A busted flush

Even when Michael Gove says that people who use food banks have only themselves to blame, it does not affect the Conservative Party as they march to an easy General Election victory on 12th December. Jacob Rees-Mogg can accuse the victims of Grenfell of lacking common sense and the story is soon forgotten. Boris Johnson can lie, use racist, sexist and homophobic tropes in almost every speech. In short, Tories can say whatever they like and it doesn’t matter. They know in their hearts that the 2019 General Election is pretty well in the bag.

Jeremy Corbyn’s cult following expect a similar conclusion to 2017 when Theresa May’s dreadful campaign imploded and Labour only lost by a narrower margin than expected. Or perhaps an even better one, making Labour the biggest party, putting Corbyn in 10 Downing Street. Dream on.

I do not see this election as a re-run of 2017: I see it a re-run of the 1983 election, when the hard left got hold of the Labour Party and produced a manifesto that the late, great MP Gerald Kaufman described as “the longest suicide note in history.” By coincidence – or was it? – this was the year in which a little known career political activist entered parliament, Jeremy Bernard Corbyn.

Corbyn was on the far left of the party, actively supporting Tony Benn, the far left’s de facto leader. The manifesto they put to the country was heavily defeated and Margaret Thatcher’s ghastly anti-working class, anti-trade union government won by a landslide, wining an overall majority of 144. Many of us on the mainstream left blamed Benn and the comrades for Labour’s heavy defeat, every bit as much as acknowledging Thatcher’s increasingly presidential campaign. Labour’s defeat had catastrophic effects for the working class. I fear we face a similar outcome today.

I see the latest opinion polls and they confirm what I suspect is the mood of the country. Most people dislike Boris Johnson but the overwhelming majority dislike Corbyn. The young people who saw Corbyn’s elevation to near sainthood in 2017 now realise that there was nothing remotely new or fresh to his ‘ideas’. On the contrary, it became clear that they were merely reheated Bennism from the 1980s. That worked out well, didn’t it, especially if you were a Conservative voter. Corbyn is now a busted flush.

It is possible the polls will close in the weeks ahead and it might mean there is another minority government. I wouldn’t bank on it. In fact, I can’t see it at all. The more the electorate see of Corbyn and his dismal ‘top team’, comprising of the likes of Diane Abbott, Barry Gardiner, Richard Burgon, Rebecca Long Bailey and Dawn Butler, the less they will see them as a government in waiting.

There is no question that Boris Johnson’s top table is equally as bad, packed as it is with dullards and never weres like Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Andrea Leadsom, but in the current scheme of things, it scarcely matters. The idea of the home secretary, Ms Patel, casually introducing a harsh immigration policy which had it existed in the 1960s would have prevented her own parents coming to Britain is apparently quite normal. Anyway, Johnson promises to ‘get Brexit done’. For a politically exhausted electorate, how good does that sound? Except that getting Brexit done will do more to keep the wretched subject at the top of every news bulletin and on the front of every newspaper than staying in the EU for years to come. But now is not the time to drone about Brexit. It’s about how Labour won’t win with its current leadership.

Corbyn’s horrible past, including his close associations with terrorists, his opposition to all military intervention including Syria and preventing genocide in the former Yugoslavia, his tolerance of widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, making it an unsafe place for Jews, and his all round unsuitability to be Labour leader, never mind prime minister, mean I cannot support a Labour Party led by him. A vote for even a moderate Labour candidate is a vote to make Corbyn PM. That’s a step too far for me.

Expect a horrible, chaotic, nasty Tory party to take back control of our country from Friday 13th December. Then, Labour will have one final opportunity to step back from the disastrous experiment with Corbynism and return Labour to the centre left which is the only place from which it can win. In that event, in the wake of a Tory victory, I’m willing to either rejoin Labour or pay my £3 to try to elect a leader who might take Labour back to sanity. That, I believe, for mainstream Labour folk, could be the final battle.