Brendan O’Neill

Jeremy Corbyn’s speech today in which he confirmed that a Labour government would keep Britain in a Customs Union with the EU was about so much more than trade. It was about the future of the Labour party itself. It sent a clear message about what, and more importantly who, Labour is for these days. It confirmed that Labour has finally made its choice between which of its two, quite conflictual support bases it will represent in public life: the better-off ones, the middle-class ones, the Southern ones. This is what Labour’s cosying up to the idea of a Customs Union — which is a betrayal of Brexit, whatever Labourites say to the contrary — really tells us.

This week, the Corbynistas bared their teeth. They gave us an insight into the mob-like authoritarianism that lurks behind the facade of their ‘kind’ politics. They insisted Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t a spy for the Stalinists while at the same time exposing their Stalinist tendencies. ‘How dare you lump us in with Stalinists?’, they cried, while in the next breath making manic-eyed videos threatening the press and forming online mobs to punish those who criticise their Dear Leader. The irony has been dark. For the first time, I feel fearful of Corbynism.

Dear right-wing people, please stop the red scares. Please give the Cold War lingo a rest. Please remember it is not the 1950s anymore and that there’s about as much chance of Kevin Spacey taking the title role in a biopic of Jesus Christ as there is of Commies coming to power in Britain. Please stop referring to Jeremy Corbyn as if he were some Trotskyite firebrand, when in truth his drab politics is closer to Milibandism than Marxism (the Ed variety, that is, not the Ralph variety). You’re embarrassing yourselves with this pinko panic. Even worse, you are unwittingly flattering the Corbynista crew by indulging their teenage fantasies about being red and edgy. Stop. This Corbyn-and-the-Czech story has got to be the lamest red scare of recent times.

Nigel Farage has called for a referendum on the House of Lords. Earlier this week, on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, wearing his trademark dapper hat and velvet-collared coat, Farage laid into Lord Adonis’s anti-Brexit agitation, branding him a ‘dishonest, disconnected, twisting little weasel’ — ouch! He then said that if Adonis’s antics are ‘what the House of Lords is all about’, maybe we do need a second referendum — not on Brexit, but on the Lords itself, ‘a referendum to sack the lot of them’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om74Me2mTNw This is the most correct and brilliant thing Farage has ever said. We do need a referendum on the Lords, and I know which side I’ll be on: for abolition.

Britain has a new feminist hero. She’s a diminutive, eye-rolling force of nature. A BS-deflecting defender of the right and ability of women to get stuck into public life as well as any man can. A warrior against the neo-Victorian view of the female sex as fragile and unable to deal with the amorous advances of tragic blokes. It’s Ann Widdecombe, former Tory MP, Catholic convert, borderline national treasure, and now contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. But this is no ordinary Celebrity Big Brother. It’s a feminist one, a Suffragette one. Yes, the Channel 5 show has gone political, giving a nod to the hundredth anniversary of women in Britain winning the vote (well, women over 30) by making the CBB house an all-female one. (For now.

In my lifetime, I cannot remember any thing or idea or person getting as bad a press as Brexit has. It’s relentless. It’s not daily — it’s hourly, minutely, by the second. Open a newspaper, switch on the radio, browse the web, and there it is: more Brexit-fear, more predictions of economic calamity and national decline if we continue down this course dumbly mapped out for us by the electorate. It’s exhausting to read; heaven knows what it must be like to write it! I fear for the sanity of the Brexit Doom hack. No doubt reporters and columnists will say they’re doing their job and reporting uncomfortable facts. But to me — and, I imagine, to many people outside of the media bubble — it smacks of the politics of fear.

The EU has no shame. It is a completely shame-free zone. How else do we explain the grotesque spectacle of EC President Donald Tusk cosying up to Ireland this weekend, and claiming to respect Irish sovereignty, as if the past 15 years of Brussels treating Ireland as a colonial plaything had never happened? As if the EU hadn’t time and again overridden the Irish people’s democratic wishes? As if the EU didn’t just a few years ago send financial experts to run the Irish economy above the heads of the apparently dim Irish demos? Tusk claiming to be a friend of the Irish takes EU chutzpah to dizzying new heights. EU officials were all over Ireland at the weekend. Tusk decreed that Ireland would have the final say on the Brexit deal.

The capitulation of the establishment to the politics of transgenderism has been astonishing. I’m struggling to remember any other time when a new and contested ideology has been so uncritically embraced by the powers-that-be. We have a Tory government pushing a Gender Recognition Act that would allow anyone to change his or her gender without so much as popping a hormone pill. An established Church which yesterday issued guidelines to its schools encouraging them to let kids ‘explore gender identity’. Police forces exchanging helmets for caps because ‘gender-based headgear’ is disrespectful to trans people.

The political class has lost its marbles. This goes beyond Priti Patel failing to follow basic ministerial code or Boris Johnson’s blabbermouth making life a hell of a lot harder for an imprisoned Brit in Iran. There is also the increasingly deranged ‘Pestminster’ scandal. And their ongoing emotional meltdown over Brexit. And the Russian conspiracy theories being spouted by Ben Bradshaw and others — the David Ickes of polite society — which imply Putin is puppeteering the Western masses’ brains. It increasingly feels like we’re being governed not merely by fools and incompetents, but by nutters. Incompetence is the go-to explanation for the political class’s current malaise. And it’s a tempting one.