Revolutionary McDonnell is even more dangerous than Corbyn

“Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” is not a chant one hears much these days. It has joined “I agree with Nick” and “Brexit means Brexit” on the scrapheap of rusting political soundbites. Corbyn is still around, of course, and thanks to the anti-Brexit clowning of entitled Tory Remainers he is a possible prime minister-in-waiting. Yet even if Labour were to win a general election, would he become prime minister in anything but name? The prospect that has long hovered over Labour and has recently gained traction is: vote Corbyn, get McDonnell.

John McDonnell has always been the more heavyweight contender of the duo heading Labour. A self-confessed “cultural Catholic” educated in a junior seminary, later a determined autodidact who clawed his way up the ladder from menial employment to graduate status, the contrast between the substance of his life experience and the more dilettante background of Corbyn is significant. Corbyn is a joke figure, McDonnell is formidable.

Theoretically, McDonnell’s protégée in any future Labour leadership contest would be Rebecca Long-Bailey, but why would McDonnell, if circumstances were propitious, choose to play second fiddle? If Jeremy Corbyn failed badly at a general election or simply threw in the towel under pressure, why would McDonnell not aspire to succeed him? If Corbyn became prime minister, a stint as chancellor would be an ideal prelude to shooing himself into the top job.

The post of chancellor would enable McDonnell to navigate a Labour government’s fiscal policy in his preferred Marxist direction, stamping the essential character of a nominally Corbyn administration. Remember the Blair/Brown precedent. All that, however, presupposes Labour coming to power, a prospect which now looks more problematic than it did a year ago.

Unless – and it is an extremely unlikely eventuality – Boris Johnson delivers a clean Brexit on 31 October, the Tories are bound for extinction. Yet that is not the undiluted good news for Labour it would otherwise be. For Labour too is facing an existential crisis. The Brexit Party has signalled the end of the duopoly that dominated Britain in the last century and, in the event of a Brexit delivery crisis, would undoubtedly deny the big two legacy parties a majority.

Any Labour administration would necessarily be cobbled together from a patchwork alliance of Liberal Democrats and Celtic separatists. That is not the unchallengeable machine of Soviet-style democratic centralism that McDonnell would prefer as the vehicle for the British Revolution. There is evidence, too, that McDonnell has lately begun to make errors of judgement.

He has gone along with the lemming-like groupthink that insists Labour must become a Remain party if it is to survive electorally. That is based on the belief that Labour’s recent electoral setbacks have been due to its grudging endorsement of Brexit. True, the proportion of Labour voters defecting so far has been 3:1 Remainers to Leavers. But that simply reflects the fact that, however gnomically, Labour’s utterances on Brexit have, at least until very recently, paid weasel tribute to the referendum result.

So, there was less reason for Leavers to defect: the very scale of Remainer defection shows Labour had contrived to present itself as a Leave party. It is also logical to assume that those Labour voters who have already left were the ones for whom Remain was a priority; they are therefore unlikely to defect back from the Liberal Democrats, regardless of what belated Remainer contortions the Labour leadership may indulge in.

But those same contortions could dislodge the still loyal Leave vote – around one-third of Labour electoral support. More crucially, it is concentrated in Labour’s traditional heartlands and in key Labour/Conservative marginals. Internal Labour studies have identified 14 seats at high risk – almost certainly an optimistic underestimate. At the European elections the ex-mining constituency of Blaenau Gwent recorded a 23 per cent slump in the Labour vote and a modest 5 per cent increase in Liberal Democrat support, while the Brexit Party won 37 per cent of the vote.

If the Remainer exodus is now followed by a mass Leaver departure, the entire Labour vote could lose critical mass and implode. Does McDonnell recognize the imminent danger that the Revolution might be cancelled due to lack of support? And what would that revolution look like?

McDonnell has, with disarming honesty, described “Marx, Lenin and Trotsky” as his “most significant” intellectual influences. In 2013, referring to the 2008 economic crash and the need to change the system, McDonnell said: “Look, I’m straight, I’m honest with people: I’m a Marxist.” His policies reflect that ideological formation.

A McDonnell-dominated government would nationalize water, electricity and the railways: it would be like a video of the 1980s played in reverse. It is the crudest form of command economy socialism. Yet McDonnell is, in many cases, hitting capitalism on its bruises. You do not have to be a Trotskyite to entertain reservations about PFI projects.

Railway privatization was, from the first, a model of how not to remove an industry from state control. Some of us warned at the time that the privateers were getting it wrong. The libertarian think-tank fanatics with the unblinking limpid blue eyes of economic storm-troopers paid no heed. Because they were, in the terminology coined by the late Christopher Booker, neophiliacs their chief concern was to avoid the status quo ante: that would have been reactionary.

So, instead of being privatized vertically, with divisions resembling pre-War companies, the railways were privatized horizontally, thus begetting the monster that was Railtrack, burdened with servicing all the track, tunnels, signalling and bridges from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. It is doubtful that even McDonnell and his revolutionary cadres would be capable of devising anything quite so centralized and impractical.

Other privatized utilities have proved greedy, customer-unfriendly and crassly incompetent. Public dissatisfaction will make McDonnell’s siren nanny-state proposals seductive. If it seems incredible that in 2019 a political party is advancing a programme based on policies first implemented a century ago and repeatedly discredited as economically illiterate and guaranteed to create mass poverty, it is surely because the market has lost sight of the principles of Adam Smith, has declined into still unreformed crony capitalism and corporatism, and has lost the intellectual ability to defend its cause.

The Death Tax should have been abolished years ago; instead McDonnell proposes to slash the inheritance tax threshold from £475,000 to £125,000. And that is just the tip of the taxation iceberg: for electoral reasons the really punitive stuff would only surface in the second budget of a putative Labour government.

Like Corbyn, McDonnell has a record of sympathetic expressions towards the IRA and other extremist factions. The Tories’ pathetic response to the Corbyn/McDonnell axis has been to squeal “Marxist!” – like some protective pious mantra – on every possible occasion. As defecting Tory voters will point out, their former party long ago embraced a cultural Marxist agenda, including the suppression of free speech: all a McDonnell government would do is extend it into the fiscal sphere, meaning that this time even members of the elites would feel the pain.

If alarmed Conservatives want to avoid the traumatic experience of a de facto communist government in Britain they have only one recourse: to deliver a WTO Brexit on 31 October. There is no other conceivable solution.

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