What are we to make of events in the Labour Party? I have now read Jeremy Corbyn’s speech http://labourlist.org/2016/09/united-we-can-shape-the-future-jeremy-corbyns-speech-to-conference/

to the Labour conference in Liverpool.

Unlike my old friend Peter Oborne here http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/according-british-media-class-last-week-has-been-unmitigated-disaster-labour-lead-1488108898, I am not moved to extravagant praise.

It is true that Mr Corbyn has now twice won the leadership of his party, another example of Marx’s dictum about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. This has been quite funny to watch, especially the swollen, puce entitlement of the Blairites (victims of the tragedy and butts of the farce), who cannot accept their defeat and don’t understand it (much as David Miliband could never understand why he didn’t beat his brother to the leadership). The answer’s easy: Iraq.

Now they can’t understand that their project, wholly taken over by the Tories, is finished. With or without Mr Corbyn, it no longer has the votes or the organisation to win a national election. Mr Corbyn can save a traditional leftist rump, which can certainly survive *as a party* and might re-enter government as a coalition partner if we ever introduce proportional representation. But without Scotland, it cannot get a majority in our existing system.

If they want political careers, they need to find a back door into the Tory party, True Home of New Labour. But can they admit this? And can the Tories admit it by accepting them?

Meanwhile Mr Corbyn really has no real answer (nobody does) to the questions he rightly raises as important to millions and ignored by the mainstream – insecure, poorly-paid jobs, impossibly expensive housing, the devastation of industrial employment, the inability of this country to afford either the welfare state or the NHS in their current shape, as it grows comparatively poorer.

He is right to raise them. But which British political leader is going to say, ever, that Britain – having been so badly governed for so long, and having lived far beyond its means for decades - is just going to have to get used to a lower standard of living, poorer public services, more crowded housing and schools, longer queues for the doctor, and higher prices and taxes on top of it? Not one of them. They’ll just quietly get on with devaluing the currency (the referendum provided a fantastic pretext for starting that long-delayed process) and hope we won’t notice that they’re responsible.

The speech is often banal and packed with clichés and pieties. I cannot find in it a single mention of the Trident nuclear weapons system which Mr Corbyn fiercely opposes and which he declares he would never use if he came to office. It is an odd omission .His attitude towards education is woeful and foolish (though his use of the term ‘National Education Service’ is interesting . I have long pointed out that the ‘Academy’ programme now adopted by both major parties is resulting in a wholly nationalised state school system, controlled by a distant and fogbound quango called the Education Funding Agency, monitored by the Stalinoid inquisition OFSTED and now also patrolled by equally remote regional commissioners).

I think references to the death of the late Jo Cox MP which speculate on the alleged killer’s motive are plain wrong. The trial, when it comes, will establish the truth. Until then, best to just mourn the loss of a much-loved, much valued human being.

His strongest sections are on foreign policy, where he is rightly opposed to foolish foreign adventures. But even there Mr Corbyn’s low-grade unadventurous 1960s leftism gets the better of him. A foreign policy based on ‘peace, justice and human rights’ was more or less the ‘ethical foreign policy’ pursued by the Blair government, and which led to the crass interventionism Mr Corbyn rightly now denounces.

When will people grasp that a cynical, self-interested foreign policy, based upon the prosperity and safety of this country alone, is invariably less lethal and cruel than an idealist and utopian policy, the surest route to war known to man?

But Mr Corbyn’s head is still full of the slogans he no doubt shouted on long-ago marches and vigils in the London of the 1960s and 1970s, to him the dawn of political time. What fun it was to take sides in the great global quarrel and feel good about ourselves. Sweet was it in that dawn to be alive, etc. We were against so many bad things. Down with this, boycott that, victory to so and so. I was there too. I shouted them too. Then I saw what happened next. Pol Pot. The Cuban dictatorship. The African tragedy. I also noticed that the supposed bad guys achieved the peaceful defeat of the USSR, by ignoring our foolish pleas to disarm. And so on.

Still, I did like the bit about re-nationalising the railways. And, in an era when borrowing money is virtually free of charge, I have to admit that an economic regeneration plan based on borrowed money does not seem to me to be the disaster it would have been in earlier eras, where interest charges were huge.

And, while I totally disagreed with the passage about immigration, it was refreshing to see the leader of the Left openly advocating this policy, rather than pretending to be surprised and discombobulated by the huge numbers of migrants arriving here ( as New Labour and the Cameroons always did). What, us? Nothing to do with us!

This is what I have long wanted – an openly left-wing party , standing up for what it really believes in. I want this for two reasons. 1. There are plenty of people who believe these things and they ought to be represented in Parliament. 2. I still harbour a faint hope that such a party will call into being its opposite, an equally candid conservative rival, unashamedly arguing for socially and morally conservative policies.

And that is why, from the start of Mr Corbyn’s unexpected rise to prominence, I have refused to join the chorus of execration against him. I also had another motive. I could not see why any conservative should weep for the Blairites Mr Corbyn so hilariously defeated. Those Blairites who are far more dangerous than Mr Corbyn but somehow seldom get identified as such by the media, as I have many times pointed out, quoting the arch-Blairite Peter Hyman https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/20/labour-party-directionless-political-future

as evidence that New Labour was never (as dupes and suckers imagined) a version of Toryism, but was from the start a deeply revolutionary project, whose key ingredient was stealth, designed to lull and deceive voters into choosing the most radical government since Cromwell.

As Peter Hyman wrote (and I couldn’t have put it better): ‘New Labour was not intended merely as a short-term electoral fix after 18 years out of power and four crushing election defeats (though that would not have been a terrible thing), but as a radical new force in British politics. The “project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters. The idea of New Labour was not to be a good opposition party, to protest loudly or have an “influence” over events, but, rather, to take and hold on to the levers of power. New Labour sought political hegemony: winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st century was a Labour century with Labour values in contrast to a Tory-dominated 20th century.

The scale of that ambition, in a country dominated by a stridently rightwing press and the quiet conservatism of large swaths of the British people, was breathtaking. If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.’

By contrast with this, Mr Corbyn is a return to a much older, more modest, more British form of change, back to the days of Robert Blatchford’s bicycling socialists and Clem Attlee’s seizure of the commanding heights of the economy. He says what he wants to do. His opponents can disagree and explain why this has, for the most part, been shown to be mistaken. A proper socially and morally conservative party would have no trouble beating him. The trouble is that so many of the policies he backs are also backed (in truth) by Mrs May’s Tories, or will in the end be adopted by them. Has immigration been controlled? Will it be? Is there any real plan to get rid of the comprehensive education Mr Corbyn loves and which Mrs May showed no signs of opposing until three weeks ago? Where now is George Osborne’s supposed austerity? Is there any threat to the great raft of ‘equality and diversity’ legislation which imposes ultra-left political correctness on most of public life and much of private life as well?

In fact, I suspect it will be a Tory government that eventually gets rid of the unaffordable Trident system, taking advantage of the unavoidable economic crisis that is approaching, to do so.

That’s why I suspect the Tory response to Mr Corbyn next week will be much more in the form of frenzied abuse and name-calling, of claims that Mr Corbyn is a wild Bolshevik, than in the form of reasoned response to him. A reasoned response would involve admitting that very little actually separates them, and that both major parties are motivated by egalitarianism and liberal social policies, and are clueless about our economic problems.