman.

Labour actively enjoys penalising such people rather than doing it because such taxation is especially sensible or fair. Heavy taxes on financial transactions are likely to damage the financial sector quite badly, and so they will not bring in the expected £14 billion for long, if they bring it in at all.

The same spiteful, futile impulse is demonstrated in the scheme to force the parents of children at private schools to pay VAT on top of the thumping fees they already fork out. This will simply drive the remaining middle-class parents out of the private sector, and put extra pressure on a state school system which is in many places already overstretched.

Meanwhile, the super-rich and the overseas oligarchs will fork out the extra 20 per cent without a murmur.

The claims that they will raise an extra £ 6.2 billion from tackling illegal tax evasion and the wholly different problem of legal tax avoidance may turn out to be very ambitious, like the claim that they can raise more than £8 billion by an ‘efficiency review’ of corporate tax relief sand other reforms.

And while they are squeezing the better- paid middle classes until the pips squeak, Labour’s schemes will undoubtedly hit their own supporters. Despite claims by Mr Corbyn that his tax changes will leave the great majority unaffected, higher taxes on business tend to carry on flowing down through the economy until everyone has to pay their share.

The extra £30 billion in corporate taxation will be efficiently passed on in higher prices and charges. And who does Mr Corbyn think will end up actually paying for the proposed £11 billion windfall levy on oil and gas firms to finance a ‘just transition fund’ to smooth the way to the green economy?

The size of these pledges is astonishing even compared with Labour’s own past promises.

They may well have been made because Labour are already afraid they are losing, rather than because they think they will win. Ministers compelled to put the Corbyn manifesto into practice will struggle to do so, and Labour’s more experienced politicians well know it.

And yet it is still highly unwise for voters to relax, or for Boris Johnson to imagine that Corbyn cannot win. It is still quite conceivable that a government could come to power pledged to fulfil this disastrous manifesto.

For disastrous is what it would be. The experience of generations over more than a century is that such programmes quickly run into grave economic trouble. Investment departs, enterprise is strangled, tax revenues fall, borrowing becomes more expensive, and the grim cycle of socialism followed by crisis repeats itself.

Even oil-rich nations such as Venezuela have been brought to their knees by Mr Corbyn’s friends.

The polls continue to show a comforting Tory lead, but they were similarly optimistic about Theresa May’s chances. There is a danger still that Labour’s rash, irresponsible promises might endanger Boris Johnson’s victory, if people are foolish enough to take them seriously.

For if they have not been carefully considered, they have been carefully aimed.

Many people will find aspects of them attractive. Nobody will ever object to more spending on the NHS, or schools. Renationalisation of the railways is popular with many who now suffer delays and overcrowding – and not infrequent incompetence – on the privatised services.

The return of British Railways may not actually be the solution, but it is still appealing to the traveller, clutching an overpriced ticket and standing, crammed into a dirty, overcrowded carriage as it judders to a halt, yet again, because of a signal failure or a broken rail.

Student tuition fees and the debts they bring are a frightening burden to many. And a general sentimental concern for those less well- off than ourselves seldom fails to find an answering chord in the British heart.

The ancient, unalterable truth is that these plans will not work, that a broken, overtaxed economy cannot build or run good hospitals, or sustain decent railways or roads or schools, or pay those who work in them.

The other truth is that tax is not just paid by those upon whom it is levied, but increases the price of everything, and reduces the willingness of people to work, when so much of their reward is snatched away from them.

The economic wreckage left after so many Labour governments ought to be warning enough, but new generations of voters simply do not remember the disasters of the past.

Boris Johnson and his team should not neglect this danger or assume that the issue of Brexit will win the contest for them.

A long stretch of time still lies between now and polling day. Many voters are only just beginning to turn their minds to the choice. There is plenty of arguing still to be done. Above all, there must be no complacency.