Ignore evil men at your peril

One good thing about evil politicians is that they talk openly about their plans. One bad thing about decent people is that they don’t listen.

Lenin, for example, never concealed his intention to turn his party into a secret cabal, grab power and then exterminate and rob whole classes. He even expressed this idea numerically, by stating that he didn’t care if 90 per cent of Russia’s population perished, provided the remaining 10 per cent lived to see communism vanquish.

No one listened. Surely not in Russia, the land of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky – such was the prevailing sentiment among the intelligentsia. Surely that was just a figure of speech. It wasn’t, which the intelligentsia discovered the hard way in execution cellars and death camps.

Likewise, Hitler in his 1925 bestseller Mein Kampf was honest about his plan to exterminate all Jews. You know, the same group that didn’t exist according to the Kaiser (“We have no Jews in Germany, just Germans of the Judaic persuasion.”).

That wasn’t taken literally either, not even by most of the German Jews. The land of Bach, Beethoven and Goethe would never allow such a massacre, they shrugged. Well, it did.

One detects a similar complacency in today’s Britain about the Labour leaders’ pronouncements on their plans in office, should they get there. Even some dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, much as they hate the possibility of a Marxist government, deny that it could do irreversible harm.

Didn’t we have the same sort of thing in the 70s? Omnipotent unions, economy paralysed by strikes, Britain as the sick man of Europe, wholesale nationalisation, three-day weeks, runaway inflation, blackouts and whatnot? But we got over socialism then, and we’d do so now.

Such optimists ignore two fundamental differences between then and now.

One was that Wilson and Callaghan were socialists, but – to the extent that it’s possible for socialists – they weren’t evil. They weren’t Trotskyist energumens committed to annihilating Britain qua Britain.

The other difference was Margaret Thatcher, who became Tory leader in 1975 and PM in 1979. She managed to rally the country, roll back the unions, encourage private enterprise and somehow pull the country out of the putrid swamp into which it was rapidly sinking.

The Labour Party today isn’t just misguided but downright evil. And nor does one detect anywhere on the horizon a Tory leader of Margaret Thatcher’s calibre.

That’s why we must all join forces to make sure this evil cabal doesn’t grab power. Because if it does, it’ll be too late.

Luckily, its chieftains make such resolve easy by emulating Stalin and Hitler and unabashedly laying down plans that, if realised, will put paid to Britain as we know and love her.

For example, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell will use this weekend’s party conference to kick off the ‘Abolish Eton’ campaign to eliminate private schools.

As part of this campaign, he wants to have the endowments, investments and properties held by private schools “redistributed democratically and fairly across the country’s educational institutions”.

Allow me to translate for those whose Marxist is a bit rusty: he’s talking about seizing private property in exactly the same way the Bolsheviks did so in 1917. In both cases, the ostensible justification is an unquenchable thirst for equality.

Thus McDonnell: “We know that our society is grotesquely unequal and part of the reason for that is because of the inequalities in education, particularly in private schools, where large amounts of money are spent on a privileged few.

“That’s why I support the campaign now for us to talk about how we ensure an integrated education system, where private schools don’t need to exist and should not exist where we have equality of education.”

Judging by McDonnell’s grammar, private schools, one of which he attended, don’t guarantee a decent education. Had he come and said “Look at the way I talk – do you really think fee-paying schools are any good?”, I’d be sympathetic.

As it is, he must know that, because God in whom he no longer believes made us unequally educatable, education (or anything else for that matter) can be equalised only at the lowest common denominator.

If the battle of Waterloo was indeed won on the playing fields of Eton, the only battle that can be won in a Marxist-style educational system dedicated to social engineering is one against the country’s future.

As to the “large amounts spent on a privileged few” at public schools, McDonnell must be aware that the money comes from school fees and private endowments – unlike in comprehensive schools funded by the taxpayer.

Even the foolish but not manifestly evil drive for comprehensive education in the 1960s has succeeded only in creating three generations of ignoramuses unable to operate a modern economy.

(Among other things, this forces Britain to import better-educated people from elsewhere, but that’s no problem for Corbyn and McDonnell. One of their aspirations is to increase immigration from all over the world, and not just of educated people.)

At that time, Education Secretary Tony Crosland saw in his sights not just public schools but also state ones for more capable pupils. Crosland expressed his aims with the kind of forthrightness one expects from socialists: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland.”

But at least Crosland, unlike today’s lot, wasn’t a Trotskyist. Though bad enough, he wasn’t possessed by the demon of destruction and, had he not died early, he might have realised the error of his ways (though I doubt it).

It’s not just education. The wicked cabal of today’s hard-left Labour is aiming a whole swarm of bullets at everything that makes Britain British.

They plan to rebuild the unions to their past glory, nationalise everything that can be nationalised this side of concentration camps (for the time being), tax the wealth-producing classes into penury, rob publicly held companies of 10 per cent of their shares – and of course decriminalise drugs and prostitution. Private medicine is also bound to go the way of private education, and eventually private enterprise will follow too.

Everywhere such measures have been tried, they’ve never failed to create an economic, social and cultural catastrophe. But the McDonnells of this world don’t care about that.

They are driven by hatred, envy and resentment – by the urge to destroy, not create. That’s why they are evil, and that’s why we’ll be criminally negligent if we don’t stop them.