‘If he won it would be disaster for Britain and wider world’
If the Marxist true-believer Jeremy Corbyn were to become prime minister, Britain’s economy would shrivel, Britain’s military strength would disappear and – except to a small coterie of Left-wing cranks to whom it would be the veritable New Jerusalem – Britain’s soft power would be at an end. A Corbyn Labour victory would not only be a disaster for Britain; it would also be a shocking setback for the wider world which has always looked to this country for inspiration: as home to the mother of parliaments, the common law, the Industrial Revolution and the most widely played sport on the globe; and as the saviour of Europe from the Nazi menace. But the Corbyn platform of a crackdown on private schools, widespread renationalisation of industry, confiscatory taxes on the middle class, the effective withdrawal of Britain from Nato, and the disintegration of the Five Eyes security partnership – even though each of these are appalling enough – would not be the worst of it. The worst of it would be the effective sabotage of the people’s vote to leave the European Union.
Although Corbyn personally has always been anti-EU, it’s been for odd reasons. Instead of disliking the EU for its bureaucracy, its conformity, and its hostility to the nation state, Corbyn disliked it because of the restrictions he thought it would impose on the socialist transformation of Britain.
Perhaps he feels more affinity for the EU apparatus now, after its relentless malice towards a Britain that had the temerity to vote to leave. In any event, ever since leaving the EU became the main issue in British politics, his stance has been vague, cowardly, and based entirely on a calculation of what would be in his own best interests.
Corbyn essentially stayed out of the referendum campaign, appreciating that many Labour voters – perhaps a majority – lumped-in the EU with the other structures of officialdom that were contributing to their disempowerment. Like most Labour MPs, Corbyn treated it as a civil war inside the Conservative Party and left the other side to fight it out. After the referendum, along with the vast majority of the MPs elected in 2017, Corbyn notionally accepted the result and agreed that Britain would be leaving the EU, while doing everything he could to stymie any particular proposal that the government put forward. It was opposition politics at its worst: make the government’s job impossible but without putting forward a clear alternative of your own. To the extent that his current position on the EU can be discerned, it’s that a Labour government would renegotiate the terms of Britain’s departure from the EU and then submit this new deal to a second referendum, which the government would probably campaign against.
How could you negotiate a new deal and then campaign against it, unless you were always against leaving the EU and this is just an elaborate facade to overcome the people’s vote? In fact, it’s an embarrassingly transparent attempt to be all things to everyone on the question of the EU; because, to Corbyn, this issue is a distraction from his main task: to become prime minister, by hook or by crook, and then to oversee the transition of Great Britain into something like the old East
‘There was much to admire in the Blair Labour government which stood up for Western values abroad’
Germany, complete with Stasi, anti-Semitism, and dreadful homemade cars. As someone old enough to have seen it, even from abroad, Corbyn’s nostalgia for the Soviet era is not proof of conviction but evidence of a form of intellectual and moral disorder. You can’t take anyone seriously as a potential British leader when his first instinct after the Salisbury poisonings was to believe the Russian dictator rather than his own police investigators.
As a friend of Britain, and as an instinctive political conservative, it grieved me to see the mess that the previous Conservative government was making of the Brexit process.
Theresa May correctly stated that no deal was better than a bad deal and then accepted a deal that would have left Britain a virtual economic colony of Europe, subject to all the EU rules but with no say over their making. It was a symptom of the declinism and defeatism that has tainted the British establishment for decades. But Boris Johnson believes in Britain, will definitely leave the EU, and will then work to finalise free trade and fair movement of people between a fully sovereign Britain and the countries of the EU.
There was much to admire in the Blair Labour government which stood up for Western values abroad and moved the state towards being a purchaser of health and education services rather than just a nearmonopoly supplier. There was an honour in the old Labour pacifist tradition with its eventual – if reluctant – acceptance that you couldn’t fight evil by turning the other cheek. Doubtless, Corbyn is a nice enough man at one level; but, if ever given power, his ideas will debauch a great country. Hence, the world has never watched a British election with more interest and more trepidation. Tony Abbott is the former prime minister of Australia