This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Many people will now be thinking that the Labour Party might as well be dumped in the nearest wheelie bin and driven away to be buried in landfill.

Given how much harm Labour has done in the past 60 years, it is a tempting idea. And the pitiful line-up of contestants to succeed Jeremy Corbyn is dispiritingly bad.

Who are these people? Wearisome egalitarians who have learned nothing from the wasteland they have made of our schools. Eurofanatics who still don’t get it.

Blairites who have yet to grasp that Al ‘Boar-iss’ Johnson is now the Supreme Blairite, and has stolen all their clothes.

Worse, he is even better at Blairism than Blair himself, being both much more intelligent and far funnier than the New Labour leader.

When any of these people fight the next Election, riding directly into Mr Johnson’s guns, they will make the Charge of the Light Brigade look like a shrewd move. And yet it will be very bad for the country if we have a feeble Opposition.

When governments are too strong, they make more mistakes. They become smug and high-handed. British liberty depends on there being a strong, effective Opposition.

But how could that come about? Well, there is a tiny glimmer of hope, which I think civilised people should encourage.

It is called ‘Blue Labour’. At the moment it is only a few brave and thoughtful people, and it was pushed to one side in the Corbyn era of childish, clapped-out 1970s Leftism.

But if it succeeds it could not only be a good Opposition, it might even be a good government. People forget what Labour used to be.

Before it was taken over by Bloomsbury social liberals and Islington Eurocommunists in the 1960s and 1970s, it was a highly conservative, patriotic, working-class party.

Labour councils used to proudly build and sustain grammar schools, knowing that they benefited Labour families more than anyone else, as well as benefiting the country as a whole with educational standards far higher than we have today.

Labour politicians understood that it was the poor who have most to fear from crime and disorder, and had little time for the liberal social theories that have gutted our police, courts and prisons.

Incredible as it may now seem, the Labour Premier Clement Attlee, and his Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, both voted in 1948 to retain the death penalty for murder. Modern Leftists, who claim to admire these men at a distance, do not really understand what sort of people they were.

Labour was also seriously Christian, hugely influenced by Methodism. And it was sternly sober, strongly against the sort of Gin Lane drinking culture and the easy gambling that New Labour cynically encouraged.

When, in 1970, Labour’s then Premier Harold Wilson began to destroy the laws against marijuana, his Cabinet split almost equally between the working-class Ministers, who wanted to keep effective laws in place, and the Oxbridge intellectuals, who wanted to let rip.

Alas, it was the intellectuals who won, which is why the whole country now stinks of dope. And in the era that followed, real working-class figures almost vanished from Labour’s front bench.

Where political parties combine patriotism, a strong but just welfare state, good education, firm policing and tough defence, they tend to win elections.

France’s Charles de Gaulle ruled for years on that basis, and Poland’s Law and Justice party (for all its faults) has rapidly become the dominant force in that country. Why not here?

I long ago gave up on the Tories, who don’t have a conservative muscle in their body or a patriotic cell in their brains.

I can’t see them benefiting much from their guru, Dominic Cummings, and his appeal for more weirdos in government. Aren’t there enough already?

Let Labour’s current hopeless leadership dash themselves to pieces in another Election. They’re no loss. Then, when these dullards have gone off to fulfil their true destinies in public relations or pantomime, maybe it will be time for Blue Labour.

If they can seize back control of the People’s Party, I’d support them against the Pinko Tories.

#MeToo killed off a brilliant movie

Whatever has happened to the film An Officer And A Spy, which won the Grand Jury Prize and a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival last August?

It is based on a successful and excellent novel by the bestselling Robert Harris. One distinguished critic, David Sexton, says it is ‘an absolute masterclass in how to make a historical film’. But nobody seems to be showing it in this country.

It is a powerful account of the scandal of all scandals, a filthy state-sponsored lie that took years to dispel, the wrongful imprisonment of the Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus by an antisemitic French establishment.

Yet the chances are you won’t ever see it. This is because its director is Roman Polanski. Polanski has admitted – and evaded justice for – a revolting paedophile crime.

But alas, he is also one of the great film-makers of our age. Up till now, his films have been shown.

But the #MeToo movement now seems to have put a stop to this in some countries.

Should that mean An Officer And A Spy cannot be seen? If so, what should the BBC do about the sculptures by Eric Gill, which adorn its London HQ?

Gill’s sexual crimes were so horrible that I will only say they included incest.

As for the much admired surrealist painter Salvador Dali, his private life (by his own account) was cruel and disgusting beyond belief. Should his pictures be removed from the world’s galleries?

I suggested it a few weeks ago and, after last week’s events, I think a lot more people will see my point. When the current reign ends, let’s keep the Monarchy but pension off the Royal Family.

The continued theoretical existence of the Monarchy will keep politicians from getting too grand, but we won’t have to worry about the individual Royals, with their weird private lives, impossible desire to enjoy celebrity and privacy at the same time, horses and malfunctioning sweat glands.

Hardly anybody under the age of about 80 understands the point of monarchy any more.

Only someone brought up in an age of brisk walks in all weathers, strict bedtimes, regular church, finishing what was on their plates and thank-you letters could possibly tackle the role. There isn’t anyone like that left.

Bushfire facts the biased BBC ignores

Glad as I always am to get news about Australia, an interesting parallel civilisation very like Britain but also deeply different, I am sick almost to screaming of the BBC’s incessant coverage of the forest fires there.

They do it only because it supports their fanatical preaching about man-made global warming. Actually, it doesn’t.

A little study reveals that Australia has been just as hot before, according to measurements as far back as 1889.

Various excuses are now made for ignoring these inconvenient figures but there really isn’t much doubt about it.

Huge forest fires are also common in Australia’s brief history, some of the worst having been in the very hot summer of 1938-9.

After lethal blazes in 2009, a Royal Commission in Victoria strongly recommended the ‘prescribed burning’ of brush to prevent future fires – an old Aboriginal method.

It criticised the ‘minimalist approach to prescribed burning despite recent official or independent reports and inquiries, all of which recommended increasing the programme. The State has allowed the forests to continue accumulating excessive fuel loads, adding to the likelihood of more intense bushfires and thereby placing firefighters and communities at greater risk.’

I don’t think anyone took much notice. Just so you know.

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