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Article published by: Leah Rowe
Date of publication: 23 July 2024
Meanwhile in the UK:
The new Labour government has recently sequestered 7 MPs who rebelled over the two-child benefits cap. Speaking as a conservative, I oppose the cap; the average number of children per family is 1.7 so the cap is needlessly cruel to a statistical few. Abolition costs nothing.
But I respect strength; this time, something good got canned. In future, something bad. Government mustn’t let a tiny few dictate terms or the many will suffer.
They’ll probably abolish the cap anyway. It’s the Labour party. They campaigned on a platform of fiscal discipline and what they billed as “government for public service” - basically they took a centrist position, in stark contrast to the social democratic position of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. The results were actually disastrous, electorally: the party only got 34 percent of the vote, but a split between Conservatives and Reform UK meant that they were able to drive a wedge and gain a large majority in parliament.
Anyway, I digress:
I’m not a supporter of the Labour party but the hallmark of good government is precisely that it has discipline in its decisions; good governance in any large organisation with a lot of scope means that decisions are taken collectively, for the many. Letting a few rebels dictate terms means they then demand more, then eventually they stop listening to everyone else. Mob rule masquerading as popular rule is something we avoided when Corbyn was defeated in 2019, and good riddance; the politics of envy should have no place in any country. Rule on merit, and listen to what real people want. Most people would not want socialism in any form, and it’s why the Labour party wisely purged all Corbynistas; Kier Starmer’s Labour is perfectly reasonable, and will not damage small businesses like mine, and they will at least respect property rights. Taxes will go up, but not crazy amounts, despite what the party I actually belong to might tell you (taxation was actually higher towards the end of the last Conservative government, than it was during the Blair years).
The real objective though, of today’s purge, was exactly that: Starmer’s labour party used the opportunity to purge the last remnants of Corbynism within the party. This is welcome, because those people are dangerous; principled, and with all the most noble of intentions, but utterly misguided and anti-business in the extreme.
Now I’ll get to the point of the joke, as alluded by the title of the article.
Firstly, why was I talking about Corbynism? Because John McDonnell and Rebecca Long-Bailey, prominent Corbynites within Labour, were among the sequestered seven. Now they are the few, not the many.
I will now steal the very phrase they coined, and turn it against them.
Yes. I’m not sure this current context was the original intent behind the phrase, and I realise the extreme irony of what I’m about to say next, aware that it may even offend some (and maybe amuse others), but I will borrow it here and say it. I will say it, with absolute conviction:
For the many, not the few!
I hold such contempt for social democrats (I would describe Kier Starmer’s cabinet as essentially liberal), because they have contempt for me; their ideology completely disregards and even punishes the existence of owners, they think we’re all evil and they want to make the freedoms we have impossible, just because we dare to defy authority; because we are democrats, and able to see through their charade. When they tell a landlord it’s no longer legal to rent a property out to someone unless it’s within a certain price point, that property is no longer theirs. When they sell their own council house for profit and later campaign against Right to Buy, they are hypocrites. When they promoted free internet access for all, I expected censorship of the internet. When two thirds of your income goes back to them so they can spend it on pointless projects, you are being robbed. When they talk about the working class, they are not talking about dreams and aspirations, and you should not listen to them; if you let them, they will create a culture of dependence, and teach people not to strive for greater things. Because that’s what the hard left does. They have never run a business themselves and never had to balance a budget during slow summer sales or worry about the next five years. The poison that they put into young people’s minds tells them that having wealth and authority over their own lives is a bad thing, because they’ve never had any over theirs, and they want to make that your problem. They make it a social crime to be rich. Put simply, you are their enemy.
I’m not exactly wealthy myself, but I believe in freedom, so I find it extremely satisfying when I see such people being put in their place. They arrogantly believe that they get to say what’s what, but we decide that. The vast majority of people (about 78 percent) either voted for Labour, Conservative or Reform in this recent election; although I campaigned for my local Conservative party, I respect the current, much more level-headed, technocratic and reasonable pro-business iteration of the Labour party lead by Kier Starmer; let’s hope it lasts.
For the greens, SNP and liberals (the parties who brought forward the King’s Speech amendment that the seven rebel Labour MPs supported) to think they have any authority whatsoever is laughable, and an insult, even if they have a good idea. The ruling party of the day, elected by citizenry, is what gets to decide; they have the authority, and rightly so. Say what you want about Labour, I know I certainly will, but they have the right to govern as they wish, as the duly elected party of government. Corbynism has no authority, and its supporters are to be rebuked loudly at every opportunity.
I’m rambling, as I often do, so I’ll end it here, but not before I take one more swing with the bat, for the road:
Corbynites are not the many. They are the few.
That is all.
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