Corbyn’s vision is a Marxist Britain

There is a worrying tendency among people on what might be called the soft Left to see Jeremy Corbyn and John Mcdonnell as representatives of an Old Labour tradition whose revival needs to be encouraged. Lenin called such people “useful idiots”. This week, as the party conference met in Liverpool, Lord O’neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist and Conservative-appointed Treasury minister, said Labour “appears to be offering the radical change that people seek”. Recently, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking to the TUC, accused multinational corporations of “leeching off the public” and said gig working was “the reincarnation of an ancient evil”.

They were praised from the platform in Liverpool by both Mr Corbyn and Mr Mcdonnell, the shadow chancellor, who offered to help the archbishop with advice on what to do if he was called a Marxist. The audience laughed.

But this is no laughing matter. The current Labour leadership is not some ageing, superannuated throwback to the pre-blairite Labour Party. It is a team of committed Marxists with a radical plan which they have waited more than 40 years to implement: the imposition in the UK of state socialism, the first major Western capitalist country to succumb to its full force.

Mr Corbyn’s lengthy speech to the conference yesterday was a classic of its kind, a sub-bennite address conjuring up the folklore heroes and events of the hard Left – the Chartists, the Peterloo massacre and 19th-century poetical denunciations of mass poverty. This Spartist poppycock would be risible were Mr Corbyn still a fringe backbencher; but he could be forming the next government if the country takes leave of its senses.

Of course he is able to tap into the disaffection with capitalism that accompanied the financial crash of 2008 and the sense ever since that those responsible got away with it, even enriched themselves, while ordinary people have struggled.

But the utopia outlined by Mr Corbyn surely does not convince even the most credulous member of Momentum. Under Labour there will be no depressed people, no suicides, no elderly people without care, no one untreated in hospitals, no child unloved, no illegal immigrant returned, no one underpaid, no homeless people, no one living rough, no victims of crime, no more left-behind areas, no late trains.

Everyone will be happy apart from the rapacious capitalists, who will be taxed to within an inch of their lives to provide the money to be redistributed by Mr Mcdonnell.

And when those very same entrepreneurs leave the country or close down their businesses and put thousands out of work they will be blamed for the penury into which the country will plunge. Labour delegates simply do not understand or care that these policies will leave the Treasury with less money to spend on the health, education and welfare programmes the party promises to expand – now to include an extension of 30 hours free care a week to all children under five.

Yes, everyone will be equal – equally poor. We know this because wherever Mr Corbyn’s brand of socialism has been tried, calamity has been the result. Look at Venezuela, now an economic basket case, wrecked by his hero Hugo Chávez.

When Mr Corbyn says he intends to transform the country, this is not an empty slogan for popular consumption but the harbinger of an economic approach the like of which we have never seen here before. Labour’s apologists need to understand the nature of the beast they are stroking. The agenda set out by Mr Mcdonnell on Monday was more radical even than anything in Labour’s election manifesto last year.

Under the cover of giving workers shares in their company the state would take a 10 per cent stake in all private firms with more than 250 workers, a form of expropriation. The water, rail and energy industries would be nationalised, along with Royal Mail; unions would be able to set wages; and taxes would rise on businesses and better-off earners.

In his speech, punctuated by more standing ovations than would be received by Kim Jong-un, Mr Corbyn hardly mentioned Brexit other than to offer Mrs May support if she was prepared to keep the UK in the customs union, something she has so far refused to countenance. He used weasel words – throwaway lines, almost – to concede Russia’s involvement in the Salisbury poisoning, followed immediately with an attack on Donald Trump.

For Mr Corbyn, the latter is far more deserving of condemnation than a Russian leader who apparently ordered a state-sponsored assassination using a nerve agent on British soil. He accepted that the summer row over anti-semitism had been hurtful to Jews but did not apologise, nor did he acknowledge the problem existed in his party.

Mr Corbyn’s speech ticked all the boxes for his adoring followers, who responded with a rendition of that tiresome dirge “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”, ending Labour’s conference on a triumphalist note that the Tories urgently need to silence with a plan of their own.

‘Mr Corbyn’s utopia surely does not convince even the most credulous member of Momentum’