Things that go bump

If you have been wondering – I know you have – whatever happened to Dan Brown since the madcap Da Vinci Code days, fear not. He has apparently found work drafting Jeremy Corbyn’s election launch speech. Filled with foreboding and riddled with demons, witches, ghoulies and bogeymen, Hallowe’en was the most appropriate day of the year to attempt to fill biddable young minds with the spectre of world domination by shadowy cabals. If his plan is to scare kids into voting for lifelong servitude to the state he has wasted no time in entertaining even the tiniest glimmer of reality.

But it’s okay, everybody, since that desperate, elite-bashing frenzy the attention of the high priests of outrage has turned to their favourite Guy Fawkes figure of all. Donald Trump. People are entirely at liberty and quite within their rights to despise the orangutan-haired 45^th president; the most comical White House occcupant in history. But in their haste to condemn, how completely do they reveal their nastier side. Again, very Hallowe’en.

But, but, they insist, Brexiteers sneered at Barack Obama’s calculated, invited, deliberate intervention in the referendum campaign, so how can they defend Trump? I didn’t hear anybody defending Trump. The people we voted against at the referendum, the self-satisfied, smug, superior guardians of the apparent new world order are very quick to see a threat where none exists. Everybody sees Trump as a joke, but some of us understand why he was elected. His comments to Nigel Farage last night were nothing new and were probably far from calculated; just Trumping from the hip as usual.

Besides, Jeremy Corbyn’s vision is a true recipe for disaster and I happen to think that – possibly accidentally – The Donald is spot on. A new communist Britain, for that is exactly what JC is proposing, would be a horrible place to live. His fanciful tale of elites and secretive organisations colluding to keep people poor demonstrates a woeful ignorance of how capitalism works. Poor people can’t consume and without consumption the advanced world would be like… well it would be like Russia, pre-enlightenment. (Or some might just say ‘like Russia’.)

Rob the rich, Jezzer? You have to catch them first. As is pretty clear and as has been demonstrated, if you go after the people who - despite all his protestations – actually pay ALL the net tax, they will use their resources to put themselves out of your reach. If you penalise success which, however much he says otherwise, is exactly what a Labour government would do, you end up with mediocrity and rent-seeking. If you drive out those who can, you end up with those who can’t… and won’t.

But how nice this kind, caring, gentler politics sounds if all your life you have been told fairy tales about wicked old witches, goblins and rapacious, baby-eating giants, plucking the food from the mouths of downtrodden workers and building poisonous, polluting factories to enslave the masses and keep them down. How right it seems, if you are told that ‘the rich’ fear nothing more than they fear paying their taxes, that we should squeeze them until the pips squeak. How fair does it sound that children should be allowed to have a say on who governs their future?

Momentum – Labour’s brownshirts – have wasted no time in embarking on a mass assault on the consciousness of the young and the frail, the left-behind, the malcontents. If they get their way instead of the country being run by those best able to do it, it will be run by those with a track record of appealing to the least educated, able and industrious. If you want a story about things that go bump in the night, under Labour the economy would do just that.