The Labour party now has as its main objective the establishment of a socialist one-party republic. The Leader of the Opposition is a neo-communist, as is his shadow chancellor. They associate with neo-communist groups, like Owen Jones’s People’s Assembly. The people Jeremy Corbyn is recruiting as his advisers follow in this tradition. They seem to see terrorism on British streets as a possible path to power.
Of course, as I have written before, they cannot openly admit their communism as the use of the c-word has invited ridicule since the fall of the Berlin Wall, if not before. The MPs of the Parliamentary Labour Party, most of whom did not vote for Corbyn even if some actually nominated him, are seen as irrelevant compared to the thousands of members, old and new, and the trades unions that are ranged in support of the new Labour leader. This is despite the fact that as MPs they have been elected by ordinary voters and not card-carrying union or party members and thus have the greatest democratic mandate within the party.
Labour’s rulebook makes it all but impossible to topple an incumbent Labour leader, a glaring but obviously socialistic omission compared to the party rules of the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, which have both allowed MPs to oust clear vote-losers in a timely and efficient manner. Indeed, Corbyn is proposing a change in the rules to make it certain that he cannot be ousted, or if he is, he is replaced by a fellow-thinker. Nominating Corbyn in the name of ‘widening the debate’ has been a disaster and an act of insane socialist doublethink by those MPs who did not support him.
Wanting to establish a socialist one-party republic is not a new aim of the Labour party. Leading figures of the Labour movement have wanted the establishment of a left-wing dictatorship before. The 1983 manifesto was more or less explicit about it. Back in the 1970s, the only dispute was exactly who would be in charge once this ‘socialist utopia’ had been established. Writing in The Spectator in 2009, Douglas Eden of the University of London tells of an argument between two hard-left Labour grandees:
“I can still recall the knock-down argument at Blackpool between Jack Jones and Ian Mikardo, representing the union and parliamentary wings of the pro-Soviet Left respectively, as to whether the coming far-left government of their desire would be run by the TUC General Council (or Soviet?) or the Parliamentary Labour Party. They infuriated each other, and left the meeting without shaking hands or resolving the argument. The revolution was not in question — its proponents were arguing over who should control post-revolutionary power.”
During its period of opposition, Labour came to the realisation that British voters did not want the brand of full-on socialism it was offering, and never will. It tried to come up with an excuse every time it was humiliated by the democratic political process – that the defeat was due to the voters’ false consciousness, a Marxist explanation that tries to explain the perpetual unpopularity of applied Marxism in modern capitalist societies. Of course, the fact that every country where Marxist theory has been applied in practice has resulted in misery and countless hecatombs of unnecessary civilian deaths is conveniently forgotten. The economic hell-holes of Venezuela and Cuba are wilfully ignored by Labour and the Left generally in exactly the same way as the USSR’s record and the fact that East Germany had to build a wall to imprison its population under pain of death was ignored a generation ago.
After successive defeats, Labour brought forward moderate leaders to liberalise the party into electability and to expel the communist infiltrators, however they described themselves. Reinvented as a pro-capitalist social democratic party in all but name, Tony Blair won three elections in a row. He is now a hate-figure in the party. The quarter century of liberalisation, started by Neil Kinnock when he inherited a party infested with Trotskyists, essentially yet another set of communists too embarrassed to use that name, has been undone during the disastrous leadership of Ed Miliband and the chaotic one of Jeremy Corbyn. Labour is now back to where it was in 1983. In slightly over two weeks, the reality of Labour’s regression to unelectability will become clear when it either loses the Oldham West constituency to Ukip or finds that the late Michael Meacher’s fourteen-thousand vote majority has been significantly slashed. If this trend continues, the added effect of boundary changes may result in Labour falling below two hundred seats for the first time since the 1930s in the 2020 election.
This does not seem to bother Jeremy Corbyn and his neo-communist cabal as much as it should. There may be a good reason for this.
As I have written before, the Labour movement includes sections that are willing to promote civil disorder to achieve its aims. However, this is just one way that the neo-communists running Labour wish to achieve a revolutionary takeover of the British Government.
Modern Western states are highly resilient against revolution by extremists from within. The bulk of the population will side with established governments against the insurgents so long as it retains their confidence. However, the sure-fire way to achieve the overthrow of a government in a major power like Britain is to subject a state to an externally-sourced violent stress. This has been the case for the last one hundred and fifty years.
The 1867 splitting of the Austrian Empire into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, with the weakening of the House of Hapsburg in the face of Magyar nationalists, was a consequence of national defeat in the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866. The collapse of the French Third Empire and the restoration of republican government took place as a direct result of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. In both cases, it was Prussian military aggression that forced internal political change in these empires. Imperial Germany, itself formed as a result of that war, succumbed to revolution when its leaders’ military policy led to country to defeat in 1918.
The same was the case in Russia in 1905 and also 1917, the latter seeing the end of autocratic Tsarist rule. In both countries, it was socialists who gained. America’s reversal in Vietnam resulted in a loss of prestige in the Presidency and Congress that saw the end of deference and increased media scrutiny of the activities of the legislative and executive. Democracy was restored in Argentina only after the collapse of the Junta following its defeat by our soldiers in the Falklands. The fall of the USSR in 1991 was accelerated by military defeat in Afghanistan in 1989, a year which also saw the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. Britain got off lightly following the humiliation of the Suez crisis in 1956, but that may be because while it prevailed militarily, it lost diplomatically. The French Fourth Republic collapsed in Metropolitan France in 1958 under the stresses caused by insurgency in Algeria. An internally-weakened Third Republic had fallen in 1940 following military defeat.
Corbyn’s position on armed terrorist groups may be to see them as allies in the struggle to bring neo-communism into power by force of revolution in the UK. This is why he objects to any successful attack on them, most recently calling for a serial decapitator of Western civilians to have been arrested instead of blown to pieces by a guided missile. How this was to be performed without a land invasion was never made clear. Indeed, Corbyn’s letter to François Hollande following the atrocities in Paris stated that Labour supported “every effort to bring to justice the perpetrators of these despicable acts.”
He made no mention of supporting French military action in Syria, now ramped up following the mass murder in Paris. Corbyn clearly tacitly opposed the storming of a flat containing some of the perpetrators by French security forces, where those terrorists who did not blow themselves to pieces when they were caught bang to rights were shot up with over five thousand bullets. No-one has bothered to ask him what he thinks of that. But I think we already know.
This is not dissimilar from Labour’s tacit, and in some cases concealed but active, support of the USSR in the years before its collapse, when it objected to NATO upgrading its forces to meet the Soviet threat and tried to thwart it by any means in its power. It saw the USA as the aggressor and not, as everyone else could see, the defender of democracy and freedom in the West.
Only by weakening our forces and institutions can a neo-communist takeover succeed in this country following an externally caused crisis. It is therefore not surprising that Corbyn undermines a pro-deterrence Shadow Defence Secretary by appointing leftist Ken Livingstone to a strategic defence review and does not even bother to tell the shadow minister, who discovers it via Twitter. The fact that the Shadow Chancellor put his name to a series of demands calling for the disbandment of MI5 and the disarming of anti-terrorist police should not be a shock in this context. His denial looks thin, especially when he is photographed smiling while holding up a piece of paper where it is written in black and white. He either means it or is dangerously gullible. Neither are good qualities in a man who wants to be steward of our nation’s finances. But then the talent pool of people willing to serve under Corbyn because they actually agree with him is thin.
Corbyn’s refusal to consider further armed intervention in the Syrian Civil War, despite the fact that it is now causing bloodshed in the streets of Europe, is also consistent. Instead Corbyn seems to want the so-called Islamic State (Isis) represented somehow at a peace conference, stating: “The dreadful Paris attacks make the case for a far more urgent effort to reach a negotiated settlement of the civil war in Syria and the end to the threat from Isis,”
In reality, the Labour leadership actually appears to prefer the UK government to be humbled by Isis or the like on our streets and to walk away from our position in the world of defending and promoting Western civilisation. Following a national humiliation and loss of life, the consequent fall of public confidence in the institutions the state employs to protect the people could be leveraged into a political revolution of sorts, propelling a hard-left Labour government into power as the only institution that can negotiate with terrorists, to restore peace to our bloodied streets by surrendering to the Kalashnikov-wielding bomb-vest wearers. But to do that, Britain has to be seen to be defeated. And the only way to do that is to hobble or degrade our forces and institutions. Labour’s oratory matches this intention, just as it did in the 1970s and 1980s.
Corbyn and his neo-communist acolytes will never say this explicitly. Despite their so-called promise of ‘straight-talking honest politics’, their rhetoric is the most bent in modern politics. However, giving in to terrorists, calling them friends, objecting to them being killed by precision strikes or police action, scaling down our armed forces, abolishing our security services and refusing to deploy strategic deterrence would irreparably weaken this country. The lessons of history are clear. Countries that are subject to external stress and fail to meet the challenge to the nation fall to political revolution by extremists. Weakening a country from within facilitates this. And that seems to be exactly what Corbyn and his allies on the revolutionary Left want.
(Image Courtesy of Garry Knight, Flickr)
