Sea Change

There really was no need for the government to reduce the threshold at which high blood pressure gets treated . Corbyn’s supporters are registering 160/100 right now, as their project starts its inexorable – and inevitable – downward spiral. Long gone are the days when the hard left used to dine out on Jez’s improbable 40% showing in the 2017 general election. The latest YouGov poll has the Tories on 40, while the remodelled Momentum-run Labour Party languishes on 31. Even the faithful are beginning to realise the game is up. If there ever were an opportunity for the veteran socialist to slip into Downing Street, the window has now closed. And as the decline continues, you can expect recrimination, denunciation and howling exasperation. How did the Corbynites find themselves in this position? Of course, there’s no one answer. Like many movements, they are divided between purists and pragmatists. Although Corbyn and McDonnell share much the same ideology, the former...

Perhaps the Independent Group – or the party into which it will inevitably morph – will achieve little electorally. Critics are quick to point to the experience of the SDP in the 1980s and the crushing nature of the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system. But those who obsess over the chances of a breakthrough in a general election are missing the point entirely. The very emergence of TIG is the single best thing to happen to British politics in some years. The breakaway faction offers a potential choice to voters that goes beyond hard-left vision of Jeremy Corbyn and the laissez-faire madness championed by the Tories. It exposes the vacuous claim of the far left that ‘centrism’ is now dead and has no natural constituency. It shakes up the arithmetic in Parliament and presents some new possibilities in the endless and painful debate over Brexit. (Indeed, in recent days John McDonnell and others have signalled that Labour might be more inclined to embrace a second...

In a moment of immense unscripted irony, it was announced today that Derek Hatton - Deputy Leader of Liverpool City Council during the Trotskyist insurgency of the 1980s - has rejoined the Labour Party. As seven brave moderates stick their heads above the parapet and quit to form The Independent Group in Parliament, Corbyn reaches out to his old pals on the hard left. For those with long memories, 'Degsy' was associated with the very worst of the excesses in local government 35 years ago and was expelled by Neil Kinnock for his part in the organised infiltration of Labour by the Militant Tendency. Of course, in the world of the current Labour leadership, he's just a comrade who was hounded out in a 'witch-hunt'. Corbyn was one of the leading lights in the campaign to oppose the expulsions in the first place. Hatton's reinstatement proves the claim of the so-called 'Magnificent Seven' - led by Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger -  that the Labour Party...

Was it Brexit that turned us collectively insane? Or was the EU referendum a sign that we had already lost our marbles? Whether the chicken laid the egg or the egg gave rise to the chicken, perhaps we’ll never know. In just two weeks, however, Parliament looks set to act in an utterly reckless and crazy way by voting down Theresa May’s proposed withdrawal agreement. After which, we’ll all be running around the farmyard without our heads and the country will be in the biggest clucking mess since World War II. But let’s get one thing straight early on. It’s not actually Theresa May’s deal at all. To describe it that way is entirely misleading. This is the deal that the EU is prepared to offer us. Sure, they might tinker with some of the detail at the margins. But we’re not going to get something fundamentally better than this. That’s because of the power relationships involved. Remember how the crackpot Brexiters promised us that the German car manufacturers would be strapping ...

As the Good Ship Brexit – holed multiple times beneath the water line – limps to the end of its two-year voyage, four distinct islands are now in view. The first is the one that everyone seems to agree we simply cannot approach. It’s the island favoured by the beleaguered Captain May and, through our telescope, we can just make out the tiny figure of Donald Tusk waving from a crag. Some people think the island is too big. Some think the island is too small. Some believe it to be inhabited by monsters. But all agree it’s a desperate place to head for and they shake their heads at Captain May for her folly. The second potential destination is the one favoured by a group of officer mutineers, who plan to throw the Captain overboard. It’s an island of sunny uplands, where the inhabitants trade freely with neighbouring provinces and business proceeds unfettered by any regulation. If we head there, we’re assured by Lieutenant Boris that grog will be replaced by milk and honey. ...

What’s the biggest lie that is told about Corbyn by his supporters? Is it the fact that Jez supposedly supports the EU? Or that he has always been on the ‘right side’ of history? Could it be the claim that his elevation to the leadership has nothing to do with the surge in anti-semitism within the Labour Party? Or the fact that the veteran leftist is apparently committed to stamping that racism out? All of the above are certainly whoppers by anyone’s standards and would be credible contenders for the top spot, if it weren’t for a lie that is actually far more obvious and outrageous and staring us right in the face. The biggest lie told by the Jezuit cheerleaders is one that can be immediately and categorically disproved, yet it still seems to have a currency. It’s the lie that Corbyn is ‘popular’. We hear it all the time, thrown casually into conversation. ‘Is it any wonder that Corbyn is so popular when the trains don’t run on time?’ ‘Can we be surpri...

The populist movement led by Jeremy Corbyn likes nothing better than to be besieged by enemies. The ‘neoliberal’ Blairite MPs who will do whatever they can to obstruct socialism. The so-called ‘Israeli lobby’, which apparently trumps up charges of anti-semitism against the left. And, of course, the notorious ‘MSM’ – proper newspapers to you and me – responsible for issuing a poisonous drip-feed of lies and distortions about the motivations and intentions of the Dear Leader. Traditionally, opprobrium was reserved for the ‘right-wing press’, but recently things have taken a comical turn with the Jez junkies turning on The Guardian . Despite the liberal paper being the repository of correspondence from every leftist luminary since the beginning of time, its open-minded and critical stance is now anathema to the hard-left activists busily destroying the Labour Party. Corbyn himself harbours bizarre fantasies of ‘democratising’ the press, as if objective reporting can only come ab...