First, the positive. This is what I wrote on 20 May:
“Mrs May’s manifesto appears to be a cynical attempt to appeal to traditional Labour voters, ensuring thereby a large and lasting Tory majority.
“Alas, the only thing that really appeals to traditional Labour voters is traditional Labour policies – and, even more important, traditional Labour philosophies.
“This is what Mrs May has served up, thereby guaranteeing a Labour victory on 8 June. That this particular branch of the Labour Party paints itself blue rather than red is a purely chromatic difference.”
In that I was right. Mrs May clearly decided she could get away with alienating the core Tory support by painting herself a slightly paler shade than the blood-red colour favoured by Corbyn.
Everything else I got wrong. I, along with the Tory high command, assumed that whatever seats the Tories could gain in Labour areas would be a bonus on the number of seats they were guaranteed anyhow.
As I wrote a couple of days ago to a deeply concerned friend: “You and I are thoroughly alienated. But we aren’t going to vote Labour, are we?”
We didn’t. But enough people did to plunge the country into chaos, thereby reinforcing my contempt for our unchecked democracy and weakening my already brittle hope for our country.
Presented with two versions of socialism, diluted and neat, millions of people voted for the most subversive creature ever to lead a major British party. What the hell, go all the way, was a strong sentiment.
This shows how fundamentally corrupted the British electorate is. The job of corrupting it wasn’t hard, considering that, instead of relying on the head to decide such matters, most voters are driven by the organ located quite a bit lower.
There’s a quote attributed to Churchill: “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.”
Actually, the organ I had in mind sits even lower than the heart, but neither one is a proper place for making decisions about the country’s future. A voter in a democracy is supposed to act as a statesman, choosing right policies on the basis of rational deliberation.
The assumption is that, since the average voter is capable of such deliberation, the arithmetic majority is always right, whereas in fact it never is. The average voter doesn’t know how to think about politics, or about anything else for that matter. Feeling is the new thinking, and, thanks to creeping infantilisation, not just among young people.
No one capable of thinking at the most rudimentary of levels would vote for a rank communist like Corbyn. Anyone with a modicum of nous would know in a split second that every policy Corbyn proposes spells an unmitigated disaster for the country and indeed for the Western alliance.
Yet even a modicum of nous can’t be presupposed in a population comprehensively educated to think with their gonads, not their brain. Witness the fact that over 40 per cent of the electorate voted for an evil communist creature devoted over a lifetime to obliterating Britain by whatever means possible.
Economically, Corbyn policies are Leninist class war designed to punish industry, enterprise and thrift. He’s committed to wholesale nationalisation, making the government the only serious player in the commercial arena. This is accompanied by the usual Labour dedication to high taxes and runaway spending – this time grossly exaggerated even by those standards.
Then there are some nice extra touches, such as Corbyn’s self-acknowledged commitment to collapsing the house market with his ‘garden tax’. That would impoverish millions of people, especially the older ones, those for whom their houses are their whole wealth.
In terms of national security, Corbyn has always been the terrorists’ best friend. In the good modern tradition he eschews discrimination and happily supports anyone who can murder his countrymen: the IRA, Hezbollah, Hamas, Muslims in general. There’s no reason to believe that, should he find himself in power, he wouldn’t turn Britain into a free hunting ground for murderers.
He’s also in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, leaving the country at the mercy of any predator big or small. And of course he’d cut the army down to a level even lower than the one the Tories have criminally perpetrated.
This is accompanied by his zoological hatred of Jews in general and Israel in particular, and of course of the monarchy. I’m sure Comrade Corbyn wishes he could do to Her Majesty what his Russian co-believers did to her relation Nicholas II, but he’d be happy to settle for the next best thing: turning Britain into a people’s republic. May I suggest the BSSR as a possible name for it?
There are of course some hardcore communists in Britain, but they certainly don’t add up to 40 per cent of the electorate. That number has to include millions of those Charles Moore calls idealists and I call idiots, mostly young ones – those who don’t think but feel.
Corbyn fed them a few buzz phrases that made them feel warm down there, and off they headed, ‘down there’ first, for the polling stations. If any argument against unchecked democracy is needed, this election is it.
I’m not convinced, as some commentators are, that, had the Tories come up with a proper conservative manifesto, they would have had their landslide. Nor am I sure that anyone less of a nonentity than May could have led the Tories to Shangri-La.
It’s conceivable that a manifesto of low taxation, lower social spending, greater defence spending, resolute response to both Muslim terrorism and EU blackmail would have put Corbyn into 10 Downing Street, not just within a whisker of it.
The Conservative Party hasn’t been conservative for a long time, and our dumbed-down population only ever gives the Tories a large majority in the wake of universally acknowledged catastrophes perpetrated by Labour.
The British have become knee-jerk socialists and, given a decent economic situation, they’ll vote Labour – even, as in this case, its communist wing. Mrs May, devoid of any mental or moral strength, but amply blessed with cunning, realised this and delivered a Labour manifesto in Tory clothing, communicated with epic ineptitude.
The ploy has backfired. Our gonadic voters heaved a sigh of relief at realising that even the Tories are socialists at heart. Well then, why not vote with their gonads? No reason at all.
Even if Mrs May cobbles together a workable coalition with the Unionists, hers will be a lame-duck government unable to push through any grown-up policies – or certainly to get out of the EU on its own terms if at all.
Another election beckons, with probably a different Tory leader at the helm. But there are no different Tory leaders – only different names. It’s not only every nation that vindicates Joseph de Maistre by getting the government it deserves, but also every party.
“Our gonadic voters heaved a sigh of relief at realising that even the Tories are socialists at heart. ”
Probably better describe as more welfare state than socialist
I’m reminded of the young ‘remain’ voter, interviewed on the morning of June 7th. When asked why she was in tears, she replied:
“Because I’m not going to be able to get my Nandos” (a South African casual dining restaurant).
To paraphrase Peter Hitchens – a generation of comprehensive education has done its work. There are 13 million or so people in Britain who were prepared to put Corbyn in No10, McDonnell in the treasury and Abbott in the home office.
Welcome to the new idiocracy.
I wonder if the men in grey suits have knocked on her door yet? She has proven to be a big disappointment, and has proven to be an identikit-machine-technocratic-non-collegiate political clone. It seems that there isn’t really much between the parties in our political class – and not much between their ears, either. Where’s Screaming Lord Sutch when we need him?
Theresa May is a failure. The unnecessary decision the call an election was probably not hers but she allowed it to happen, conducted an inept campaign and made her party hostage to a bunch of naive blowhards with no experience of government and no obligation to do the rest of the UK any favours.
The increase in Labour seats is a modest achievement of sorts, but the parliamentary party will still be at odds with its ‘leader’ who only holds that role due to farce of an electoral procedure rigged by Trotskyite/Anarchist goons who could not succeed as parties in their true colours. However, Putin should be jealous of their achievement (that is if he didn’t organise it himself).
As for true ‘Tory values’, could someone please spell them out, raise the banner and make a stand so that we have a clear choice. I have some difficulty in accepting that we should give an entirely free run to the rentiers and the sort of businesses that can only make a profit by paying third world wages. That would run the economy down real fast. If the masses have nothing to lose we may see the syndrome caused by ‘I couldn’t pay the bill, so instead I took the till’. Third world countries are mostly unpleasant with the rich in fortified compounds and most people getting by on the proceeds of corruption and extortion.
The heart/head quotation has antecedents going back almost as far as Ecclesiastes. I fact I am almost convinced I have seen something like ‘I came and saw under the sun that the selfish young man had no heart and his unselfish father had no wisdom. And time and tide swept both away’.
It’s been such a long time since the UK had a full-on socialist government, complete with stupidly disastrous economic policies (and crawling to the IMF for a bail-out), that no-one under fifty has any memory of it. No doubt this is why Labour are keen to follow the SNP in reducing the voting age to 16.
I do wish there was some way in which those who think the 70s were wonderful could be made to go and live in that dreadful decade.
As an aside, why is it that the left seem always to be treated as occupying the moral high ground? People should be constantly reminded that this high ground is built from a mountain of corpses.
I’m trying, I’m trying.
What you said isn’t an aside; it’s the key point. The left have purloined and perverted the moral tenets of Christianity, for example in replacing charity with redistribution. In fact, socialism is driven by hatred and envy, not love. Everything else is a collection of devious simulacra acting as as smoke screen to hide the wicked core. Alas, the English have lost the ability to debunk false philosophies, replacing it with piecemeal debates about details. Even our conservative pundits balk at describing Corbyn as evil and explaining why. They may talk about, say, his economic ideas as disastrous in practical terms, but not as morally wicked and philosophically cannibalistic. This could spring from English pragmatism and distrust of generalities, which certainly has its place — but not at the cost of compromising the underlying philosophy, or even not having one in the first place.