Against All This Humbug And Garbage

Fleet Street's most pro-Corbyn columnist, Peter Hitchens writes:

It’s now plain that our supposedly super-accurate RAF bombers have done very little in Syria since the great Parliamentary vote on the subject. If the military need was so urgent, why is this so?

It seemed to me at the time and seems to me now that Parliament and the government’s regiment of media toadies were actually being invited to authorise raids on Jeremy Corbyn.

The government also wanted to implicate us in some way in military action in Syria, presumably to make Saudi Arabia happy and to make deeper engagement possible later – if we can find a way of backing the pro-Saudi rebels who have done so much to turn Syria into anarchy and ruins. 

But the ridiculous praise for Hilary Benn’s fatuous speech, regarded as Churchillian by the sort of people who think Downton Abbey is great drama, and the Labour applause for it, were the real victory.

Had the Oldham by-election the following day, on 3rd December, gone the other way, the Blairites in New Labour would have mounted a putsch against Jeremy Corbyn, and tried to recapture their party from its annoying members.

This sort of thing has been done to the Tories, when IDS, a far less competent leader than Mr Corbyn, was overthrown by a supersmooth, pinstriped putsch.

The timing of the Syria debate, in retrospect, looks rather suspicious. There was no special military or diplomatic reason, as is quite obvious now, for holding it that night.

The only reason for hurry was the Oldham poll. There was nothing else on the grid that couldn’t be altered. 

A humiliation for Mr Corbyn on Wednesday night at Westminster and another one on Thursday night in Oldham Town Hall, and the brave boys of New Labour would have acted.

Alas for Blairism, the people of Oldham didn’t do as the Blairites wanted. This, of course was immediately said to be in spite of Jeremy Corbyn, and not to his credit.

If it had gone the other way, it would, I promise you, have been entirely his fault, and the people’s verdict on Corbynism.

David Cameron and his media helpers really, really want to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Cameron’s attitude towards Mr Corbyn at Question Time is one of real, venomous enmity. 

He ignores Mr Corbyn’s actual questions (this week those questions were by common consent pertinent and well-asked), and instead fans the undisguised and inevitable hostility between Mr Corbyn and his MPs. 

Why does he do this? You’d think he’d want to keep Mr Corbyn there, if he’s as awful and useless as we are constantly being told.

On Channel Four News last night (a programme which might once have been a good deal more sympathetic to Corbynism than it would now like to admit, having become a Blairite organ like all the rest), there was speculation after the supposedly disastrous Labour reshuffle that we were heading for a one-party state, as Labour is now so enfeebled.

Again, you’d think the Tories would like that. But they plainly don’t.

The identifiable sycophants of David Cameron in the media are dedicated to attacks on Mr Corbyn, attacks so relentless that you would think there was nothing else to write about, that the economy was fine rather than poised on a precipice, that the NHS was perfect rather than in increasingly deep difficulties, and that the Prime Minister’s attempts to escape his EU referendum pledge (a hopeless, illogical tangle) were going well. 

Not to mention disasters visible to me daily such as the hopeless delay on the electrification of the Great Western mainline, miles behind timetable and mountains of money over budget. 

Let’s forget HS2 and the Heathrow expansion, or the relentless slither towards a Scottish secession, and the utter failure of all attempts to control our borders.

No, the most important thing in politics turns out to be whether Mike Who swaps jobs with Brenda What, and if Stan Nobody has quit his non-job as deputy minister for Tramways and Fine Arts, in protest at the easing out of Albert Whatsit from his non-job as Shadow Secretary of State for Wind Farms.

Billed for weeks as the ‘revenge reshuffle’,  it was supposed to be a sort of Westminster version of the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones, with the Shadow Cabinet corridor knee-deep in blood and littered with grotesque political corpses and the weltering, obscene figures of the dying,  crying ‘treachery!’ and ‘murder!’ 

What, I wonder, was the source for this fantasy? I don’t think Mr Corbyn talks much to the Parliamentary Lobby, who he rightly recognises are not his friends.

The actual event, in which great crowds of reporters hung about stairwells and lift-shafts trying to find something, anything interesting to write about, involved Jeremy Corbyn boring  a few colleagues half to death with conciliatory, polite conversations, and getting rid of a few people from unpaid, unimportant jobs because they disagreed with him about major policy issues.

Well, I never. A party leader who wants allies in his Shadow Cabinet. Well,  I never. A party leader whose authority comes from the old-fashioned left-wing party membership clashing with a new-fashioned left-wing Parliamentary Party whose authority comes from their endorsement by the media and the money men who decide who’s top in politics.

For the first time in my life, this country is actually coming to resemble the Marxist caricature of crude money and power, concentrated in a power elite,  versus the disdained people – a caricature that has never hitherto been true at all and which does not prove that the Marxists were right.

For the power and the money are all lined up on the side of the revolutionary radicals of Blairism,  whose origins, even if they don’t know it, lie in the raw pre-Lenin and pre-Kautsky Marxism of 1848 –fanatical egalitarians ready to wreck the education of millions for an ideology, wild, dogmatic warmists ready to wreck our economy for the sake of their faith, flingers-open of borders at any cost, wagers of liberal wars and bombing campaigns, overthrowers of foreign governments which don’t conform to their desires, servile slaves of foreign authorities which accord with their desires, viciously intolerant promoters of the most all-embracing social and cultural theory since the Reformation.

To these people, now dominating the House of Commons, the media and the academy, Mr Corbyn is (paradoxically) an infuriatingly conservative person, who (for the wrong reasons, but never mind) keeps open the possibility that they might be wrong, and (worse) that they might one day be defeated by discontent. 

He thinks in categories they have long ago abandoned, nation, class and history. His old-fashioned good manners alone are a reproach to the modern go-getter who has none. No, no, I don’t agree with him. [Yes, you do. A lot.] Don’t get carried away.

But they loathe him just as much as they loathe me, and for what is basically the same reason. Anyone with a memory is an obstacle to their project. The only opposition they are ready to tolerate is one that doesn’t raise any awkward questions.

They expect to beat Labour whoever leads it. But they don’t want the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, still an implicitly influential position, to haunt them with memories of when this country had a genuinely two-party system and all that went with that.

As Richard Neville said so perceptively right at the start of this revolution 50 and more years ago, ‘There is an inch of difference between the two parties – but it is in that inch that we all live’.

I think that’s it, anyway.  I just felt like letting rip against all this humbug and garbage.