Your country needs you... to save it from those who would wreck its safety and prosperity
WE ARE in alarming, uncharted territory. Every vote counts as almost never before. The Mail on Sunday’s Survation poll now shows the Tory lead down to just one per cent.
In these uncertain times, this distressing figure may be the last, best warning we get that this is a contest of great seriousness, in which many of the old arguments have somehow failed to get Britain as worried as it should be.
Here and now we explain in grim, urgent detail that this is no time to be lulled. Behind and beside Jeremy Corbyn stand gaunt and worrying figures, unqualified for high office. Their policies spell economic ruin and social chaos. The Labour Party, alone or in coalition with the SNP, are simply not fit to govern.
At the start of the campaign, there was much jaded weariness. Not unreasonably, many took the view of ‘Brenda from Bristol’ that we had undergone quite enough voting for the time being. There was also an assumption that a strong incumbent Prime Minister was guaranteed a thumping majority over a hopeless, extremist and marginal Labour leader.
Now, these beliefs look foolish. No wise person still believes this Election is a foregone conclusion.
Those who fail to vote could live to regret it for a very long time.
Such complacency could once have been forgiven. Voters have seen or heard the campaign slogans, repeated ad nauseam, but are left wondering how this relates to them. And the early phases of the Tory campaign were not always well-judged. Theresa May was of course right to seek workable ways of meeting the huge and growing bill for social care for the elderly. And it was in pursuit of such a solution that she made her mistake over the so-called ‘dementia tax’. But it was a mistake.
Tory campaign managers ought also to have seen that Jeremy Corbyn could only improve his standing, after years of being dismissed as hopeless. The Labour leader’s undoubted courtesy and refusal to engage in personality politics, which sit oddly with his sympathy for various indefensible political movements, have appealed to the British sense of fair play.
Mrs May had also been compelled by campaign managers to take too much of the burden of her Government’s efforts on her shoulders. This has now been corrected.
As we saw on Wednesday evening, the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, is a great asset to the campaign. Her unflappable, calm, articulate and thoughtful style is appealing in itself, and a very good counter to Mr Corbyn’s performance. The fact that she achieved this while grieving over the death of her father is even more impressive. So let us see more of Amber Rudd in these final days.
If by any chance the more worrying polls are right, it is possible that we shall see the following appalling sight on Friday – Jeremy Corbyn on his way to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen and be asked to form a government.
And what a government! Into the Home Office will go Diane Abbott, clueless about her brief, steeped for decades in spiteful Left-wing policies, openly hypocritical about the education of her own child, and not much given to charm or to easygoing good-humoured tolerance of opponents – valuable qualities in this very sensitive department.
Here is a woman who compares changing her views about a terrorist organisation to abandoning an Afro hairstyle. Such questions are crucial moral issues rooted deep in character and beliefs, not superficial fashion trivia.
Into the Foreign Office will go Emily Thornberry, the embodiment in one woman of the North London liberal elite and its vast array of Left-wing dogmas, not necessarily moderated by wide experience or knowledge of the world.
Into the Treasury will march John McDonnell, an unreconstructed Marxist who has for decades inhabited the shadowy world of militant trade unionism and flinty, ultrahard-Left Labour local government factionalism. Above all, Mr McDonnell has associated with and expressed sympathy with grisly Irish Republican factions. He may later have apologised for speaking of ‘honouring’ those involved in the so-called ‘armed struggle’, and for saying ‘it was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA’. But he said it – and it is this willingness to make allowances for and consort with such people that decisively makes Mr Corbyn himself wholly and permanently unfit to occupy No10 Downing Street.
He may have sought to reinvent himself in recent weeks as a goodhumoured, kindly old grandfather who makes jam and enjoys his allotment. But this is entirely at odds with a world-view so far to the Left that much of his own party – especially the sensible, patriotic and fiscally responsible parts – continue to disown and avoid him and (not very secretly) hope for him to fail.
His views on terrorism, defence and politics are actively damaging to our national security and future. His telephone discussion with his equally stonily leftist aide Seumas Milne (which we disclose today) is
Those who fail to vote could regret it for a very long time Amber Rudd is a great asset to the campaign. So let us see more of her in the final days
Jeremy Corbyn’s views on terrorism and defence are damaging to our security
highly revealing of how a Corbyn government would behave. The pair dismiss the very idea of a retaliatory second strike against any country which launched a nuclear attack on Britain. By doing so, they effectively signal that a Corbyn-ruled Britain would have given up its nuclear deterrent in advance, inviting a devastating assault on this country and leaving us utterly open to blackmail from anyone with a nuclear weapon. And his views on economics and taxation would be, if implemented, ruinous for our economy.
Amber Rudd tried to tell Mr Corbyn on Wednesday that there is no magic money-tree. But he thinks there is. He believes it is made up of middle-class people who can be limitlessly forced to give up more and more of their earned income to pay for ill-planned and poorly costed generosity to his favourite causes.
And here is an important point. Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn have both been reduced to gibbering incoherence when asked to explain how their plans for taxing and spending add up. Perhaps they are both duffers at arithmetic, which is bad enough, but there is more to it than that. Mr Corbyn and Ms Abbott do not know what their plans cost, or how they will work, because they do not really care.
They come from a world in which the great revolution in thinking of the 1980s and 1990s never happened. They closed their ears and minds to the discoveries of that era that state socialism is utterly discredited by practical experience, that too much tax strangles an economy, and that lower tax, by releasing enterprise, actually makes everyone richer.
Mr Corbyn and his colleagues still dwell in the imaginary shade of the imaginary money-tree, and would – if given the chance to govern – swiftly be blasted by the bitter winds of economic reality.
The trouble is that we should be blasted with them, and that we should have to endure wealth taxes, garden taxes and taxes based on the idea that a modest hard-earned income is undeserved wealth. These are the politics of childish spite and mean-spirited envy that crush enterprise, aspiration and self-reliance.
Far from helping ‘the many, not the few’, they would wreck and mangle the economic engine that provides the means through which we can support those most in need.
Here in Scotland, the Tory wobble provides cause for concern for those who believe in the maintenance of the United Kingdom. When Theresa May answered the SNP’s demand for a second independence referendum by insisting that now was not the time for more disruptive constitutional wrangling, we were absolutely delighted. For too long, the SNP had been allowed to ignore the wishes of the majority of Scots who want to remain inside the UK.
If this position is to remain strong, it is important the Conservatives make gains in Scotland. Jeremy Corbyn would play into the SNP’s hands if he is able to grow his party’s number of Scottish MPs. Weak against the Nationalists, seemingly duped into believing that the SNP represents the ‘progressive’ values he so cherishes, he would sleepwalk into a second referendum. And who could be sure, then, that he truly believed in the fight to save the Union?
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has dictated the pace of Scottish politics for too long. Some losses for the SNP would take her down a peg or two and might even force the Nationalists to focus some attention on the domestic agenda rather than constantly picking away at the constitutional scab.
If the SNP suffers a setback on Thursday, we might be seeing the beginning of the end of a constitutional
The task of leaving the EU cannot be left to fanatics
battle most believe was settled in 2014 with victory for the No campaign. We dearly hope this turns out to be the case.
Which brings us finally to the reason this Election was called in the first place – the intricate and vital task of leaving the EU. This newspaper campaigned against Brexit, but it respects the result of the referendum. No one should be under any illusion about the scale of the difficulties that lie ahead in securing a good deal for Britain from reluctant and recalcitrant European leaders, while holding the United Kingdom together.
That task simply cannot be entrusted to the assembly of amateurs and fanatics that would constitute a Corbyn government. They are not up to the job. Mrs May is. That is why those conservatives in the Remain camp who might be tempted to register their dissatisfaction with a protest vote for any other party would be cutting off their noses to spite their faces. And it is why Brexiteers from the Left should lend their support to the Conservatives as the only party capable of securing the future for Britain that they voted for.
And so The Mail on Sunday urges Mrs May and the Tories to cast aside any remaining shreds of complacency and to campaign for common sense government for all they are worth in the final days of the Election battle.
And we urge our readers, as we have urged them from the beginning of this campaign, to vote Conservative, not reluctantly or hesitantly, but in the certainty that it is vitally necessary for our national future that they do so.
This United Kingdom needs you.