They cheered Corbyn like kamikaze pilots before taking off to oblivion
Jeremy Corbyn yesterday proclaimed to the Labour Conference that his election as leader was ‘nothing short of a political earthquake’.
And behold, there in the Brighton hall for all to see except his slavishly applauding supporters, were its consequences: the ruins of all prospect of his party gaining power on his watch.
Labour’s new standardbearer committed himself to the cause of the poor and dispossessed, the victims of ‘injustice and dreadful Tory austerity’, trades unionists and Syrian refugees, the homeless and the persecuted.
He shackled his leadership to the fortunes of the world’s losers, which is a fine thing for an Islington socialist to do. Unfortunately, though, there are not remotely enough of them to take him to Downing Street.
His hesitant, repetitive oration sounded for some time more like a wedding speech, because he devoted so many words to thanking his political ushers, bridesmaids, in-laws and suchlike.
Speculators
He offered more sentiment, less substance than a Pam Ayres poem, and left no Leftwing cliché of the past halfcentury unturned.
He praised ed miliband, kindness, caring, humanity, wind farms, friendship, listening to others, the last beardie Labour leader Keir Hardie, honesty, democracy and the United Nations. He denounced profit, Tory government ‘ by the few, paid for by the few’, Saudi-Arabian beheadings, oppressive regimes, speculators, and over-paid bosses.
The apparent ecstasy of Corbyn’s audience, many of whom rose repeatedly to offer standing ovations, suggested that every Blairite in the party had been subjected to an exclusion order for the afternoon, to pack the place with true believers in St Jeremy the Baptist.
The massive security precautions accorded to party conferences seem redundant in Brighton this week: most of the people who threaten Britain’s established order have been inside the hall, cheering their hero.
The whole affair has resembled a convention of kamikaze pilots, celebrating wildly before a last take-off to oblivion.
Tory ministers watching yesterday’s performance must have been hugging themselves with glee. Surely middle england, even on an off- day, could never vote for Corbyn’s moth- eaten vision, borrowed from the Labour Party of 1945.
If he did not follow Aneurin Bevan in describing Tories as ‘lower than vermin’, this was only because he preferred his own characterisation of them as heartless brutes.
Corbyn’s big selling point is that he is a decent, honest bloke who cares about people, as Tory toffs do not. yet never for a moment should we forget that he and his acolytes are bent on a purge of moderates and dissenters inside their own party, which is likely to keep the guillotines busy for years.
His parade of honesty is designed to conceal the reality that much of what he states as fact is falsehood; that if his ‘caring’ economic policies were ever implemented, they would spell ruin for thousands of businesses, doom for enterprise and profit, and cripple the nation’s taxpayers.
It is a fantasy, of course, to pretend his vision could be funded by taxing the rich and making Google pay its dues.
It has been a hallmark of the Left for decades to preach compassion, while instead presiding over dependency, waste and economic failure. Corbyn yesterday repeatedly used the words ‘public investment’, a phrase coined by Gordon Brown to mask Treasury profligacy with taxpayers’ money.
The new leader’s economic vision has been road-tested in two societies for which he has professed admiration, Cuba and Venezuela.
It seems doubtful that the condition of either’s people would excite much envy in Pinner or Penzance. yet Corbyn touched one nerve that Tories would be wise to notice — when he spoke of inequality.
Globalisation, he said bitterly, is used to justify paying rockbottom wages to workers, and sky-high rewards to bosses. He is right — a host of British people who support honest capitalism recoil from the insatiable greed of company bosses and bankers, paying themselves rewards beyond anything that as mere employees they could be said to earn.
It is very hard for governments to check excessive pay at the top, except by denying state honours to the fattest cats. But if the trend to excess continues, we should not underrate the damage it will inflict on faith in social justice among the British people.
Labour has just recruited as an adviser Thomas Piketty, a French economist who last year published a book denouncing inequality and excessive pay.
much of Piketty’s thesis, especially his remedy of imposing confiscatory tax rates on six-figure incomes, seems absurd. But his book has sold hugely worldwide, because the grievance he identifies is widely felt.
Shameless
If the consequence of the Labour Party’s collapse, and of a long spell of Tory government, is to sustain a shameless smash- and- grab raid by those at the top, the backlash among voters could just conceivably propel a Leftwing alliance into power in 2020. Only foolish people talk with absolute confidence about the prospect of a decade and more of Tory rule.
The British people are entitled to a modest celebration, about the fruits of their own display of good sense at last may’s election. A year ago, it seemed at least possible that Labour and the Scottish Nationalists might today be governing us.
yet no one, least of all the Conservatives, should suppose the future is secure. Britain still faces huge structural difficulties, many though not all invented by Labour governments since 1945.
moreover, our present relative economic success is precarious, and founded largely on consumer debt rather than productive achievement.
The message of this week’s conference is that the Opposition’s descent into lunacy provides David Cameron with opportunities unmatched in British politics since 1945 to reverse the excesses of the welfare state, and the union tyranny that exercises a stranglehold on public services.
Instability
There should at last be a prospect of challenging Tube drivers who hold London’s transport system to ransom. Of facing down teachers’ unions that have blighted progress towards raising standards in education. Of confronting the diehards who refuse to recognise that the NHS cannot much longer survive in its present form, free to allcomers, as it is unaffordable.
The Tories must also reinforce our defences at a time of terrifying global instability, rather than just pretending to do so.
One more point to notice in Corbyn’s speech: he said nothing to praise hard work or commerce. Like the Scottish Nationalists, he believes the political debate is solely about how money is spent by the state, not about how it is earned by its citizens and companies.
On those grounds alone, he should be rejected by the electorate as a future prime minister. The foremost challenge for Britain is how we shall earn our living, and how best government can strengthen the nation and its workforce to achieve this.
The window of opportunity for rolling back the socialist tide is small. In some guise, within a few years a credible opposition will rise again, and cohere against the Tories.
If David Cameron and his colleagues fail to seize the moment, if they remain content merely to savour the security of power, basking in the spectacle of their foes cavorting with the fairies, then neither history nor the British people should forgive them.