Team Corbyn Mimics Team Trump
Philip Collins writes perceptively about the character of the UK Labour Party these days - "sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British", using George Orwell's words as a perfect fit for Jeremy Corbyn and his officials spokesperson Seamus Milne.
Collins also hits the nail on the head with the compassion he draws between Corbyn and Trump because both men are trying to undermine confidence in key national institutions - Trump in the FBI which is investigating the President's Russian connections and Corbyn in the UK security services who advise that Russia is directly implicated in the deadly chemical attack on UK soil.
In different ways, both men are seeking to make politics as tribal as possible, so that their own supporters become unquestioningly loyal and cult-like in adoration of their party leader.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/corbyn-s-line-on-russia-shows-his-true-colours-g203x0w83
Corbyn’s line on Russia shows his true colours
By philip collins - The Times
The Labour leader has little interest in domestic policy but would wrench Britain away from key foreign alliances
The last time that Britain stood truly alone, in 1941, George Orwell wrote of his comrades on the political left that they were “sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British”. The next moment of British isolation may now beckon, brought closer by a European escapade of the Tory right and a Labour leadership that perfectly answers Orwell’s mocking description.
Jeremy Corbyn is something of a squashy pacifist but his spokesman Seumas Milne is violently pro-Russian and Mr Corbyn is a weak man. Their combined response to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury was a disgrace. Eventually Mr Corbyn had it dragged out of him, after a joint statement by France, Germany, the US and the UK, that the evidence in the case points towards Russia. This came after days of prevarication and pathetic what-about-Iraq evasion which made the attitude of the Labour leadership perfectly plain.
This was, alas, a predictable, indeed a repeated, disgrace. Mr Corbyn and Mr Milne were schooled in the Cold War contest between communist Russia and the capitalist West. Orwell, for all his irritation with blimpish Britain, was window-pane clear in My Country Right or Left: “war was coming, and the government, even the Chamberlain government, was assured of my loyalty”. I doubt Mr Corbyn could echo the sentiment. The late Ken Dodd once said of trying to get anywhere in foreign lands: “In Russia you’ve no chance. Everything ends in off.” Mr Corbyn does not think so. The leader of the party of Attlee and Bevin, the party of Nato and the independent nuclear deterrent, is so inhabited by anti-western thought clichés that he takes his lines from Moscow.
The only confusing complication for Mr Corbyn was that, until the White House recovered its senses and issued a statement of allied support, he found himself on the same side as the American president. Mr Corbyn’s objection is generic rather than particular. He is not simply horrified, as many are, by the egregious Mr Trump. He objects to all American presidents because the animal spirit of his politics is supplied by the charge that all the ills of the world are imperial in origin. The wickedness in the world was once ours but is now America’s. Therefore, to be caught alongside a pro-Putin president does not quite compute.
Mr Corbyn will not welcome the comparison but his similarities to Mr Trump are more notable than the differences. Both purvey anti-establishment rhetoric and both regard scrutiny as illegitimate, questions as impertinent and the media as the enemy of the people. Both are expanding the range of stupid statements that their political fan clubs are prepared to put up with. Yet perhaps the most durable similarity is that neither has anything serious to say to their own country.
A year into his presidency, Mr Trump has no domestic accomplishment to his name save for an entirely mainstream package of tax reforms. In the contest of the president versus the constitution that began in January 2017, Mr Trump is losing. Here in Britain, in an electoral system that exaggerates victories and an executive that centralises power, there is no equivalent constitutional bridle on Mr Corbyn’s radical intentions.
There is, however, an even more effective restraint which is Mr Corbyn himself. He has no radical intentions. Domestically, he doesn’t want anything. There is barely an idea in his head beyond the airy hope that things can only get better. For no reason they can recall, Labour will probably invite the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to run the supply of water and energy. After that it is a toss-up which runs out first, their interest or their money. After utility compensation and a huge subsidy to the middle class in the form of tuition fees, there will be precious little left for anything else. Which is just as well, as Mr Corbyn has never shown the slightest interest in how to get the best out of large systems such as the NHS and a state education service. On domestic policy, Labour is not a remotely serious party.
Orwell believed, wrongly, that the war could not be won without a social revolution and Mr Corbyn will not be a late answer to his hopes. He has no Orwell-like interest in home. His passions are all abroad and this is where he would make his changes were he to become prime minister. Here again he is very much like Mr Trump who, unbound from constitutional restraint, is free to make America a pariah in the world, setting his country on a path towards nuclear confrontations with North Korea and Iran and trade wars with South Korea, China and the European Union.
If he is given his head, Mr Corbyn and his team will reassess Britain’s place in Nato and will abandon the nuclear deterrent or at least make it pointless by insisting it could never be used. The intelligence and security we gain from allies in the Middle East would cease as conversations with Israel and Saudi Arabia came to an abrupt stop. Britain would by then be out of Europe and the Brexit-boy fantasy of a revived Commonwealth of Nations topped off by a deep engagement with America would be over, as Mr Corbyn would surely move to distance Britain from the United States. This would be a foreign policy unknown to modern British history. There is a lot of talk in the air about a new party but there is already a new party. This is nothing like the Labour Party. Under Mr Corbyn, Britain would have no real friends and allies. Brexit plus Corbyn means a very little Britain indeed.
You do not need to be a sentimental nationalist to think this would be a sorry state of affairs. The enduring worth of George Orwell as a political writer is that he was able, uniquely, to combine biting criticism with patriotism. Orwell ends the opening salvo of England Your England with the arresting idea that, even though Britain was a class-ridden nation, the red pillar boxes had entered his soul. “And above all,” he writes of the Britain he knew it was crucial to preserve, “it is your civilisation, it is you.”
If Orwell were writing today, about the horrors of Syria for example, I imagine Mr Corbyn addressing a Stop the War rally at which pro-Putin stooges waved banners denouncing “Eric Bliar”. This squashy pacifist is too easily turned into the instrument of bad men. Looking at the serried ranks of decent Labour MPs forced to listen to Mr Milne, I feel bound to remind them: “it is your party, it is you”.
Labour and Assange (13/07/17)
Sir_Max @Sir_Max points out on Twitter that the real significance of the recent exposé on Seumas Milne is that the mystery blonde he was spotted 'nuzzling' in public was none other than the lawyer for Julian Assange, a young woman called Jennifer Robinson.
Now I'm not normally one to take the moral high ground in these matters - I'll leave that to Mrs Seumas Milne (Cristina Montanari) who presumably will have plenty to say, in private, about her husband's behaviour.
Apparently Seumas, the Labour leader's official spokesperson, previously met Julian Assange inside the the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he has been holed up for the past 5 years, a fugitive from justice.
In any event, the two of them deserve each other, Julian and Seumas that is, and it just goes to show what kind of company the Labour leadership keeps these days.
Morally Pure (11/07/17)
Former Labour MP Simon Danczuk was barred from standing for the party in the 2017 general election after some spectacularly poor judgment in his personal life.
But Simona Danczuk has not been slow to extend the hand of friendship to Seumas Milne, the Labour leader's official spokesperson, who has run into a spot of bother of his own as the report below from the Guido Fawkes web site explains.
All we need now is for the old Labour warhorse Lord John Prescott to offer his own expertise on the subject!
