Add K to GB, and what do you get?

Complacent philistines, c.1914, shrugged their shoulders insouciantly.

“Surely mass slaughter can’t happen in Europe.” But it did.

Russian intelligentsia did the same, c. 1917.

“Exterminating whole classes, instigating a bloody civil war and enslaving the entire population? Can’t happen in the land of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.” But it did.

German social democrats, conservatives and Jews, c. 1933, smiled knowingly.

“Yes, we know Hitler wrote about exterminating Jews in Mein Kampf. Now let’s be serious: it can’t happen in the land of Bach and Goethe.” But it did.

Now the British read about all those cannibalistic Trotskyist rants by Labour politicians and dismiss as alarmists those who say that this lot mean what they say.

A communist takeover of Britain with her oldest and most stable constitution? “We’re British, old boy. Can’t happen here, what?” But it can. And if we don’t do something about it, it will.

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.” This aphorism is attributed to Burke and, though the attribution is doubtful, the underlying thought isn’t.

The evil scowling through the red flags of today’s Labour presents by far the greatest danger to our survival as a free nation. Greater than the EU, though God knows it’s dangerous enough. Greater than Muslim colonisation, though that too is a major threat.

For some policies being proposed for the Labour manifesto can’t be realised without turning Britain into a giant concentration camp, complete with arbitrary imprisonments and summary executions.

For example, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell promised yesterday to transfer property from private to public hands should he ever get the power to do so.

He finds it terribly unfair that a small proportion of Britons own a large proportion of land. Clearly nationalisation is the only way to right that wrong.

You must understand that communists don’t use the word ‘unfair’ in its normal sense of not getting one’s due. To this lot ‘unfair’ means anything that curbs their power and promotes individual liberty.

When Western civilisation was still embryonic, in Greece c. 500 BC, people already knew that secure private property is the foundation of freedom.

Not only does it encourage citizens to guard their liberty from domestic tyranny, but it also makes them resolute in defending it from foreign despots.

Because the Greeks were fighting for their freedom, their homes and their families, they were able to rout Xerxes’s hordes in, say, the naval Battle of Salamis (in the numbers involved and casualties suffered, the greatest naval engagement in history).

The Greeks were outnumbered three to one, but they were free men fighting against slaves. It was no contest: the Persians fled, leaving at least 50,000 corpses behind them.

Remove secure property, and slavery beckons. That is, of course, exactly what this evil lot are after. Why, they even paraphrase the prescription of that great socialist Benito Mussolini: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”.

This is how the phrase was transformed by McDonnell, who lacks Il Duce’s gift of the gab: “It’s the development of the ideas of ‘in and against the state’ at the local level.”

One thing I can say for socialist cannibals, national or international, actual or aspiring, is that they’re always frank about their intentions. The problem is that decent people refuse to take them at their word.

Having thus borrowed his idea of property ownership from The Communist Manifesto and his phraseology from Mussolini, McDonnell then nicked his tactical prescriptions from Lenin’s What Is to Be Done.

Having boasted about Labour reaching 50,000 members, he then put his own spin on Lenin’s cherished concept of a cadre of professional revolutionaries: “We’ve got to convert ordinary members and supporters into real cadres who understand and analyse society and who are continually building the ideas”.

If you wonder about the physical shape of nationalised British towns and villages this lot see on their mind’s eye, McDonnell’s acolyte, Russell-Moyle, helpfully obliged.

We’ll tear up planning laws, he explained, and encourage local authorities to build tower blocks in the middle of pastoral villages and leafy suburbs. Thus Britain will within a few years acquire that charming shape for which Romania, c. 1960, was so justly famous.

As far as Russell-Moyle was concerned, one of the first things to do would be to reverse Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy: “Let’s just talk about council houses – let’s get those bloody private houses back into our hands [my emphasis].”

Collective ownership of land, promised McDonnell, would shake up society. That it certainly would, just the way their ideological brethren shook up Russian society, c. 1917. And those ‘noxious insects’, in Lenin’s phrase, who’d rather not be shaken up were exterminated in their millions.

Once that sledgehammer is first swung, it’ll go on swinging. Acting in the capacity of that tool, McDonnell also announced plans to nationalise, well, everything in the long run, but starting with utilities.

And of course the House of Lords will be replaced by an elected senate. Here McDonnell must be rebuked for resorting to palliatives. Comrade Trotsky would be ashamed of him.

Why not go all the way and replace the House of Lords with a Supreme Soviet, the Queen and PM together with a Secretary General of the Party, and the police with the KGB?

This sounds preposterous, I know. NIMBY, I hear people say. That sort of thing can happen in Russia, North Korea or perhaps Venezuela. Not in Old Blighty.

Well, those people ought to tune their ears to the echoes of 1914, 1917 and 1933, when McDonnell’s and Corbyn’s typological ancestors shattered such hopeful illusions.

What with our electorate thoroughly corrupted by 100 years of leftie propaganda, this sort of thing can indeed happen here. And, if we do nothing, it will.