I suppose I should say something about the Labour leadership election. I will begin by saying that I did not register as a Labour supporter, and have not voted in the leadership election. I dislike any form of political cheating, and I do not think good will come of interfering in the internal affairs of opposition parties.
This said, I turn to Mr Corbyn. I have no reasonable doubt that he is an honest lefty. He appears to believe everything he says. What he says veers between the reasonable – ie, avoidance of yet another war in the Middle East and a de-escalation of our new cold war with Russia – to the stupid and dangerous. This includes the whole of his economic programme, which I cannot be bothered to discuss. I will add his opposition to freedom of speech and freedom of association, and his belief in purging every institution within reach of the State of anyone still there who is not politically correct. Nor will I forget his past support for the IRA.
But he is an honest lefty. He looks and behaves like a normal human being. He does not appear to be financially or sexually corrupt. Ask him a question, and he will answer it with what he thinks, and is indifferent to whether this will get him the vote of the questioner. In the British political landscape that emerged after 1979, and that has seemed a permanent fact since 1997, this gives him a great advantage.
To call his opponents liars would be to flatter them. They are low apparatchiks who believe nothing at all in the wider sense. They are neither better nor worse than the generality of British politicians. Watching them shrivel beside Mr Corbyn is like watching Nigel Farage dominate a Question Time panel.
This is the weakness of the current order of things in England. It is built on lies. It is still not absolutely hegemonic. It is not only staffed but also led by people without character. It is brittle. Perhaps Mr Corbyn will lose the leadership election. Perhaps it will be rigged against him. If he does win, perhaps he will be removed by various means. Whatever happens, though, he has shown the weak points in the Thatcher-Blair Settlement.
But suppose he does win, and is not removed. I suspect Labour will begin to revive – in Scotland as well as in England. People like sincerity, and there is enough in what he promises to attract wider support than from the Trotskyite fringe. The Conservatives who are now rubbing their hands will then have a problem. It will not be enough to be less economically illiterate. The Party leadership will need to start honouring some of the promises it has been making or implying for the past ten years.
That will be interesting.
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As we discussed last night, the ASI and the IEA will have a field day. Their outdated rebuttals of old fashioned socialism will once more become relevant. At least these sad old men can die relevant.
More dreary policy documents, the basic assumption of which is that actually existing corporatism is a free market.
Still, a Corbyn victory will keep these people from saying much that is really stupid.
Maybe the old one who wears his hair like Donald Trump will write a book about defending the free market against the evil Corbyn. After Corbyn’s downfall, this book will be the explanation. They might make him a lord (or should it be lady?) for his services to the Cameron regime.
Then a new Labour leader, more willing to donate to a certain think tank, will be elected and all will be right with the world again.
This echoes my view almost exactly.
Nice article and I generally agree. It is a bit sad to see such silly ideas as renationalisation returning to the political mainstream but important to note that Labour never really dropped this idea, they just didn’t dare say it post 1994.
Forthcoming economic disaster could see this turd as UK Prime Minister. The fact he is a sincere evildoer is worthless. So was Adolf.
PS–anyone heard owt from Ian B?. He has been missing a long time now for a holiday. It may be he has given up blogging but it would be nice of him to have said ta-ra.
The last blogger I saw had stopped blogging was Neil Craig, (A Place to Stand–He was a Scottish ukip free marketer). After about 10 months of silence someone on Tim Worstall pointed out to me that he had died. There aren’t that many sensible people left in this world such that we can afford to lose them. Even if you are sick of blogging, at least let us know you are OK Ian.
I’m a little concerned, but he comes and goes. I shall be signing off for a week form tomorrow – or perhaps not.
This is too long and good to serve as a comment. We have moved it to the front page as an original post.
Everything happens for a reason. I don’t think we can ignore that Corbyn has been enthusiastically promoted in the Left-liberal media, and it happened all of a sudden. At the beginning of the contest, he was touted around as the token hard Left candidate (which he isn’t, in actuality). Then, suddenly, he was flavour of the month. He came out of nowhere, from nowhere [to Nowhere..??].
It occurs to me one reason is that Corbyn might help Labour lock-in both Scottish voters and white working class voters in England, two sections of the electorate who have been disillusioned by Blairism. So this could be seen as a defensive move against both UKIP and the far-Right, and also to counter the SNP.
Corbyn’s backers know he is unlikely to win an election, but that is of lesser importance to Labour at the moment. The Blair years, while electorally and ideologically successful, also carried a price tag in that Labour’s base was eroded and its local party infrastructure is non-existent in some places. The Blairites/neo-thatcherites in the Labour Party who put up only a very token and half-hearted resistance to Corbyn, will have factored this into the equation. I live in a fairly sizeable Yorkshire town and we have no local Labour Party whatsoever here – they don’t even stand candidates here anymore, and their former councillors stand as independents or for other parties. I suspect that’s typical, and that little-mentioned reality should be taken into account. Labour is dying on its feet. Corbyn is the ‘man with the briefcase’, sent in the rescue a middle-class income opportunity with some good old-fashioned left-wing populism.
So, Corbyn could be seen, from one perspective, as a reactionary choice. Far from weakening the grip of the political class, his leadership of the Labour Party might strengthen it and cement the broad neo-liberal consensus that, in truth, Corbyn accepts implicitly. I could be wrong – please don’t take this as a prediction – but my suspicion is that Corbyn’s victory is seen as bad news within the UKIP, but we do have some UKIP/ex-UKIP members on here, so maybe they could comment?
The fuckwits first action was to demand unlimited immigration to the UK. If he is trying to woo the white working class he has a strange way of going about it.
I don’t know if Corbyn himself is consciously trying to woo the *white* working class – he might be – but I think that is going to be one effect of his election as Labour leader. I don’t use the term ‘working class’ in any scientific sense here, rather I refer to Labour’s traditional support among lower income whites.
The basis of what I am saying is the demographic of BNP and UKIP support. I am not trying to lump the two parties together ideologically or politically, but I would suggest that they do draw from a similar support base to Labour in certain areas of the country (though there are some differences, as I explain briefly below). If you accept there is a significant overlap in support, and also factor in the ascendency of the SNP in Scotland, then Labour have cause to be worry. A Corbyn leadership would serve two strategic purposes for Labour and the political class: helping restore Labour’s electoral base, while neutering UKIP electorally (and by extension, the far-Right).
One wrinkle in this analysis of mine is that most of the BNP and UKIP support seems to come from whites in that difficult-to-define middling group of the affluent working class and lower middle class, rather than the lowest income whites. They tend to be people with decent incomes but few qualifications, often self-employed. I think a Rowntree study confirmed this about the BNP back in around 2010, but Corbyn is in the right zone to appeal to a lot of these people and stifle UKIP, especially if the economic conditions worsen. He also potentially has appeal to elderly voters who might otherwise vote UKIP but would vote for Labour for more expedient reasons.
I maintain my view that it would have been far better for UKIP if Labour had elected Burnham or Cooper, or better still, Liz Kendall. A neo-liberal Labour Party is far easier for UKIP to take on in the key northern constituencies, notwithstanding that UKIP itself is neo-liberal. So UKIP face a serious strategic dilemma now. The Lib Dems and Greens perhaps less so as their support tends to be regional and appeals to a bespoke demographic, and they may end up as coalition partners in a Labour-led government. As for the Tories, I disagree with Peter Hitchens’ analysis elsewhere. I think this is an opportunity to present themselves in sharp relief to Labour, and far from this signalling the beginning of the end of Old Gang politics, we are possibly we are back to a redux Red-Blue battle in mainstream politics, only this time Labour will have a populist leader. I actually think there is every chance Corbyn’s Labour Party could win a general election if Labour can get its act together in Scotland.
I have no reasonable doubt that he is an honest lefty.
Then you’ve not been paying attention. “Honest lefty” is an oxymoron:
For example, asked about high levels of immigration, Corbyn told a Radio 5 hustings debate that “There is net immigration at the moment; in some years there’s net migration outwards.” That is rather like saying that “in some years, Leeds United compete to be the football champions of England”. That too would be an accurate description of the 1970s, was fleetingly again the case in the early 1990s, with very little chance of being true again at any time in the foreseeable future. The last year that the UK saw net migration outwards was almost a quarter of a century ago in 1993.
Even the New Statesman has spotted Corbyn’s lies