British Labour Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn and his leftist allies have gone strangely quiet about Venezuela. Not so long ago they were praising the glorious, heroic Chavez regime to the rooftops. What can possibly have changed?
Well, partly it’s the awkward fact that, as all Communist regimes do, Venezuela has collapsed into starvation, brutality, and chaos.
Mainly it’s down to the even more awkward fact that what Hugo Chavez did to Venezuela is pretty much exactly what Corbyn and his cronies plan to do to Britain.
Think it could never happen in the land of Magna Carta?
Then I urge you to read this exposé by Giles Udy in Standpoint of the Corbynista template for effecting Communist revolution in Britain.
It’s all spelled out in a manifesto called Britain’s Road to Socialism — essentially the operations manual for the Communist Party of Britain which has close ties with the Labour leadership.
There are three stages to the “revolutionary process” which will transform Britain into a socialist utopia.
The first — “a substantial and sustained shift to the left in the labour movement” — has already happened. Moderates in the Labour Party have either been ousted or subdued to the point where they are thinking of forming a new centrist party. The hard left have dominated.
This leaves Britain ripe for stage two, which Udy outlines below:
Stage two would follow the election of a left-wing government to Downing Street and would entail widespread nationalisation “in all major sectors” of industry and commerce. The list of targets is long and includes the financial sector, gas, electricity, water, oil, railways, buses, road haulage and air travel, construction, engineering, armaments, land and property, shipping and chemicals. Landed estates, luxury tourist establishments and “second homes” would also be brought under “public ownership”. Prospects for financial recompense for wealthy stock and property owners don’t look good. Compensation, if paid, would be “primarily to pension funds and small investors and on the basis of proven need”. [My italics]
Financial, property and advertising services would be “limited” and their “socially useful functions transferred to public bodies”. Nationalising the advertising industry could open the way for a state propaganda office, and measures that would be taken to “decisively break the grip of monopoly conglomerates on the capitalist mass media” would curb resistance from the press. State funding for political parties would be banned and corporate donations would need to be cleared by a workers’ ballot, which would permit the unions to block Conservative Party funding.
The programme would be financed by increased tax rates on higher rates of income, an annual wealth tax, a “Robin Hood” tax on City financial transactions, an increase in the rate of corporation tax, windfall taxes, and the closure of all tax havens under British jurisdiction (including the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man). Council tax would be replaced by local income, wealth, land and property taxes.
Echoing Jeremy Corbyn’s own past comments (which he has tried to downplay), the monarchy would be replaced by a “democratically elected and accountable” head of state. The House of Lords would be abolished and the Church of England would be disestablished. Leading Corbyn supporter Ken Loach, who has made three films for Labour, goes further: his “Left Unity” manifesto calls for all the assets of the royal family and CofE to be confiscated.
Stage three is the even scarier part. One of the Communists’ great fears is that Britain will then follow the “example of Chile”. That is, as with the glorious revolution that brought socialist president Salvador Allende to power, there will be a counter-revolution (encouraged, of course, by the evil United States) which will undo all the glorious work of the left and force yet another right wing government on the helpless proletariat.
This, as Udy notes, is where Britain’s Road to Socialism gets increasingly paranoid:
In response, a left government “will use all the official and popular forces at its disposal to crush each and every attempt at military subversion, rebellion or invasion”. A new paramilitary force — “the state’s corps of military reservists” — would gradually replace the army. Linked with “large workplaces and local working-class communities”, its recruitment, education and administration would be overseen by the trade union movement, an echo of the political commissars attached to all Soviet military units.
The Communist Party of Britain (CPB), it’s true, is not in itself a significant electoral force. In 2017, it had a total of just 734 members; and in the 2015 general election, it gained a grand total of 1,229 votes.
Unfortunately key figures from CPB, including Andrew Murray — the man believed to have had a hand in writing the 2011 edition of Britain’s Road to Socialism — are now Jeremy Corbyn’s key advisors.
These also include Seumas Milne, a privately educated admirer of the Soviet Union, now Corbyn’s Director of Strategy and Communications; Chris Williamson, a hard-left cheerleader for the Chavez regime; and, of course, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell — who has made little secret of his violent revolutionary leanings:
When McDonnell told a gathering of supporters, “I am a Marxist. This is a classic crisis of the economy — a classic capitalist crisis. I have been waiting for this for a generation”, it was this that he was referring to. His praise for students “kicking the shit out of Millbank” (the Tory HQ) as being the “best of our movement” raised eyebrows too but, once again, such sentiments are logical for a Marxist. Marx and Engels defended the use of violence in pursuit of the revolution. Engels wrote that “nothing can be achieved without violence” while Marx declared that “only revolutionary terrorism” could “shorten the bloody birth throes of the new society”.
How scared should we be?
Well personally, I think we’re already well past Peak Corbyn.
In the most recent YouGov poll, his popularity hit an all time low.
But the worrying detail here is that the decline had more to do with his wavering position on Brexit than it did with his left-wing lunacy.
When we asked people who had turned against him, Brexit was mentioned overwhelmingly as a reason. It was about his indecisiveness, playing politics with Brexit and refusing to meet Theresa May.
The reason for Corbyn’s ambiguity on Brexit is that he, like many of his hard-left inner circle, sees the European Union’s regulations as an irritating constraint on his ambitions to implement full Communism in the UK. In other words, Corbyn is secretly as pro-Brexit as Jacob Rees-Mogg but he just can’t admit it. Sure, it would make him more popular in the Labour voting strongholds of the north, but he’s probably got their vote anyway. More important to his strategy is to avoid giving Theresa May’s shaky government any more support than is necessary. So it suits him to sit on the fence: that way, there’s more of that much-needed instability which, he hopes, will lead to the wave of popular frustration which propels him into power.
If history weren’t taught so badly in schools, everyone would know that Communism — or “democratic Socialism” or whatever fancy euphemisms the hard-left uses to mask its intentions — has failed everywhere it has been tried.
But a lot of people in Britain either don’t know this or are naive enough to imagine that next time will be different. Corbyn’s PR machine nurtures this delusion by presenting him as a harmless avuncular figure who just wants to bring about social justice in a world brought low by the failed model of capitalism.
Chavez was just the same. Before he came to power, he was very careful to present himself as a moderate figure — certainly not the type to do anything so radically left wing as nationalise all the industries, confiscate everyone’s assets, and imprison his critics.
Corbyn probably won’t get as far as Chavez did — and consequently won’t enter nearly the same league of infamy. But it won’t be for want of trying. If the Corbynistas ever get their buttocks on the seat of power, what seems like a joke today will suddenly seem very unfunny indeed.
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