Corbyn’s not a Trotskyite – he’s much worse
The Labour leader’s utter disregard for the basic duties of the state is the mark of a deluded fantasist
Stop! Wait! Listen! Jeremy Corbyn has a new plan and you’re going to love it. Here’s the idea: scrap government spending on borders and spies and guns. Abolish expensive, anachronistic, neo-imperialist tat like bombs, passports and armies. And instead, invest in a national imagination. As John Lennon said, it’s easy if you try.
After all, Mr Corbyn is still in charge of the Labour Party. Removing him, it turns out, is hard to do. He’s full of vintage Seventies economic policy: bailouts, nationalisation and jobdestroying minimum wage rises. But it’s not these schemes that will sink Labour at the next election. Far more dangerous to its electoral prospects is Mr Corbyn’s half-heartedness about all of the basic duties of the state: national defence, border control and fighting for Britain’s interests abroad.
In less than a week since his reelection as party leader, Mr Corbyn and his followers have revived the doubts that most bother what used to be Labour’s natural electoral base – the poor, patriotic working class in the north of England and Scotland.
On the very first day of his party conference, Mr Corbyn criticised MI6’s recruitment of more spies to fight terrorism and suggested that it is unnecessary for Britain to have a “huge, land-based defence force”. His activist group, Momentum, managed to mock soldiers by selling merchandise that joked about prosthetic limbs for those wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then his spin doctors made clear that Labour doesn’t care about immigration levels, after all. A hat-trick, of sorts.
To be fair, Mr Corbyn did bring up patriotism once, when he said that companies and individuals who use legal tax avoidance measures are “unpatriotic”. The fact that many voters agree with him will not save Labour from electoral oblivion.
The party’s problem is that every time Mr Corbyn has an opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to a fundamental aspect of British defence or security, he fluffs it. The charge sheet is long. Back in the autumn of 2015, he declared that he would never press the nuclear button under any circumstances. Shortly after that, he suggested that police shouldn’t ever use lethal force, even when lives are at stake. This summer, asked if he would go to war to defend a Nato ally who had been attacked, he prevaricated.
Then there’s Labour’s Defence Review. Remember that? It was set up with great fanfare in January as a way for Labour to resolve the bitter dispute between its anti-nuclear unilateralists, like Mr Corbyn, and the pro-nuclear moderates. Its heavily unilateralist leadership, including then-shadow defence secretary Emily Thornberry and Ken “Hitler-was-a-Zionist” Livingstone, promised to report their conclusions at this year’s party conference.
That’s not quite how it turned out. What we actually saw at conference was a shambles worthy of a students’ union. Minutes before Clive Lewis, the current shadow defence secretary, was due to speak, the speech loaded up for him on the conference autocue was slyly altered. Seamus Milne, Mr Corbyn’s left-hand man, had watered down the wording of Mr Lewis’s promise that he would not revisit Labour’s current policy in support of renewing the Trident nuclear missile system. Instead, in his airbrushed address, Mr Lewis simply acknowledged the policy. Undermined and humiliated, the shadow defence secretary, a former soldier, is said to have retired backstage afterwards and punched a wall in frustration.
It might be satisfying for those on the Right to think that Mr Corbyn’s feeble commitment to defence is just part and parcel of a Leftist agenda. But that would be taking a very short view of history. Labour has in the past been a staunchly pro-defence party. It was a Labour union leader, Ernest Bevin who, as minister of labour, helped mobilise the civilian war effort during the Second World War. It was a Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, who decided that Britain ought to have an independent nuclear capability. And even now, it is the GMB union that has most stridently criticised Mr Corbyn’s opposition to Trident, not least because of the manufacturing jobs the deterrent programme supports.
Mr Corbyn’s ideas might be retrograde in flavour, but they’re not rooted in old Labour values, and old Labour voters have no interest in them. Corbynism is a singularly indulgent, theoretical and impractical movement, tracing its lineage to cafés and student protests, not factory floors. To understand the world Mr Corbyn inhabits, it’s necessarily only to listen to his own words, spoken in 2012. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” he said, “if every politician around the world, instead of taking pride in the size of their armed forces, did what Costa Rica has done and abolished their army and took pride in the fact that they don’t have an army?” Hell, he ought to write a song about it. A policy platform? Maybe not.
Mr Corbyn has been called a revolutionary, a radical Leftist and a Trotskyite. In fact, he’s not half as realistic as these labels suggest. He’s more of a fantasist. Even Leon Trotsky believed in strong defence.