One has to admire Corbyn’s understanding of politics and economics. His ascent to power, he forecasts dispassionately and accurately, will produce an immediate run on the pound and a collapse of business investment. An economic catastrophe, in other words.
Since Britain’s imports exceed her exports, the predicted devastation of the already devalued pound will drive the cost of living sky high. This will be exacerbated by an inevitable hike in unemployment and inflation, with the financial system showing all the stability of a feather in a hurricane.
Financiers like that sort of thing as much as a cyanide sandwich. Even British investors will look for greener pastures elsewhere, while their foreign colleagues will be falling over their own feet in an outward stampede. (No doubt this will be blamed on Brexit, but then everything will be.)
Yet in spite of displaying such impressive analytical acumen, Corby is seeking power with nothing short of maniacal persistence. Obviously he feels that the correctly forecast consequences are worth taking – especially since he won’t be the one taking them.
Such insouciance in the face of the disaster likely to hit common folk (uncommon folk have ways of protecting themselves) would be incomprehensible in a party supposedly committed to looking after the working man – but only if we confused its slogans with reality. In reality, they see people, working or otherwise, only as so many building blocks in the edifice of socialist tyranny.
Much is being made of Labour anti-Semitism, and true enough: 61 per cent of all anti-Semitic harangues by public officials come from Labour. And one can confidently predict that the on-going party conference is bound to drive that proportion even higher.
But Corby’s frankness on the impending economic collapse provides even starker evidence for what has to be clear to any student of history: socialism is wicked, and the more socialist a party, the more evil it is.
Corby’s Labour is as socialist as it’s possible to be this side of concentration camps filled with what Lenin described as ‘noxious insects’ (anybody Lenin didn’t like). And if this lot get their way, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of their stepping over into that territory too.
The Labour conference isn’t just one continuous incitement to riot – it is a riot. Actually, street riots are what one speaker after another is calling for, if that’s the only way to get Corby into a position where he could collapse the economy.
None of them sees anything wrong with confiscation of private property, something that hasn’t been tried in Britain on a large scale since Henry VIII looted the monasteries. And Henry’s way of solving marital difficulties appeals to many delegates as a legitimate political expedient.
Every time the royal family was mentioned yesterday, invariably in pejorative terms, the delegates roared “Guillotine!!!” – and our royals aren’t even Jewish. In some quarters this sort of thing may be described as treason, but that word is no longer used in polite, and especially rude, society.
Here our socialist friends show that their understanding of history is less reliable than their grasp of economics. For those who scream for the guillotine the loudest eventually put their own heads on the block – to that law of history there are no known exceptions.
The typological precursors of Labour, all those Jacobins, Bolsheviks and SA, got their comeuppance after first spilling most satisfying oceans of blood. The regicides Robespierre and Saint-Just perished in Thermidor; Trotsky, Bukharin and Zinoviev were killed by Stalin; Röhm and Strasser were massacred by Hitler.
The very fact that such names can be mentioned as relevant to British politics is a calamity in itself. It’s hard to contain one’s heart-felt wish that Corbyn and his jolly friends get their own Thermidor prophylactically. But alas, the only Thermidor these champions of the proletariat are likely to get is of the lobster variety.
Delegates to the Labour conference provide musical accompaniment to incendiary speeches by singing Internationale and Bandiera Rossa, with blood dripping from every word. I just wish more people pricked up their ears and listened: this lot mean what they sing.
As it is, the British are likely to get a Corbyn government next time around, vindicating de Maistre’s maxim that every nation gets the kind of government it deserves. But I still hope we don’t deserve Corbyn – no nation’s sins are as grave as that.
P.S. I tend to eschew the trick so beloved of many pundits, saying “I told you so” when their predictions come true. However, without uttering that sacramental phrase, here’s what I wrote about Corbyn before he even got to lead Labour: http://www.alexanderboot.com/none-dare-call-it-conspiracy/