Editorial Comment:
The thought of Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister ought to terrify mainstream Britain. Under Mr Corbyn’s leadership, any vestige of New Labour centrism is now gone: the party is a vehicle for the socialist transformation of society, with class and culture war actively pursued by the state. Labour aspires to wage a tax war on gifts, inheritance, capital gains, profits and wages. To nationalise utilities, abolish private schools and make comprehensives the only kind of state education.
The Tories calculate that Mr Corbyn’s plans amount to extra spending worth £1.2trillion over five years: a rate of growth three times faster than even under Gordon Brown. Any citizen worried about the supposed economic costs of Brexit (the vast majority of them exaggerated) needs to weigh up the catastrophic price tag of any vote that leads to a Left-wing majority in Parliament and, hence, a Corbyn-led government.
They also need to consider the serious ethical dimension to this election – the test of what our country really stands for. In a powerful interview with this newspaper, Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident who went on to become Israel’s deputy prime minister, says that Mr Corbyn’s criticism of Israel is reminiscent of the anti-Semitic rhetoric deployed in Stalin’s USSR. Mr Corbyn has also described Hamas, a body which wants to abolish Israel and exterminate Jews, as “friends” (in order to be “inclusive”, he explained). He has long had associations with extremist groups.
Not a day goes by without multiple stories breaking that expose just how rotten the Labour Party has become under Mr Corbyn’s stewardship: accusations of candidates using anti-Semitic language or downplaying anti-Semitism, or that a candidate might celebrate the deaths of politicians such as Tony Blair and Benjamin Netanyahu.
A handful of Labour stalwarts, to their credit, realise that Labour is now morally beyond the pale and are willing to say so. Ian Austin, the retiring MP for Dudley North, is supporting Boris Johnson. Last week he claimed that Mr Corbyn “always seems to back Britain’s enemies”. The voters can judge for themselves whether or not this is true, but they might bear in mind Mr Corbyn’s paid appearances on Iranian TV or his initial doubts about Russia’s involvement in the Skripol poisonings. He once said that Britain has not fought a just war since the Second World War. In 1982, he described the Falklands conflict as a “Tory plot”.
In 2017, many people probably voted for Mr Corbyn on the assumption that he couldn’t actually win. This year, not only can they not risk a vote for Labour but the electoral calculus suggests that a vote for anything other than the Conservative Party – including, in all but totally unwinnable seats, for the Brexit Party – puts Labour closer to power at the head of a Left-wing coalition in the Commons. Smaller parliamentary parties can always be bought off with promises of referendums on Europe and Scotland.
This would be not just an economic and political catastrophe for Britain but a moral outrage. Mr Corbyn must not be PM. Only Mr Johnson has a serious chance to stop him.
‘Labour aspires to wage a tax war on gifts, inheritance, capital gains, profits and wages’