'I never thought I would be fearful for Britain under Labour - until now'

BORIS Johnson, with his vision of post-Brexit Britain, has chucked a grenade not just into the Government but also into the Labour Party, in this conference season, writes Bernard Ingham.

By The Newsroom Wednesday, 20th September 2017, 7:00 am

Jeremy Corbyn

Labour is all over the show about the EU. Indeed, never before has it staged its annual conference in such a miserable state.

It may be just ahead in the opinion polls and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, may be idolised by his hard left supporters. But never before has the party qualified as “the enemy within”, to quote Margaret Thatcher’s view of the NUM’s leaders in the 1984-85 miners’ strike.

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Of course, Harold Wilson dismissed the leaders of the seamen’s strike in 1966 as “a tightly knit group of politically motivated men” and Neil Kinnock savaged the Trots running Liverpool.

But the Trots are now in charge of the Labour Party, not just Liverpool, and the prospect of moderates rising up against their totalitarian domination seems remote. Most people expect

Momentum’s film directors to lay on the consecration of Corbyn as the Messiah.

He may change his policies to catch the prevailing wind as often as I change my socks, but he can do no wrong in the eyes of his devotees who think that democracy is not working because he is not Prime Minister.

We also have Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell calling for a union uprising to oust the Tories, and Len McCluskey, Labour’s paymaster, ludicrously comparing himself to Nelson

Mandela because the Tories are preventing him from ravaging the economy just as

they stymied his power-mad predecessors after the “winter of discontent” in 1978-79.

I’ll bet every post-war Labour leader from Clement Attlee to, yes, Gordon Brown would have been, or is, appalled at what has become of their party. It is truly the enemy within when it claims the right to ignore laws that constrain it. Our democracy does not offer a choice of which laws enacted by Parliament to observe.

It is true that the Government, through its Brexit Bill, will have to decide which EU laws and regulations should remain on the Statute Book. But Parliament’s law-making (or repealing) is legitimate; selectivity in the observance of law by the Labour movement is not.

What else, then, is the current Labour Party if not the enemy within?

But that is not the end of the threat to this nation and its very democracy from other enemies within and without.

We can readily identify those without. Jean-Claude Juncker has made it abundantly clear he wants an end to our national identity under his project to establish a United States of Europe.

He and his ilk will not rest until Great Britain is no more.

Vladimir Putin, now on manoeuvres in Belarus, is dedicated to destabilising the West. And we have had yet another reminder on the London Tube at Parsons Green of Islamic terrorism aimed ultimately at replacing Christianity with Islam and its horribly discriminating Sharia law. A British woman’s life would not be worth living if that lot had their way.

But there are other enemies within Britain who would never bow the knee to Putin or Islamic terrorism. They are nonetheless enemies of the British people because they wish to defy the Brexit referendum.

I can parade a distinguished roll call of other liabilities to the national interest such as Lord Heseltine, Tony Blair,

Sir Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leader who has shown he is ever more deluded at his party’s conference this week, untold numbers of peers, some like Lord Mandelson with EU pensions to defend, the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists and, of course, Sinn Fein.

We can add Tory Europhiles prepared to disrupt their government, the CBI and a host of tycoons who, lacking the flair and spirit of Sir James Dyson, the engineering entrepreneur, prefer the EU’s straitjacket to conquering the world’s markets.

It will be interesting to see whether even the semblance of opposition to Corbyn & Co emerges in Brighton this weekend. If not, we should recognise that we democrats have, over and above Islamic terrorism, a fight on our hands to preserve a free society.

The abuse hurled at Labour moderates, their very existence as MPs threatened by Momentum, the cavalier approach by the unions and hard left to the rule of law and the cruel assault via the internet on independent-minded people, and especially women, underline the nation’s peril.