STEPHEN GLOVER: We stand on the brink of insanity. How can we British even consider plunging in and casting our vote for a Marxist prime minister and a Marxist chancellor?
By Stephen Glover for the Daily Mail
11 Dec 2019
When I go out to vote later today in what is surely the most momentous election in a hundred years, I will still be puzzling over a baffling question.
How it is possible, in a supposedly sane and civilised country, that millions of decent people are intending to cast their vote for a Marxist prime minister and a Marxist chancellor?
So many of them, in fact, that I won’t be astonished if at 10pm this evening, the BBC informs us that the usually reliable exit poll has predicted a hung Parliament with a probable Labour-SNP alliance.
I don’t expect it to happen, but it might. Jeremy Corbyn could be in No 10 within days, with John McDonnell installed next door, preparing his first Budget.
The British are respected for their good sense and moderation, or used to be. But they may be about to choose an extremist government that would crash the economy and appal our traditional allies.
And even if they don’t — even if Boris Johnson wins a clear majority — the question remains as to how the not- very-bright, but definitely sinister, Labour leader could have been indulged by so many for so long.
Because, although Mr Corbyn has striven to conceal a lot about himself, much is known about him. Only someone who had spent the past five years at the South Pole without any communication could reasonably claim ignorance.
We know he presides over a party in which anti-Semitism is rife. During the ITV leaders’ debate last month, he declared: ‘Where anyone has committed any anti-Semitic acts or made any anti-Semitic statements, they are either suspended or expelled from the party.’
But this is not true. Leaked confidential Labour files reveal that 136 cases of alleged anti-Semitism remain outstanding, even though the vast majority were reported to the party more than 18 months ago.
Anti-Semites often face lenient sanctions, or none at all, and are allowed to continue abusing Jewish members. Extreme complaints about incitement to racial hatred, and calls for a second genocide against the Jews, have remained unresolved for months or years.
It’s clear Mr Corbyn either tolerates anti-Semitism in his party, notwithstanding his repeated denials, or is notably half-hearted in trying to extirpate it.
Isn’t it shocking that a major party in a modern democracy should harbour people whose racist views wouldn’t have been out of place in Germany in the Thirties?
And mightn’t one expect voters to recoil in horror? Some do, of course, but millions shrug their shoulders and will today place a cross in the box marked Labour.
Perhaps it’s unfair to blame them when The Guardian, which has a proud record as a liberal newspaper, briefly considered the charges of anti-Semitism against Mr Corbyn in an editorial yesterday, before sweeping them aside and urging its readers to vote Labour.
If Mr Corbyn were a saint and a genius in every other respect, the stain of anti-Semitism would be enough to disqualify him as the leader of our country. But there are many other blemishes.
When the IRA was waging war against the British State, and committing numerous acts of terrorism in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain, he gave succour to the organisation.
At the height of the Troubles in the Eighties, he befriended a convicted IRA terrorist, Gerard McLaughlin, and helped him obtain a council flat in Islington.
As a young MP in 1984, Mr Corbyn invited Gerry Adams, then president of the IRA’s political wing, and widely believed at the time to have been a recent active terrorist, to a meeting in the Commons. A fortnight earlier, the IRA had tried to blow up Margaret Thatcher and the rest of the Cabinet, killing five people.
Even if Boris Johnson wins a clear majoritym the question remains as to how the not-very-bright, but definitely sinister, Labour leader could have been indulged by so many for so long
Isn’t this shaming? And wasn’t his frequent association as a backbench MP with members of Hamas and Hezbollah, terrorist organisations committed to the destruction of Israel, also disgraceful? He has referred to his ‘friends’ at Hamas.
Here is someone who has spent most of his adult life arguing against Britain’s unilateral nuclear deterrent, and as recently as 2014 said he wished that Nato, the Western alliance that has kept the peace in Europe, ‘didn’t exist’.
Last year, the man who is quick to embrace this country’s enemies and slow to defend its interests upset even his own backbenchers when he refused to join Theresa May in blaming Russia for the Salisbury nerve agent attack.
No wonder Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6, recently described Mr Corbyn as a danger to national security who would pose a ‘present danger to our country’ if he became PM.
I haven’t even mentioned Labour’s madcap economic policies, which would bankrupt Britain, leading to a flight of capital and deterring foreign investors.
Don’t forget how Mr Corbyn praised Hugo Chavez’s economic stewardship of Venezuela
Don’t forget how Mr Corbyn praised Hugo Chavez’s economic stewardship of Venezuela, when it was obvious that he was an autocrat ruining his oil-rich country.
After Chavez’s death in 2013, Corbyn lauded him as someone who ‘showed us there is a different, and a better, way of doing things. It’s called socialism’.
We heard nothing from the Labour leader after Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, completed the process of impoverishment, which has led to the exodus of millions. No word of complaint when Maduro’s armed cars drove into crowds of protesters.
How can millions of sensible people be contemplating voting for the misguided Labour leader who, for all his talk of bringing our country together, is fomenting class war?
It’s not as though he has made only the odd misjudgement. Jeremy Corbyn has supported countless wicked men and innumerable bad causes, and never shown the slightest awareness of his wrong-headedness, far less any signs of contrition.
I suppose there are traditional Labour voters who don’t bother with the political fine print. And younger voters for whom IRA terrorism, and Labour’s last wrecking of the economy in the Seventies, are not even a distant memory.
And there are also millions of people who loathe Boris Johnson and so would prefer any alternative. God knows, he’s far from perfect. He sometimes tells lies, though hardly on the same scale as Mr Corbyn, whose pretence that the Tories intend to sell off the NHS is an unscrupulous piece of fantasy.
Whatever his faults, Mr Johnson doesn’t embrace the enemies of Britain. Nor does he protect racists. His policies won’t beggar us. And I think he loves his country.
Moreover, Remainers who fret about the possible economic harm of Brexit — exaggeratedly so, in my view — should reflect that Labour’s economic policies with Corbyn and McDonnell in charge would almost certainly be infinitely more damaging.
Sometimes, I think to myself that the only way for Corbyn enthusiasts to discover the true nature of the man would be to experience his incompetent and divisive rule. But that is like saying that the only way to understand pain is to have a terminal illness.
ADVERTISEMENT
If we are delivered today from Jeremy Corbyn, it will be largely because thousands of traditional Labour voters in the so-called ‘red wall’ stretching from Wales across the Midlands and northern England have seen through him.
This really is a moment of destiny as we hover on the brink of insanity. Despite everything, I can’t believe we British are mad enough to plunge in.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/...nk-insanity-British-consider-plunging-in.html
