Leader is a great leap backwards for Labour

JEREMY corbyn’s ecstatic supporters brandished placards at Westminster yesterday proclaiming that their hero represented ‘a new kind of politics’.

Depressingly, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Labour’s new leader embodies a form of extreme Socialism so old that people seem to have forgotten how dangerous it can be.

It’s the hard-Left politics of envy and social division – involving punitive taxation of the middle classes, ruinous public spending, reckless borrowing, and kow-towing to trade union power.

the last time it truly infected the Labour party in the 1970s, this toxic political creed led to the near collapse of British industry, crippling waves of strikes in essential services and annual inflation of up to 27 per cent. It brought down the Labour government in 1979 and through the 1980s and most of the 90s made the party unelectable, ushering in 18 years of unbroken tory rule.

So the election of Mr corbyn is not so much a Great Leap Forward – to use the Socialist vernacular – as a Great Leap Backwards. Indeed, one senior Labour figure described Mr corbyn last week as ‘an early-80s trotskyist tribute act’.

Less than 24 hours after the election result, the party was in chaos. half the shadow cabinet resigned, saying they wouldn’t work with such a trenchant Leftwinger and even his new deputy leader tom Watson was publicly criticising Mr corbyn’s support for unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the EU.

Meanwhile the unions – knowing they now have Labour in the palm of their hand – are spoiling for a fight. Gathering for the annual tUc conference in Brighton yesterday, they threatened to wage war against the sensible reforms of trade Union law due to be put before Parliament today.

the belligerent rhetoric of Mark Serwotka, head of the Public and commercial Services Union was typical. he called on Mr corbyn to back a ‘mass vibrant movement’ of ‘strikes, demonstrations, local campaigns, occupations and everything else’, to ‘stop austerity in its tracks and topple this government’.

Mr corbyn is scheduled to address the conference tomorrow. he will almost certainly embrace the union barons rather than condemn them, as any responsible person should.

here in Scotland, Mr corbyn’s coronation will do little to rehabilitate the party in voters’ eyes. and the SNP? as alex Massie argues brilliantly elsewhere on this page, they might slyly enjoy an unelectable Labour party as a tory majority in Westminster feeds their narrative that Scotland and England are so different as to be incompatible.

But the tories should not be too triumphalist about Labour’s travails. Maverick Mr corbyn’s landslide victory has also demonstrated how thoroughly disillusioned people – especially the young – have become about Britain’s complacent and self-serving political class, across all the major parties.

the Government must now prove it is working in the interests of the whole country by rebalancing the economy, cutting our terrifying national debt, reducing the tax burden on hard-working families and creating efficient, affordable public services. the tories may have at least ten more years of majority government. With vision and energy, they can – and must – use that time to build a fairer, freer, more affluent society.