14 October 2018 | OPINION
Recently, both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, two of Labour’s most successful politicians, claimed that they were doubtful that the Labour party could ever be wrestled back from the left-wing extremists who have hijacked the party. And they are right. Corbyn has flooded the party with those who are a sympathetic to his views, and has quickly moved to diminish the influence those who he views as hostile to his policies.
The moderates have lost Labour party for a generation and is quickly becoming irrelevant. This is bad news for those in society who need a Labour government the most.
Corbyn and his supporters who now control the party are ideologues, steadfastly committed to a radical programme of state intervention and unwilling to compromise whatever. This makes any prospect of electoral success incredibly bleak. Corbyn’s hard-line leftist supporters, who appear ferociously allergic to sensible thought, would argue that the 2017 general election and the ‘buzzing’ feeling that surrounded the 2018 Conference suggests that Labour are on the brink of power. Unfortunately, this is a deception that is almost akin to the delusion that his policies would be progressive. The reality is that Labour lost the 2017 general election, despite all of the Tory parties’ faults. The Tories failed to win in 2017, but they will not make the same mistakes twice.
One of the reasons that the Conservative party has always been an election winning machine is because it embraces pragmatism, or at least appears to do so. The party understands the importance of sensing the public mood and developing policy fit for the modern day. Corbyn’s policies are quite the opposite. These are the same policies that he has been advocating since the 1980s, and which have already been exposed as being regressive and deeply damaging. Therefore, as Corbyn’s army of followers increase their grip on the party, the prospect of a Labour government slips away.
However, even if Jeremy Corbyn and his cronies could win a general election, it would be a deeply dangerous prospect for those in society who need a Labour government the most. Corbyn’s renationalisation programme and aggressive opposition to business would do tremendous damage to the UK economy, which would almost certainly hit working-class families the hardest. Spending billions on nationalising industries such as utilities, despite all the evidence of how damaging this would be, is utterly ludicrous.
So strong is Corbyn’s dogmatic dislike of profit, that he would rather waste public money on nationalisation than embrace the future and invest in the skills needed for emerging technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and virtual reality.
Renationalisation is not the only policy that would be terrible for working class people across Britain. So too would state subsidies for trade and industry, abolishing academy schools and ending Right-to-Buy. Corbyn’s domestic policies are the same as the old-left in the 1980s, and shows little understanding of the modern world.
It is not just domestic politics in which Corbyn is a threat. His foreign policy, which in a nutshell is to defend every blood-thirsty dictatorship with a visceral anti-Western sentiment, is equally as dangerous.
Labour needs a leadership that will embrace the modern world, be pragmatic and forward-thinking when developing policies. Labour needs a leadership that want to build a country with a strong private enterprise sector alongside a state that is capable of helping people. As long as the dogmatic Corbyn and the unshakeable left-wing brigade that support him control the party, Labour will remain unfit to govern.
