THE favoured tactic of the right in this country has always been to label any left-wing views that cause them discomfort as "extremist". The prefix "hard" is applied to ideas of the left which they fear could cause any ripples in their world of pre-arranged privilege and social management. Their entire political strategy rests on ensuring that the rest of us look the other way as they ensure that real power will always be deployed from within their tiny, privileged elite.
Once, they were bred like battery hens and taken early from their families to spend what was left of their childhoods at places such as Eton and Harrow, learning how to wield power. Sentimental attachments to mummy and daddy could never be allowed to come before serving the state and their appointed place in it: at the top. They were scattered to the far ends of the British Empire to administer British control and to ensure that the fuzzy-wuzzies didn’t get too truculent about being ruthlessly robbed and exploited by the British East India Company.
When the sun began to set on that empire they retreated to their fortresses at home to ensure that they could hold on to control of the UK at least. They deploy The British Armed Forces like their own personal private army by deluding them into thinking they are serving the Queen and their country. And they rely on the right-wing press to be their nightwatchmen, ever-ready to defame and besmirch any who might rise up from the masses and attempt to tell the truth.
Occasionally, useful idiots like Tony Blair arrive to peddle some state-sponsored radicalism and soften up us, the idiot punters, for another stretch of reactionary Conservatism.
So, it was pleasing to observe the shock of the Right at the election of Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday as leader of the UK Labour Party. How to explain the fact that more than 250,000 people, across every category of Labour supporter, voted for Corbyn – more than the other three candidates combined? They can’t all be raving Marxists and revolutionary Communists?
The narrative of unpleasantness and vindictiveness has already been cranked up. Blairites like Peter Mandelson, who grew almost as rich as his master on the takings of the New Labour delusion, and David Blunkett are already talking about the death of the party. Tony Blair, pausing for a moment from his lucrative occupation of conning gullible eastern potentates into believing that they, too, can be global statesmen, said that Corbyn supporters had mental health issues.
Even just the prospect of a Corbyn victory gave us a glimpse of what lay behind the mask of Blair and his wretched gang: careerism, acquiescence lies and corruption.
Jeremy Corbyn had better get used to this, for it will become worse, far worse. When the miners looked like they were going to defeat Margaret Thatcher and the mine-owners, every division of the British state was mobilised to destroy them: the Metropolitan Police attacked and assaulted striking miners in the knowledge that the judiciary would all be taking holidays. Stella Rimington, head of MI5 deployed a double agent at the top of the NUM to gather intelligence on how best to destroy Scargill. In the end they settled for a lie, eagerly advanced by the press, that he had been filching funds from his own union.
In last year’s referendum on Scottish independence the same divisions of the British state were deployed once more and useful idiots in the so-called left- wing press were also somehow persuaded to chip in. For of course this was never about preserving the Union, it was about maintaining
Britain’s seat at the UN and not being seen to have lost a quarter of the kingdom on your watch.
How can a party call itself "patriotic" when it cheerfully sends thousands of its young people to their deaths in illegal wars, ill-equipped and under-paid? And how many of us now believe we were far safer as a country before we started slaughtering Muslims in their own homes on the lie that they were harbouring weapons of mass destruction?
IT’S not difficult to see why the UK right hates Corbyn. His avowed aim of withdrawing from the nuclear club will not make the UK more vulnerable, it will simply detach the UK’s face from America’s arse and free us from the delusion that we are a super-power.
A Corbyn-led government will make the unions stronger in defending the lost rights of British workers, something that Blair and his useless crony Gordon Brown failed to do despite the safety net of a three-term stretch. It will also seek alternatives to making the most vulnerable in our society pay for the profligacy of the rich which led to the credit crisis. People don’t mind being asked to make sacrifices if they believe that all other sections of society are being asked to as well.
The lickspittles of the right, like Blair, Brown and Mandelson, will wail and gnash their teeth and insist that a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn can never regain power. They conveniently forget that whatever party they all thought they were representing in office between 1997 and 2010 it certainly wasn’t recognisably Labour. Yet these people today are reeling at the sheer volume of numbers of those who voted for Corbyn. He now has a bigger mandate than Blair ever had.
If Corbyn can expose the lies that sit at the heart of Conservative ideology then he may indeed be set fair for government: we are not all in it together, we’re all in it for a few; we are not one of the most prosperous countries in the world, we are one of the most unequal; we are not spending billions to defend ourselves, we are a militaristic basket-case who would rather spend billions keeping weapons of mass destruction operational than some vital community services.
And if Kezia Dugdale reads the signs of the times and resists the advice of those advisers who lost Scotland, she will suggest to Corbyn that the party drops its ridiculously hostile attitude to the idea of an independent Scotland. If so, then the Labour Party in Scotland can begin to entertain the notion of defeating the SNP.
Corbyn urged to change Labour’s policy on Trident
James Kelly: Corbyn will inject a dose of unpredictability into the Holyrood race
Corbyn's shadow cabinet to be gender-balanced
The National View, September 14: UK takes one step closer to being rid of nuclear weapons
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