Mick Hartley

Nick Cohen, in Prospect, on the Corbyn debacle:

Previous oppositions always provided new ideas. Labour people, for whom Corbyn has made any catastrophe seem possible, have fixed with ghoulish horror on 1931, when the national government reduced Labour to just 52 seats. Yet however crushed the party was, it nevertheless began to develop the ideas that powered the 1945 government. You see the same phenomenon in our time. The Labour councils denounced as “loony left” in the Thatcher era, embraced ideas on rights for gays, women and ethnic minorities, which seem common sense now. Sophisticated opinion derided the Tory backwoodsmen who stumbled into parliament after the Blair landslide of 1997 for “banging on about Europe,” but look where we are. Ed Miliband was mocked in turn, yet May steals his agenda now.

The modern far left, though, has no ideas to steal. It is an attitude not a programme. A howl not an argument. No one will look back and say “laugh though people did, Corbyn’s party was the first to think of what we take for granted.” The banality of the far left explains their otherwise inexplicable indulgence for Hamas, Hezbollah, Putin and the Iranian mullahs. In traditional leftst terms, the gangster capitalists of the Kremlin and the theocrats of the Middle East represent ultra-reactionary forces. Only when you grasp that all that is left of the left is a Pavlovian Occidentalism, do you realise that for its devotees any enemy of the west is better than none. May’s position appears stronger than any of her predecessors: she not only surveys the political collapse of the opposition, but its intellectual collapse as well.