Nick Cohen

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3" title="Nick Cohen and Fraser Nelson discuss the death of the left" startat=32] Listen [/audioplayer]‘Tory, Tory, Tory. You’re a Tory.’ The level of hatred directed by the Corbyn left at Labour people who have fought Tories all their lives is as menacing as it is ridiculous. If you are a woman, you face misogyny. Kate Godfrey, the centrist Labour candidate in Stafford, told the Times she had received death threats and pornographic hate mail after challenging her local left. If you are a man, you are condemned in language not heard since the fall of Marxist Leninism.

The Labour party must dig deep into roots if it is to survive. The Blairites cannot do it, they are finished now. The far left is triumphant but they are a tiny force in the Parliamentary Labour Party, and nowhere near as popular in the country as their deluded supporters imagine. In the middle sit the broad mass of social democratic Labour MPs, and they do not know what to do. The leadership campaign showed that they could not inspire, although I thought that Yvette Cooper found her voice in its final weeks. They don’t know whether to sit in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet or to stand by their principles and retire to the backbenches. Corbyn humiliates those who try to be loyal. They thought that they were serving a pro-EU leader, then Corbyn implies that maybe they are not.

Smart political operators are often the stupidest people. In conventional Westminster terms, it was smart of Labour’s Chuka Umunna to say last night that everyone in Labour should work with Jeremy Corbyn. Received wisdom expects us to applaud Umunna as he bows his head to conventional pieties and says Labour should get down with the kids, 'celebrate' the Corbyn-supporting yoof, 'embrace' them and 'harness' their energy to revitalise Labour. We are expected to nod sagely as political journalists tell us that Umunna is calculating that 'if Corbyn, the clear frontrunner, is to fail, Umunna’s wing of the party must not have done anything to make it responsible'. Clever move, we are meant to mutter. This guy knows it is best to keep your head down, and not go looking for trouble.

I suppose I'd insult Jeremy Corbyn if I compared him to an American. Jews (sorry 'Zionists') and Ukrainians rank high in the far-left's demonology. But Corbyn and his comrades agree that Americans are the worst. So I should say that I mean no offence when I point out that 'if Corbyn were American' his campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party would make sense. In the United States, or any other presidential democracy, the winner of a party's nomination selects his or her team from among their supporters. If they win power, they appoint their own cabinet. The executive and legislature are separate. Whatever deals they must cut with their senates or parliaments, the membership of their administration is ultimately their concern.

In the early 1960s a satirical combo called the Chad Mitchell Trio sang of the anti-communist paranoia of the John Birch Society (a forerunner of today’s Tea Party, as those among you who study the history of demagogic delusion will know). The reds were so ubiquitous that: There’s no one left but thee and we, (and we’re not sure of thee). You cannot trust your neighbour Or even next of kin If mommy is a commie, then you have to turn her in.

The media complain about 'career politicians'. Yet when politicians come along who aren’t Oxford PPEists, who have progressed via think tanks and spadships to safe seats without their feet touching the ground, journalists are shocked by their failure to conform to contemporary mores. We want politicians to be different, it seems, as long as they stay the same. Tim Farron is that rarity in modern life: a senior politician from the north of England. The north has become the British equivalent of America’s flyover states, lost in the no-man’s land between the centres of real power in London and Edinburgh. Farron did not leave it until he came to Westminster. He was born in Preston, and educated at Runshaw College in Leyland and Newcastle University.

If you want to see our grievance-ridden, huckster-driven future, looks to Northern Ireland, which has always been a world leader in the fevered politics of religious victimhood and aggression. Just as the Tories and much of the politically-correct liberal centre think they can force us to be nice by allowing the cops to arrest those who 'spread hate but do not break laws' (in George Osborne’s sinister words) so Northern Ireland has all kinds of restrictions of 'hate speech' to police its rich and diverse tradition of religious bigotry. I suppose it was inevitable that they would catch 78-year-old Pastor James McConnell of the Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle in North Belfast. The pastor is a protestant of the fundamentalist kind.

Ever since Margaret Thatcher U-turned in the dying days of her premiership, there has been a kind of agreement between Left and Right on what the European Union is. Most Conservatives followed the late-vintage Thatcher. They stopped regarding the EU as a free market that British business must be a part of, and started to see it as an unaccountable socialist menace that could impose left-wing labour and environmental policies on a right-wing government. As many critics have said, the Tory version of British nationalism that followed had many hypocrisies. It did not want foreigners infringing national sovereignty when they were bureaucrats in Brussels but did not seem to mind them when they were generals at Nato or economists at the WTO.

It is very easy to make David Cameron and the Scottish National Party look ridiculous. But as every soldier and journalist knows, just because a target is easy doesn't mean you shouldn't hit it. The attempt by supposedly respectable politicians to use trickery and outright lies to rebrand Islamic State as a state that has nothing to with Islam is too good to miss. David Cameron kicked off this week when he shouted at the BBC for calling Islamic State 'Islamic State'. Yesterday at Prime Minister's Questions he was at it again. Islamic State should not be called 'Islamic State' but 'Isil'. Meanwhile the SNP rounded up Boris Johnson, Caroline Lucas and Zac Goldsmith to stand alongside its own ample collection of charlatans and wishful thinkers.

On the radio this morning, a campaigner from the Child Poverty Action Group had an 'emperor’s new clothes' moment. Why not, she said, treat the young like the old. If the Tories insisted on having a 'triple lock' on pension benefits for the elderly, which guaranteed that the state pension must increase every year by whatever target was the highest - inflation, average earnings or a minimum of 2.5 per cent - why not put a triple lock on the benefits of poor families. The state would then treat the young like the old, and subsidise the future as it subsidises the past. You will understand why she was speaking out of turn when you listen to David Cameron describe his plans to cut £12 billion today.

The most revealing moment in the Labour debate last night came when a questioner asked 'what qualities do you share with Nicola Sturgeon that could make you as successful as a party leader?' The unctuous manner in which the question was delivered suggested that being an English Sturgeon was a fine thing to be. No Labour member would think of asking 'what qualities do you share with David Cameron that could make you as successful as a party leader' — even though Cameron has just won a majority against the predictions of everyone —including himself.

Imagine you are a Labour MP or a trade union official surveying Britain this week. The following points will strike you: Labour has just lost an election it could have won, in part because Unite helped impose a useless leader on it in Ed Miliband and an equally incoherent programme, which failed to convince millions of voters to rid themselves of a mediocre Tory government. Poverty and inequality are everywhere growing in part because of the shocking failure of the trade union movement to come to the aid of the new working class. In the care, hospitality and private security industries and in the shopping, leisure and call centres that dot modern Britain trade unionism is barely a folk memory. Only 14 per cent of private sector workers are trade union members - and they are dying off.