Discontent

On and on Philip Hammond went about Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party Conference. He gave no impression that he himself was in Government. Corbyn's raft of measures that are normal throughout Europe was, with boring predictability, held up as "Marxist", "Venezuelan", "Zimbabwean", and "back to the Seventies".

In fact, though, the Winter of Discontent would never have happened if the Labour Government of the day had indeed been in the pocket of the trade unions, and it occurred in reaction to that Government's turn to monetarism more than a year earlier. If there was anything "Marxist" about that Government, then that was entirely lost on the many Marxists who were very much a part of the British scene in the 1970s.

Hammond warned that "the trade union barons" were throwing  their weight and power behind Corbyn. But if there are still "trade union barons", then what was the point of Margaret Thatcher? He also claimed that Corbyn and John McDonnell were breaking a 35-year consensus, as if such a lack of debate had been a good thing in itself, and as if the admittedly rare Conservative attacks on the Blair and Brown Governments had been all an act. Say it ain't so. McDonnell was even castigated for having seen the Crash coming. I mean, the nerve of him.

Hammond clearly longed for the days when political debate consisted in nothing more than Daily Telegraph articles that mocked their uncomprehending readers by pretending to get worked up on their behalf about foxhunting or hereditary peers (such as the one who chaired Northern Rock when it went bust, to which Hammond's speech referred, but who seems to have done all right out of it). Thus was the pretence of a robust exchange of ideas able to be maintained during the 20 years when the only people who wanted to talk about economic or foreign policy were "museum pieces" and "dinosaurs" such as Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.

All in all, Hammond was like Tim Kaine, about whom you have probably forgotten. Kaine had a regular "aw shucks" line about how he had never lost an election. Well, he has lost an election now. Similarly, the likes of Philip Hammond are just going to have to live with the fact that the debate is no longer closed to people who do not happen to agree with him, and who are not even prepared to pretend to take seriously his ludicrous suggestion that measures that were normal throughout Europe were "Marxist", "Venezuelan", "Zimbabwean", or "back to the Seventies".