Labour’s plan is to dismantle capitalism
This election is a battle not only between Right and Left but right and wrong. Labour’s manifesto is frighteningly bad. It exposes a party that has unambiguously abandoned the New Labour pretence at centreground politics and embraced a form of hardcore Marxism that is even worse than the variety it espoused in the Eighties. Labour threatens to steal property, steal wealth, steal income and put as many people on to welfare as possible. If the sums do not seem to add up, that is because they are not meant to. Labour is run by extremists with a long view, men and women who are happy to provoke a crisis in capitalism to justify the introduction of yet more socialism. Labour’s nightmarish manifesto is a prologue to an even greater catastrophe.
The election of Labour would undo everything good done since 1979, when the British voted to reject powerful trade unions, bad services, high taxes and economic mismanagement. What Margaret Thatcher achieved through deregulation, tax-cutting and privatisation was not just a worldcompeting economy but a revolution in thinking. She told Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet reformer, that the hardest part of her job was “to change people’s attitudes”. Things we take for granted today had to be fought for: mass home ownership, a share-holding society, a vibrant financial sector, the pensions market and relatively low taxes, especially for the low paid. This is the precious inheritance that Labour’s manifesto sets out to dismantle.
Trade union legislation will be scrapped along with restrictions on organising; there will be a return to “sectoral collective bargaining”. Trains, Royal Mail, water and energy will be nationalised, involving not just theft and management by bureaucrats and unions, but also the ruination of pension funds. Social spending will go through the roof and things that absolutely do not need to be universally free will now be handed out to all, even to the richest – including free broadband and free tuition fees. Labour will finance this by borrowing, income tax rises on the middle-class, a raid on inheritance, tax on second homes, scrapping the Married Couple’s Allowance, raising corporation tax back up to 26 per cent and applying income tax rates to capital gains, among a myriad of other confiscatory policies.
Once Labour is finished squeezing businesses and the better-off – or at least until they have fled abroad – then it will claim that it must expand the state even further to make up the shortfall. This is the real goal. Jeremy Corbyn is not trying to exploit capitalism to meet his social goals, as Tony Blair did: he wants to destroy capitalism and replace it altogether. And he wants the process to be, in the words of John McDonnell, “irreversible”. This will destroy the achievements and dreams of millions.
Thankfully, there are plenty of positive reasons for voting Tory instead. The Conservative manifesto, out today, contains a triple tax lock, new investment in training and help for motorists in the form of “free” hospital parking and action on potholes. Not least, there is a pledge to honour the referendum and to introduce the Brexit Bill before Christmas.
Labour would essentially reverse Brexit, by negotiating a rotten deal and then holding a second referendum. Mr Corbyn says he would remain neutral in that campaign. On the most important issue of our time, he has no opinion. On everything else – and considering his association with extremists and terrorists and his refusal to support almost anything Britain has ever done to defend its citizens – voters must conclude that Mr Corbyn is a dangerous ideologue.
Jeremy Corbyn wants the process to be irreversible. This will destroy the dreams of millions