"He was a member of the BNP but he never said anything racist"

Today marks something of an epiphany. I had, sort of, assumed that the Labour Party would eventually get round to sorting itself out on the matter of antisemitism. After all, being a Jew is recognised as an ethnic designation - in the words of our equalities laws, a 'protected charcteristic'. This means that language attacking Jewish people on the basis of their Jewish identity is a 'hate crime'.

The revelation that the leader of the Labour Party was a member of a "secret" forum on Facebook that seems to have specialised in antisemitism was pretty shocking. But it is only half as shocking as the reaction of Labour members and supporters to this revelation. With a few notable exceptions, Labour MPs, councillors and activists responded to the existence of this forum and Mr Corbyn's involvement with what amounts to a shrug. If these folk said anything it amounted to "nobody cares" - probably because there are only 300,000 or so Jews in Britain making racism towards them pretty marginal in political terms.

When poked or pushed the typical reaction from Labour members has been to make excuses for Mr Corbyn - like this:

...being a member of a group where obnoxious views are expressed does not mean that you share them. Unless there is clear evidence, such as a racist post or a like of a racist post by an individual it is merely circumstantial, and at worst cause for concern.

So Mr Corbyn is invited to join a group full of racists, chooses to join the group (we'll give him the benefit of the doubt on whether he checked out the group before joining) and remains a member for at least two years. During that period we're expected to believe that Mr Corbyn didn't witness a single antisemitic trope, meme or statement even though he appears to have helped (or so the people involved said) organise a meeting of some sort - here's a letter to Mr Corbyn from Joan Ryan, Labour MP for Enfield North:



It may be - I haven't seen - that Mr Corbyn denies helping organise this meeting or deflects it by passing off the organisational blame onto his office but, for me at least, this shows that he was actively engaged with the people running the group who were (judging from their posts) deeply antisemitic. It's not just a case of being a member and occasionally posting.

Overwhelmingly the membership of the Labour Party is not antisemitic but, when the leader and people around the leader are closely associated with antisemites, you have to ask whether the sort of "Jeremy's not antisemitic he was just on a forum full of antisemites" argument gets thinner and thinner. We've not quite got there yet but it's getting close to the position where the defence is effectively: "he was a member of the BNP but he never said anything racist". And people who remain in the Labour Party without, at the very least, questioning whether the Party has a problem are pretty complicit in perpetuating the too widely held view that being racist to Jews isn't as bad as other forms of racism.

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Why nationalising the water industry is a stupid idea

Firstly here's Sky News' business editor:

The nadir came when, during the drought of 1976, millions of people in Yorkshire, Wales, the Midlands, East Anglia, Devon and Cornwall had their household water supply cut off due to shortages and were forced instead to queue in the street for water from standpipes.

Privatisation enabled investment. More than £130bn has been ploughed into the industry since 1989 - a sum unimaginable under state ownership - and standards have shot up.

There have been plenty of long, hot summers since but, thanks to investment in new reservoirs and pipes, households have not had to endure their supply being cut off as they did in 1976.

That's the deal folks. Some people made some profits and in exchange we got £130bn invested in our water supplies, sewerage, clean beaches, unpolluted rivers and a pile of other services. That's £130bn that the government didn't have to borrow and you didn't have to pay taxes for.

Next, let's look at what happens when government runs the water supply:

According to a class-action lawsuit, the state Department of Environmental Quality was not treating the Flint River water with an anti-corrosive agent, in violation of federal law. The river water was found to be 19 times more corrosive than water from Detroit, which was from Lake Huron, according to a study by Virginia Tech.

Since the water wasn't properly treated, lead from aging service lines to homes began leaching into the Flint water supply after the city tapped into the Flint River as its main water source.

Health effects of lead exposure in children include impaired cognition, behavioral disorders, hearing problems and delayed puberty. In pregnant women, lead is associated with reduced fetal growth. In everyone, lead consumption can affect the heart, kidneys and nerves. Although there are medications that may reduce the amount of lead in the blood, treatments for the adverse health effects of lead have yet to be developed.

Nationalising Britain's water services is a really stupid idea.

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If it's such a good idea, Jeremy, set one up...

The leader of the Labour Party has been talking about business (while smiling benignly at his youth wing who want to nationalise Greggs). He tweeted this:

Imagine an Uber run co-operatively by their drivers, collectively controlling their futures, with profits shared or re-invested.

Splendid. There are some great worker-owned businesses - John Lewis, Arup and so forth - although none of them started that way. But the implication of Corbyn's comments sound a little more sinister - even a hint of some form of nationalisation for dear old Uber.

But seriously, if it's such a good idea to have a ride share co-op, Jeremy, why not set one up? No-one's stopping you (except maybe the Mayor of London and his Black Cab mates).

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It's not just the economy, stupid - a lesson from Alinsky for conservatives

Politics is about the economy. This truth has, for most of recent history, dominated the manner in which elections have been fought and to a large degree the outcomes of those elections have been determined by the economy. When James Carville hung that sign - "it's the economy, stupid" - on the wall of Bill Clinton's campaign office, he summed up this political certainty.

Because of this certainty, politicians and, perhaps more significantly, political campaign managers began to focus their attention on economics rather than marketing strategy. These folk assumed that if you got your message right on the economy and economic management and won the argument by undermining the other side's economic credibility then you win. Every time.

And is certainly seemed that way. Bill Clinton won in 1992 by remorselessly talking up recession (a recession caused by his predecessor, of course). John Major delivered a Conservative majority in that same year by positioning his government as trustworthy on economic policy and Kinnock's Labour as risky. The same goes in Germany, Japan and Canada - everywhere you looked the secret was to be boringly reliable and trustworthy on the economy. Do that and the mantle of office falls onto your shoulders.

It seems that our presumption - that the macroeconomy is what matters - may have been misplaced. Here's Graeme Archer looking over someone's shoulder on the train:

You don’t intend to read over the shoulder of the person next to you on the tube, do you, but it’s unavoidable. The well-dressed young woman on the Northern Line on Wednesday was scratching away in a very expensive notebook. The novel in my hands turned to dust, and I swivelled my eyes at her writing.

Top of the page: “Objective: financial security.” Then a new line: “Need: £20,000 to be debt free.”

I didn’t read any more. The thought of twenty grand’s worth of (I’d guess) credit card and student loan debt makes me feel sick, even experienced second-hand.

The economy isn't a thing separate from the real lives of ordinary people, yet this is precisely the manner in which we speak of it. The newspapers and self-important parts of broadcast media are filled with earnest people talking about 'charts' and 'models' and 'forecasts' as if these grand aggregations of ordinary decisions mean anything to the real lives of ordinary people.

In 2008 all this changed although we didn't notice at the time. We assumed that the election of Barak Obama was, like elections always are, determined by the US economy crashing into the wall under a Republican president. Here's a bit of a clue:

"I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday."

Confirming that Obama was trained in Chicago by the Alinsky apparatus, David Alinsky wrote: "It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well."

Describing how the Democratic National Convention was a "perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style," David Alinsky wrote: "All the elements were present: the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd's chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people."

America had elected a 'community organiser', a campaigner. For sure, Obama was less of an outsider than some claimed but his election represented a change from the 'it's the economy, stupid' approach to campaigning. And remember, given the circumstances in the USA back then, the core victory for Obama wasn't the actual presidential election but was his win, from behind against a dominant and well-branded opponent, in the Democratic primaries.

Scroll forward a few years to 2016 and we witness two shocks - the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. In both cases that community organiser approach delivered - in the UK the Remain campaign was entirely old school: 'it's the economy, stupid' while those campaigning for Leave shifted the focus to that Alinsky-style human interest. There were rallies, debates, the use of social media and that on-the-ground spread of a message that made people believe they really could vote their lives better. And they did - Brexit won.

Now put aside your distaste and ignore what the BBC has told you. Donald Trump's campaign took all the lessons from Obama's 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination and applied them for a social media age. Read that letter from Alinsky's son again:

"...the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd's chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people."

This describes Trump's campaign to the letter - add in social media which was in its infancy in 2008 and you have the recipe for his election. Despite him being a really weak candidate without an obvious base for support and without the financial resources available to the Clinton campaign.

All this brings us to 2017. A UK general election with the Conservatives out of sight in the polls and Labour led by Jeremy Corbyn, a leader who three-quarters of his MPs had no confidence in. The result was another shock as Labour climbed and the Conservative's lost their majority. Had it not been for the successful and different campaign by Scottish Conservtives the results would have been worse still.

Why? Right now we're talking about how bad the Conservative campaign was (just as we've done when we talk about the 2016 US elections) - over-centralised, too leader-focused, a dreadful manifesto and a campaign seemingly without bite or passion. And all this may be true but it doesn't really explain - after all the Conservative vote and share of the vote went up. Most of us would have been chuffed to bits getting over 42% of the vote in a general election.

The big story isn't the Conservatives but Labour. The Corbyn phenomenon, just like Obama and just like Trump, leaps straight from the pages of Alinsky - it is the victory of a community organiser against the established 'it's the economy, stupid' strategy. The story is no longer who sounds most credible talking about those macroeconomic charts and models but rather who can offer hope and change to that woman on Graeme Archer's train. Plus a million other stories - about people's health, jobs, education, pension and benefits - that fit into an organiser's narrative and motivate women on trains to become women at rallies.

Obama, Trump, Brexit, Corbyn - Melenchon in France, Bernie Sanders in the US, even the sainted Juston Trudeau in Canada - all changed how we campaign whether from left, right or centre. The old certainties - 'it's the economy, stupid' - are broken down by it being millions of different and personal economies that matter. Yours, mine and that woman on the train.

The Conservative Party remains trapped in the model of campaigning that didn't work for Clinton, didn't work for Remain, and didn't work a few weeks ago for May. It's not about how many Facebook ads you buy - that's just astroturf - but about an actual campaign run by committed campaigners. One irony is that the bussing of campaigners around in the 2015 election that caused so much hoo-hah, is much closer to the sort of campaigning we need.

In the end though, I'm struck by two things. Firstly that typically conservative folk aren't all that interested in politics - which is why Leave and Trump looked to a very different demographic for their shock troops. And secondly that, despite the apparant triumph of these populist campaigns, just as many voters are not taken in by the 'hope' and 'change' message when it doesn't come with a coherent policy message.

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Marches and rallies are professions of faith not mere political acts

In his novel 'Necromancer', Gordon Dickson explored the differing traits in human personality. The book acts as a prequal to Dickson's best known work, the Dorsai trilogy. One of the traits or types - alongside military, spiritual and scientific - was one based on faith. In 'Soldier, Ask Not' the second in the Dorsai trilogy, Dickson casts this 'trait of faith' in the manner of a sombre, puritan religion and explores ideas of unquestioning loyalty, community and conformity to rules.

But the origins of these 'Friendlies' that Dickson sets out in ' Necromancer' were what he called marching societies a group of cults whose typical modus operandi was to march through the streets chanting slogans. Now while the book paints these marchers as religious in motivation, Dickson is clear that the link is faith - undoubting belief that something is true regardless of criticism, evidence or argument:

“Let me attest as if it were only for myself. Suppose that you could give me proof that all our Elders lied, that our very Covenant was false. Suppose that you could prove to me”—his face lifted to mine and his voice drove at me—“that all was perversion and falsehood, and nowhere among the Chosen, not even in the house of my father, was there faith or hope! If you could prove to me that no miracle could save me, that no soul stood with me, and that opposed were all the legions of the universe, still I, I alone, Mr. Olyn, would go forward as I have been commanded, to the end of the universe, to the culmination of eternity. For without my faith I am but common earth. But with my faith, there is no power can stay me!”

It's important that, in understanding politics, we appreciate that this faith is as important as the measured, supposedly rational debate that we pretend motivates the politically active. It has, for me at least, been a matter of curiosity why thousands of people who are otherwise pretty normal feel the need to gather in rallies, to stage protests and to march - like Dickson's cults - along the streets waving banners while shouting slogans. When we look back at the Labour leadership campaign, we see the clash of these two approaches to politics - cynical triangulation set against a cult-like certainty of the truth in those chanted slogans. As Nick Cohen argues in this week's Spectator:

Utopias are always banal. Corbyn's Utopia allows his supporters to wallow in the warmth of self-righteousness. They want to end austerity. Stop greed. Bring peace. How they do it is not their concern. Practicalities are dangerous. They take you away from Utopia and back into the messy, Blairite realm of compromises and second-bests.

The problem is (and Cohen - along with many others - misses this) that the Blairite realm has no appeal to the political. It is essentially anti-politics at least in how it deals with the traditional certainties of the left's world view. Those traditional certainties - capitalism exploits workers, socialism is good, businessmen are greedy, Tories are uncaring - are a mantra, exclamations of faith and without them the thing that drives the activist is gone. Without them the left has no purpose and is simply a pale imitation of the cynical, corrupt Tory Party.

If this mantra of socialism, so the left believes, is shouted loudly enough and often enough its message will be heard and the workers' Utopia will come to pass. And, just as in the quote above from 'Soldier, Ask Not', it doesn't matter how often the terrible truth of that Utopia is shown the marchers simply march more and shout louder. The mounds of dead in Soviet Russia and Maoist China make no difference. The warning words in '1984', 'We' and 'Brave new World' don't dent the commitment of the faithful. Riots and bread queues in Caracas merely result in a renewed condemnation of the rich and the greedy.

The rally and the march - things that seem strange and even sinister to most people - serve the same purpose as the Sunday service does to the evangelical. They are shared proclamations of faith, occasions when the believers gather to affirm that belief. These events are as much about this shared experience as they are about changing anything - the 'Save the NHS' march doesn't do anything to achieve that aim but instead brings together the faithful in publicly professing their faith.

Today, with what's called the 'populist' right, we're seeing similar attitudes emerging blinking and unpolished from the right. This isn't really that new - the extreme right has always been a twisted reflection of the far left - except in that there's numbers and momentum. Trump, Le Pen - even Nigel Farage - use that same rhythm of repeated slogans to provide a catechism for the faithful to use. And they use the same targets as the left too - greedy bankers, corrupt politicians, the rich elites and globalisation. There's an appetite for this because the processes of democracy became the realm of marketing rather than debate or discussion. And marketing suits the simple slogans of the faithful far more than the nuanced ideas of the intellectual.

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Building more houses...(probably not)

Hardly a day passes without some politician, activist, think tank or journalist announcing that we have to build more houses. Mostly our response is "like duh" as we all know that, for about twenty-five or thirty years, we've failed - every year - to build enough houses to meet the demand for them. There are lots of reasons for this most of which have the words "planning system" somewhere within them.

"But we used to built this number of houses, you know back in the 1950s."

We did and, in the 1950s and 1960s we also built a lot of council houses. In the main these were either built on land cleared as a result of damage caused during WWII bombing or else as a result of slum clearances. In my more-or-less home patch of Penge, the roads around where my grandparents lived (in a house thankfully untouched by the bombs) are filled with blocks of flats built on the land cleared by the Luftwaffe in its failed attempts to destroy the rail infrastructure at Norwood Junction.

In Bradford, where I am now, you'll see a similar load of mostly 1960s housing where decrepit, poor quality terraced housing once stood. Typical of the 1960s this council housing features tower blocks (there are over 30 in Bradford), what are called 'walk up blocks' being lower rise flats and maisonettes in blocks without a lift, and the familiar family three-bed semis often with good gardens.

Which brings us to the latest promises:

Jeremy Corbyn has pledged that a Labour Government led by him would build one million homes in its first five years, including 500,000 council houses.

The Labour leader has said that he would “reverse a generation of underinvestment in housing” that has led to a crisis in the sector. “Decent housing is a basic human need” that successive governments have failed to provide.

Exciting stuff - a dynamic government meeting real social need (and all that guffle beloved of left wing politicians). Except for one small problem, one spotted by planner and blogger, Andrew Lainton:

Whilst welcoming expansion of social housing and council house building what evidence is there that councils and housing associations have a landbank of ‘shovel ready’ sites with planning permission to hit this?

Councils have sold off most easily developable land and most projects by even the most progressive council involve intensification of existing land such as council estates – which take time. Faced with difficult financials and cuts in funding housing associations have run down their land banks.

The fact is such targets could only be hit through private land and there is a huge risk of a public spending induced land price bubble blown up by slow progress on local plans.

This policy is introducing a 1950s level of social housing spending to a teenies level of public sector landbanks, a recipe for disaster.

From a standing start this programme would need to identify land for building, secure public ownership of that land, draw up plans, obtain permissions, contract builders and complete the homes. There really is no way that this is going to happen in five years, especially given that there isn't anything close to the capability or capacity to deliver such a building programme within local authorities and housing associations - let alone national government. And this is assuming there are the workers around to dig the foundations, lay the bricks, dry line the walls, plumb the bathrooms and install the plugs and wires a modern home requires.

Just as with the promises being made by the new Mayor of London - ones he has backed rapidly away from - these promises of rapid increases in rates of house building are not tenable. We need a more open and flexible planning system before we even start talking about accelerating the building of houses. And we need to stop treating private developers as if they are denizens of Hell's lower planes - these are the experts who are going to deliver the housing we need.

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UKIP, Momentum and the SNP are no more cults than the Liberal Democrats

I know it sometimes looks that way. Especially if you spend too much time paddling in the more febrile parts of social media. But politics has not become a contest between competing cults - Corbyn's success isn't cultic nor is euroscepticism or Scottish nationalism.

Although some seem to think so:

The political faithful dream of a glorious future: a Scotland free of English tutelage, an England free of the domination of Brussels, a Britain free of greed and poverty. Like the great religious dreams of the past, these causes take over lives. But all present formidable difficulties. In political as in religious cults, believers must be insulated against doubts. The most effective method is to blacken the outside world, and make alternative sources of information appear like the Devil’s seductions that tempt the godly into darkness. As Professors Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth put it in their study of political sectarianism: “There is only one truth — that espoused by the cult. Competing explanations are not merely inaccurate but degenerate”.

Calling the forces challenging your world view a cult is a convenient excuse for worldly wise Guardian readers safe in their well-paid publicly-funded jobs. Now it's true that these causes do take over the lives of a few people - all of the causes and their leaders have a collection of fan-children, resplendent with badges, hands tightly clutching banners, faces suffused with joy at the sight of their campaign's human manifestation. But the people turning out to a damp Corbyn rally, sitting on uncomfortable village hall chair waiting for Nigel Farage or handing out yellow and black leaflets to Glasgow commuters - these folk aren't members of a cult but really do want things to change.

Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn aren't the leaders of cults but are the fortunate beneficiaries of people's political will - admittedly not all the people (so far it seems only Farage can lay claim to success in his campaign) but enough people to challenge the certainties of managerialist and technocratic centre-ground politics. Calling supporters of Scottish nationalism, UK independence or state socialism cultists may be jolly fun on Twitter or in your column in New Statesman or The Guardian. But it simply isn't true - or at least no more true than calling Blairites a cult - or, for that matter, doing the same for the growing band of Remain refuseniks and Brexit deniers.

It is true that we gather with people of like mind - I follow and am followed by far more West Ham fans than you because I'm a West Ham fan. And, in amongst the banter and vigorous discussion of why we haven't got a right back, we behave very similarly to those political in-groups with particular enemies and consistent lines of comment. Indeed, that group of West Ham fans will moan about how we're always last on Match of the Day, how teams like Chelsea and Liverpool get far too much coverage, and how the football authorities have it in for us. This doesn't make us a cult any more than very similar assertions by followers of Corbyn or over-enthusiastic cybernats makes them a cult.

The real point about cults - from the Manson Family and Jonestown through to Scientology - is that they get people to two things: cut themselves off from normal society to live within the cult; and get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise have done ('free love', suicide, even murder). And cults are characterised by leaders who control and direct the actions of members - none of the political leaders we've mentioned fit this characterisation.

For all the adulation afforded Corbyn, Farage and Sturgeon they are not leaders of cults. Rather they are the vehicles through which the political mission is delivered - Scottish independence, leaving the EU and a socialist Labour Party. So long as these leaders deliver - or seem to deliver - success their position is assured. Nicola Sturgeon is the First Minister of Scotland giving nationalists the hope that the mission is still achievable. And Corbyn looks likely to have his leadership affirmed by Labour members - a victory that, in the view of Momentum supporters, sustains that momentum towards 'socialism' (however loosely defined). If, for whatever reason, either of these positions falters does anyone think supporters won't turn to a different leader to take up the cause?

Cults are not made by confirmation bias or the clustering of people as communities of interest. Cults are deliberate creations that use ideologies - religious or political - as the vehicle for gaining and securing power for power's sake (although what is meant by power will vary). The adulation, the conspiracy theories, the aggressive defence of the mission, and a 'you're either with us or agin us' attitude that we see with political movements such as separatism are not features that define a cult even if they are things we'd superficially associate with cults.

What the solid, dependable centrists need to understand is that, very often, they fit the same pattern and description (if you don't believe me check out Liberal Democrat social media). Just because your mission is defined as 'mainstream' doesn't mean it doesn't take on those same cultic characters - clustering with like minds, aggression, adulation of leaders - that are falsely attached to separatist, far-left and right-wing causes.

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Absolutely right - we shouldn't ever forget this...

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...Corbyn was a member of the board of Labour Briefing, a fringe magazine for diehard leftists that unequivocally supported the IRA’s bombing campaign. Corbyn organised the magazine’s mailing-list and was a regular speaker at its events. In December 1984, the magazine“reaffirmed its support for, and solidarity with, the Irish republican movement” noting that its “overwhelming priority as active members of the British labour movement is to fight for and secure an unconditional British withdrawal”. Only “an unconditional British withdrawal, including the disarming of the RUC and UDR, will allow for peace in Ireland. Labour briefing stands for peace, but we are not pacifists”. Moreover, “It certainly appears to be the case that the British only sit up and take notice when they are bombed into it”.

The current leader of the Labour Party supported the bombing of civilian targets by the IRA. it really is as bad as that and we should never stop telling the world the truth of his support for murderers.

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Corbyn's Labour really does hate the idea of a free press and free speech

Asked whether a Labour government would break up media monopolies, he said: "Yes. We are developing a media policy which would be about breaking up the single ownership of too many sources of information, so that we have a multiplicity of sources. And actually promoting co-operative ownership and access, including local TV and radio stations and newspapers like The Morning Star."

There are many things he says that I find chilling but this statement from Jermey Corbyn is a terrifying attack on the free press and free speech. I know you're all going to talk about how Rupert Murdoch is incredibly evil because he owns lots of media and doesn't vote Labour. I know so many want to pretend - against all the evidence to the contrary - that Murdoch's businesses have some sort of monopoly over the media and the the man himself is Henry H. Potter spinning his scrurvy webs like some sort of sinister spider.

You are wrong. If there is a media monopoly in the UK (and I don't think this is remotely the case) then it is the BBC not News International. This isn't an attack on Aunty but simply an observable truth - in terms of what people out there are watching, the BBC remains the dominant media organisation and this applies especially to news.

What Jeremy Corbyn, in his pretty typical hard left way, is saying is that the private ownership of media with the aim of turning a profit results in distorted news. The argument will run on to suggest that monopolies in media are therefore a problem and need to be broken up. Yet the UK does not have a media environment that features any sort of monopoly (unless you look at the BBC, of course). If you focus just on national newspapers this still isn't true even though Rupert Murdoch 'controls' a goodly chunk of them. And more to the point those newspapers no longer represent people's preferred source of news - we've the TV, the radio, our lap-tops and increasingly assorted apps on our smartphones. Twitter and Facebook are probably more important as news sources than The Times or The Guardian these days.

No, the real reason Jeremy Corbyn wants to control the press is because - as he noted just before that comment above in the Morning Star - it is critical of what his 'caring, sharing new politics' is about. So just like his pals on Bradford council wanting to ban folk they disagree with, Corbyn wants to cripple a diverse media environment through threats of 'break-up', seizure and control. We are reminded again that Labour really does hate the idea of a free press.

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The problem with Jeremy Corbyn is his values not just his policies

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So what is my problem with Jeremy Corbyn asks the wise man? Why, when I normally eschew personal criticism, do I focus so much on Corbyn's image and rhetoric rather than the substance of his policies?

I thought I'd try and explain that it's a matter of values. Rather than posting this picture and article, I'll explain that Corbyn's personal values embrace violence, reject personal freedom, oppose choice and reject individual responsibility.

Vicariously enjoying violence is not an unusual trait in politicians (from right and left) and especially male politicians. Whether it's the image of "a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other", Mussolini's fetishing of uniforms or John McDonnell's 'colourful use of language', politicians like violence. We're forever "attacking", "fighting for", and proposing "wars against".

What is especially galling about Corbyn is that, while embracing Sinn Fein/PIRA and assorted violent men from the middle east, he claims that this revelling in violent politics is done for the cause of 'peace', to 'stop war'. Such posturing is excusable in a 20 year-old student activist but demonstrates a sad lack of maturity in a 65 year-old professional politician aspiring to national leadership. Yet Corbyn has shown - right up to today - that his values embrace political violence and make no distinction between this and legitimate acts of self-defence by recognised nation states.

But then Corbyn also fails to recognise the idea of individual freedom:

Corbyn says that he supports the repeal of the anti-union laws introduced in the 1980s (“Yes, I do”) , which prohibited flying pickets and solidarity strike action.

This includes the reintroduction of the closed shop - the acme of collectivist systems - and (back to his relationship with violence) the sort of intimidation we saw all too often prior to the protections granted by those union laws.

Increasingly, those branded “scabs” by the strikers were targeted both at work and at home: windows were smashed, paint thrown at doors, some were even assaulted in the street. One who defied the pickets to go into Hawthorn coke works told The Northern Echo: “The more intimidation I get, the more determined I will be to stand up to them.”.

The message - one Corbyn still endorses - is that if you reject the 'collective will', you will be intimidated, pressured and attacked for that decision. If, and it seems they are, these are Jeremy Corbyn's values and the values of his sort of Labour Party I feel entirely justified in criticising.

And Corbyn's collectivism leads to him also rejecting choice and responsibility:

... Corbyn was one of first MPs to call for a smoking ban (in 1989). He has demanded ‘education and regulation’ — including bans on adverts — to try to wean British kids off junk food. He sees mankind as a pox on the planet (humans are ‘obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised’, said a parliamentary motion he signed).

This viewpoint - that we are blowing around in the hurricane of international capitalism incapable of making real choices or controlling our lives - is a common one on the left (and not so left) but when it is wedded to collectivist groupthink and the celebrating of political violence it forms a value system verging on the evil. And I know that is a strong word but if you think violence in the prosecution of political ends is fine, reject the idea of humans as individuals with free will and promote the idea that we are all victims of a shadowy entity called 'capitalism' or 'neoliberalism' then I struggle to think of a better word.

It doesn't matter how soft spoken you are, how nice your allotment is or which football team you can exchange banter about, if your values reject freedom and rejoice in violence I will have a problem with you. I hope - for the sake of the Labour Party and British democracy - that Corbyn's values, expressed again and again through his four decades as an activist and MP, turn out to be just words. But until this is demonstrated, I shall condemn those values and the man who espouses them.

But to return to the Brighton bomb. I have friends who were there that day. And while I understand the need to find peace and sustain that peace, I cannot find it in my heart to excuse murdering people in a political cause or people who acted as useful idiots and cheerleaders for those undertaking that political violence.

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The Labour Party may be dead. All the noise and flag-waving means we haven't yet noticed.

The Labour Party

Part of me wants to crack open the champagne, let off party poppers and party the night away - after all I'm a Conservative. The rest is just a little more circumspect. The Labour Party - one of Britain's two great parties - has taken collective leave of its senses and set itself on the path to oblivion. And so long as it proceeds zombie-like to lurch across the land there's no room for a sensible, intelligent left-of-centre opposition to the current Conservative majority government.

Perhaps I'm wrong about this. Maybe Jeremy Corbyn will show himself to be a pragmatic, responsive politician able to bridge the gap between the worried public sector workers and students who've elected him and the bedrock of labour support. But Corbyn's record over a lifetime of political activism doesn't indicate that this is very likely. We're going to get opposition based solely on the politics of protest and the championing of the Left's unique sense of moral entitlement.

Corbyn is the man who signed a motion that said this:

"Humans represent the most obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and [we look] forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the earth and wipes them out, thus giving nature the opportunity to start again"

More than the fraternising with terrorists and murders, more than the knee-jerk anti-Americanism, more than the hugging of communist dictators in attractive and warm South American countries this little quote sums us the utter childishness of Corbyn's politics. For this man it's not a serious business of try to manage a complex system of government so as to better the lives of ordinary folk, rather its a long march to an infantile socialist paradise. And we know the cost of these marches - they take us tramping to penury and oppression than striding, as if in some Soviet poster, into a future of freedom and wealth.

Strong opposition isn't about taking to the streets. It's not about direct action or strikes or signing endless petitions calling for something or other to happen or not happen. Strong opposition isn't about unyielding adherence to a line even when it's clear that line means nothing and does nothing to get closer to government. Good opposition is about holding the government to account - debating and questioning its policies, amending and adapting its bills, and above all setting out a credible and believable agenda for government.

However much I try, I can see none of this good opposition in Jeremy Corbyn. All we see is posture, flag-waving, an echo chamber of left-wing indulgence, and the complete refusal to engage even slightly with the concerns of the British public. This may seem like a revolution to starry-eyed students and like revenge to a bunch of old trots and useful idiots but it's actually a stake rammed through the heart of the Labour Party.

And for all my smiles at the prospect of another ten years of Tory government, I can't help but feel sorry for those good people on the centre-left of British politics who've seen their Party taken away from them by the very forces of reaction that tried to destroy it thirty years ago. As a very good friend posted:

I am taking a break from Facebook. After 34 years as an active labour member and 36 years as a labour supporter and voter I can't watch an old friend commit political suicide.

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Some of us have known for years that the far left is extremely unpleasant

"If you don't vote for Corbyn, you're a TORY SCUM""

I've paid more attention to the Labour leadership contest than perhaps I should. Not because it's unimportant but because (given I've no vote in the matter) it isn't something I can influence. Still it's a fascinating episode in our political history - we're watching one of the UK's dominant parties split into two factions that are, to be mild, aren't getting on together very well.

As an outsider I can only observe that the moderate wing of the Labour Party is experiencing what those of us who really are Tories have experienced for decades - a seemingly unstoppable tirade of, often childish and seldom intelligent, abuse. Those chants of "Tory scum, here we come" still echo and we smile as we watch uncompromising left-wingers applying the term 'Tory' to anyone who is slightly to the right of Dennis Skinner - I'm sure that none of us ever expected people like Harriet Harman, Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock to attract that epithet.

At the moment the focus is on the fact that these abusive left-wingers are 'Corbyn supporters' making their relentless offence on Labour's mainstream part of that campaign, a sort of pressure on MPs, councillors and others seen as representatives of the Party. The message is consistent - you're not properly committed to 'change' or 'progressive politics' unless you publicly come out in support of Jeremy Corbyn. And this cavalcade of baseless personal attack is accompanied by those very same supporters posting Corbyn's repeated claim that he "doesn't do abuse". Truth is that Corbyn doesn't have to do personal attacks, character assassination and trolling of Labour members who don't support him because he has an army of unpleasant folk who will do that work for him.

And these extremists don't just stop at abuse they extend this to a direct threat:

She revealed that one Labour councillor, who she declined to name, had been threatened with deselection for supporting her. “You cannot have people being threatened because they have different views or support different candidates. That is unacceptable,” she said.

When someone as dependably left-of-centre as Karl Turner gets this treatment you know that the Party has a problem. And it's a problem that won't go away once the leadership question is settled - too much insult, vitriol and threat has been thrown about (overwhelmingly by the hard left supporters of Corbyn) for the wounds to heal easily. Are those Corbyn supporters currently directing abuse at a councillor who has come out in support of another leadership candidate going to turn out in the rain to deliver his leaflets, knock on doors and make the case for someone they think is a Tory?

The sad fact in all this is that, as a real Tory for forty years, I understand entirely how the left behaves - the lunatic fringe is violent, vulgar, aggressive, judgemental and bigoted and the rest of the left smile benignly at all this as they secretly punch the air at this sort of quote:

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

Those same Labour supporters who downloaded 'The Witch is Dead" when Margaret Thatcher died are now getting upset because some more-left-wing-than-thou comrades as spewing the same insulted in their direction. The left indulges its aggressive, violent bigots but now the campaign is inside the Labour Party those same people who used to polish their anti-Tory credentials by quoting Nye Bevan or Clement Attlee find themselves attacked as 'Tories'. As I wrote a while back:

You see Nye Bevan was wrong. Comprehensively wrong about almost everything. But this did not matter as this man could wallow in ignorance and bigotry, could opt for the insult above the evidence and could paint his opponents as evil. And his Party loved him for it. Loved him for his insults, for his uncompromising hatred of not just the Conservative Party but of Conservatives.

Men like Bevan set the tone for the manner in which Socialists debate - not just the 'lower then vermin' gibe but the genesis for "Tory scum, here we come". All this ferocious insult mixed in with hyperbolic predictions of gloom and despondency - or what the layman might term "outright lies".

The aggression, the insults, the damning caricatures - all these things cover up the fact that the far left's agenda is an agenda of despair and, as we know from Russia, from Cuba, from Venezuela, from any number of African countries, a recipe for poverty, economic chaos and oppression. The far left sanctifies racist murderers like Che Guevara, idolises terrorist apologists like Sinn Fein, and defines its position on the basis of hating Conservatives. And proposes state confiscation of private property accompanied by the economics of the madhouse - price controls, protectionism, high taxes on investment and the effective hounding out of anyone brave enough to try and create new value or new wealth.

Those Labour moderates with their head in their hands dreading the prospect of a Jeremy Corbyn leadership need to remember that it is their indulging of the nasty, bigoted far left that made it possible. Whether its laughing at Dennis Skinner's snippy little comments or hosting Cuba solidarity events, the moderate left failed to remove the nasty cancer of extreme socialism. Now those moderates see the far left for what it is - extremely unpleasant. As a Tory, I've known this for forty years. Welcome to the club.

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