Genuinely Original

The political commentator's political commentator, Peter Oborne, is back in print, and with any luck will not be doing in 2020 what he and several other paleocon columnists did in 2015, when they stopped short of endorsing Labour even though that was the only logic of their position:

Every rich and powerful person in Britain desperately hopes that Jeremy Corbyn will fall flat on his face at the Labour Party conference, which starts in Brighton tomorrow.

The bankers want him to fail, as do the businessmen who finance the modern Labour Party. The mass media are enemies. The BBC has abandoned its traditional neutrality over what it calls ‘Left-wing Jeremy Corbyn’ (why doesn’t it refer to ‘Right-wing David Cameron’?) 

Tony Blair and his supporters hate Corbyn. Having failed to prevent his meteoric rise, they and their apologists in the London media establishment are now plotting his downfall.

Britain’s morally bankrupt security establishment — the very same that duped the Blair government into an insane war against Iraq — despises Corbyn. One serving British Army general disgracefully talks of disobeying his commands if he becomes Prime Minister, raising the dreadful spectre of a military coup.

For my part I will, if you’ll forgive the perversity, next week be wholeheartedly cheering on Corbyn.

This is not because I have much time for many of his views. His opposition to what he calls ‘austerity’ can only be described as irresponsible.

His signature plan for renationalising the railway service is demented. Anyone who travels regularly by train, as I do, knows that privatised rail provides a vastly improved service to the old state-run British Rail, whose habitual incompetence was a national disgrace. (Perhaps Corbyn, a Londoner who favours the bicycle, does not travel enough on trains to realise this.) 

No, the reason I will be cheering on Corbyn is because I am a passionate, lifelong believer in our superlative parliamentary democracy.

Any student of the history of British politics knows that our nation was formed by the resounding clash of great ideas. This baffles other countries, even democratic ones.

The European Union insists on mediocre conformity. Anyone who disagrees with the euro-federal idea is frozen out, one of the many reasons why the European project is destined to fail.

In dictatorships such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, the penalty for challenging the political consensus is torture and death. In the United States, politics has become the plaything of billionaires.

In Britain we have a very different tradition: red-blooded confrontation. Yet in recent decades we have turned our back on that superb inheritance.

It started in the 1990s, when the political process was captured by the ‘modernisers’. This happened first with Blairites in Labour, and later in David Cameron’s Conservatives — with both men competing for the centre ground, and both loudly proclaiming their modernising credentials at the expense of their traditional supporters.

The result was that the main parties looked and sounded identical. Between them they abolished real political debate. Anyone who disagreed with conventional opinion, for example over Europe or mass immigration, was labelled an ‘extremist’.

All three mainstream parties despised the views of ordinary voters. They produced identical leaders, in their mid-40s with no experience of the world.

They viewed politics as being about technique rather than ideas. They viewed political argument as akin to advertising margarine or soap powder.

The consequences of this have been tragic for Britain. Blairite contempt for Labour’s working-class supporters led directly to the rise of the Scottish National Party.

The triumph of the spin and focus group-obsessed modernisers led to the collapse in trust in politics, especially among the young.

That is why we should celebrate Jeremy Corbyn, the first authentic leader of a mainstream political party since Margaret Thatcher.

It stands to reason that he should be hated and plotted against by the political establishment. Just like Maggie Thatcher 40 years ago, he despises everything they stand for. They despise him back.

There is, furthermore, one substantive policy issue where I believe Jeremy Corbyn has many interesting things to say. This is foreign policy.

Since the rise of the modernisers, there has been a very troubling consensus on foreign affairs. Tory and Labour have agreed that, come what may, Britain would never defy the will of the United States.

This consensus led Britain into the double follies of Afghanistan and Iraq, which was the biggest and most terrible foreign policy calamity of modern British history.

When the Chilcot report is finally published, it is certain to provide deeply embarrassing details of how the British establishment fawned to Washington.

Elsewhere, there is abundant evidence that Tony Blair’s determination to appease the U.S. caused Britain to forget our values, and facilitate the torture of terror suspects.

While the worst of these excesses took place when Blair was PM, David Cameron has culpably failed to force an investigation into the British role in torture.

Let’s imagine, by contrast, that Jeremy Corbyn had been directing British foreign policy over the past 15 years.

British troops would never have got involved in the Iraq debacle, and never have been dispatched on their doomed mission to Helmand province. British intelligence agents would not be facing allegations that they were complicit in torture.

Hundreds of British troops who died in these Blairite adventures (which were endorsed by Cameron) would still be alive.

Furthermore, the world would now be a safer place.

Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq and David Cameron’s attack on Libya have created huge ungoverned zones of anarchy across the Middle East and North Africa, in which terrorist groups fester and from which migrants flee.

That is why Conservative claims that Jeremy Corbyn would jeopardise our national security are so wrong-headed. His foreign policy advice has often been wiser by far than the foreign policy establishment.

Yes, of course, he’s surrounded by a ragbag of somewhat dubious characters: his shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, whose competence is very much open to question, is way to the Left of him.

And, of course, Corbyn has questions to answer. He has been too forgiving of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose rule is based on corruption and violence.

And, yes, he deserves huge condemnation for uncritically sharing platforms with unsavoury people from terrorist groups. And he naively does not seem to recognise that there are times when foreign intervention can work.

But these serious shortcomings apart, he has brought a wonderful freshness to British politics. And while he has many unpalatable things to say, many need saying.

No one who is loathed by the bankers, the BBC and Tony Blair all at once can be that bad.

Corbyn is the first genuinely original party leader to emerge in Britain since a certain Margaret Hilda Thatcher made her first speech to Conservative conference in 1975.

Remember: the establishment hated her, too.