Where Is The Conservative Party’s Jeremy Corbyn?

Samuel Hooper24 Comments

 

Where is the Conservative Party’s Jeremy Corbyn? I don’t mean an ornery old relic from the 1970s with dubious facial hair – the Tories have plenty of those. But where is the charismatic Tory personality who – like Corbyn does for his supporters – makes their fellow conservatives walk a little taller?

Owen Jones is happy at the moment. Cheerfully, blissfully happy. Almost too happy for someone who only months ago felt trapped in a Thatcherite, “neo-liberal” dystopia ruled over by the faceless, unaccountable grey men of the Establishment. But what a difference a few months and a resounding election defeat makes. What a difference Jeremy Corbyn’s presence on the ballot makes.

Read or listen to Owen Jones now and the excitement is palpable. This is not Cleggmania revisited, where the former LibDem leader briefly surged in the 2010 general election campaign by simple virtue of sounding like a human being (in contrast to the wooden Gordon Brown and the plastic David Cameron).

Nick Clegg’s brief spell of popularity was based on style, on appearing like a decent bloke. But Jeremy Corbyn’s surge in the Labour leadership election is the product of style and content – of sounding authentic, but also refusing to draw from the same deck of centrist policies automatically adopted by nearly everyone else.

No wonder a generation of young people who came of age during the tyranny of Consensus Politics, when holding strong political beliefs and refusing to apologise for them mark a politician out as a heretic unfit for high office, are finally sitting up and taking notice.

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Our Long Term Economic Madness

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George Osborne - Budget 2015 - Long Term Economic Plan - Fiscal Conservatism - Balanced Budget

 

By Ben Kelly, blogger and editor of The Sceptic Isle.

In May, the Conservative Party portrayed the election as a choice between Tory competence and Labour chaos; Labour’s spending and borrowing compared to the Conservative “long term economic plan”. The electorate made their choice and the current government received a mandate to cut the budget deficit and fix the economy.

Britain is now purportedly on the path to economic sanity, but you can be forgiven for having some moments of doubt. In the year 2015, after nearly six years of “austerity”, we will still spend £70 billion over budget. Should we redefine what the word “austerity” means?

The economic madness really began when Gordon Brown and Ed Balls implemented their plans for a high tax, high spend, much enlarged state with a continental-style economy. As we know only too well, it grew completely out of control.

The current government has the opportunity to reshape the British state permanently, and when ideas are floated about “thinking the unthinkable” and slashing budgets by 40% there is a flicker of hope that they might grasp it with both hands. Sadly, there is too much evidence to the contrary to believe anything serious is really being done to end the public spending spree and return to a sensible, sustainable fiscal situation.

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Cecil The Lion’s Death Marks Open Season For Cheap Virtue-Signalling

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Cecil The Lion beamed onto Empire State Building

 

The killing of Cecil the lion has been a virtue-signaller’s dream, a golden opportunity for people to flaunt their enlightened and compassionate credentials without doing any of the hard work required to stop it from happening again

Riding home on the night bus this weekend, Jeremy Corbyn-style, I found myself sitting behind a young couple sharing a convivial meal of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Between chicken wings and mouthfuls of fries, one of them opined to the other about how terrible it was that a human being could do anything so beastly as murder Cecil the Lion, an innocent animal.

“It’s awful, the man who did it should be shot” wailed the companion, as a piece of popcorn chicken slipped from his greasy fingers, rolled past me down the aisle and pinballed down the stairs to the lower deck. Casually imagining the execution of a man for the inhumane treatment of an animal, while devouring the factory farm-raised contents of a KFC bargain bucket. Sure, okay.

Now, I have no time for people who jet off to Africa to shoot unsuspecting endangered animals in order to mount their heads on a wall. It’s not real hunting, for a start, in reality being much closer to shooting fish in a barrel. Quite what such people are compensating for, I won’t begin to speculate. And of course it is sad when any great and noble creature like a lion is unnaturally killed, especially a creature known and loved by so many tourists and safari enthusiasts from around the world.

But some of us are starting to lose perspective over Cecil the lion, and could perhaps do with a quick reality-check. Take the people who decided to beam Cecil the lion’s face onto the side of the Empire State Building in New York:

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Are You A Populist Simpleton?

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Populism - British Politics

 

Ukippers and Jeremy Corbyn supporters have often been steadfast in their political views for years, and as a result have languished in the political wilderness while those willing to bend, flatter and shapeshift their way toward sanitised focus group approval have been richly rewarded with power and success

 

Are you a populist simpleton?

I am, according to the Telegraph’s Janet Daley, because I am guilty of expecting more from politics than two shades of the same old drab consensus.

It’s a shame – I thought I had an ally in Daley, who is absolutely right in identifying the dull managerialism that now defines British politics, where dull technocrats reign supreme and general elections are fought over which party leader would make the best Comptroller of Public Services.

From Daley’s Telegraph piece, in which she attempts to compare the rise of Jeremy Corbyn with Donald Trump’s temporary ascendancy in the Republican Party’s presidential primary race:

There is no doubt that the politics of Western governing has become consensual and centrist. It is now a cliché – but no less important for that – to say that the arguments on which democratic choice revolve are puny and marginal. Parties and their leaders are reduced to debating the detail: a bit more of that, a bit less of this. No basic principles are at stake because they are all pretty much settled. The slogans are quite deliberately boring: recession is to be tackled with a “long-term economic plan”. It doesn’t quite have the ring of “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” It often seems as if party strategists are having to thrash around desperately for some semblance of a compelling vision to distinguish themselves from their opponents.

Daley’s analysis of the problem is spot on, echoing what this blog has been saying for over a year. And yet Daley seems to hold in contempt those of us who have also identified the problem, but seek to redress it by supporting politicians who do not conform to the centrist mould.

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Is Jeremy Corbyn The Cure For British Conservatism’s Centrist Virus?

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

Samuel Hooper Labour Party signup - Labour Leadership - Jeremy Corbyn - 2

 

First published at Conservatives for Liberty

Today, I took the plunge. I got out my debit card, opened my laptop, held my nose as I navigated to the Labour Party website – and then paid £3 to become an official Labour supporter, solely in order to advance the leadership candidacy of the MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn.

No, I haven’t taken leave of my senses, and no, I haven’t had a miraculous conversion and become a Born Again Socialist – far from it. My earnest desire remains the same: to see British politics move in a far more libertarian, pro-individual freedom direction.

But I have come to the reluctant conclusion that the Conservative Party currently has no intention of governing in the pursuit of smaller government and a strong nation state, and that therefore the best way of advancing the cause I believe in is to act externally to force the Conservative Party to sharply change direction.

I stumped up my £3 not out of any desire to “consign Labour to electoral oblivion“, like the Telegraph’s Toby Young, or to cause low-level mischief of any kind at all. I vehemently disagree with most Labour Party policy, but the vast majority of members are good people and I bear them and their party no particular ill will. I have always wanted to see conservatism win, not see socialism lose.

I became a short-term Labour supporter today because I am putting my money where my mouth is, and seeking to reward success, steadfastness and political courage. And when it comes to steadfastness at least, Jeremy Corbyn has more of this quality in his little finger than the Conservative Party leadership possess in their entire bodies.

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