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Conservative Revolution

Britain and the world’s oldest conservative think tank

Conservative Revolution

Britain and the world’s oldest conservative think tank

Bow Group’s Ann Widdecombe blasts Labour

May 18, 2017 | Archive, News Articles

By Ann Widdecombe in the Express

Read original at: http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/ann-widdecombe/805581/hard-left-true-face-of-labour-jeremy-corbyn

THE lunacy of Corbyn’s manifesto and the Leftwing lurch of Labour are much less surprising than many seem to find them.

Labour has always been the party of the trade unions, punitive taxation and antipathy to the private sector.

It was not just some lunatic phase under Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. Denis Healey warned of howls of anguish from the rich in Harold Wilson’s time.

Jim Callaghan presided over the Winter of Discontent in 1978-79.

It took 18 years of opposition to convince Labour that it had to change, that Britain had rejected socialism and wanted instead enlightened capitalism.

Tony Blair persuaded Labour to try a different approach just to win and all the time the party was winning, it went along with a programme it hated, effectively adopting the Thatcher agenda.

Therefore it was always going to be the case that when it started losing it would revert to type and that is exactly what it has done.

It was completely predictable despite the growing number of Blairites. Mrs May need do very little except sit back and watch as Corbyn presses the self-destruct button and blows up, electorally speaking, his entire party.

 

 

The only question then is how long it will take it this time to recognise that Britain simply does not want serious socialism.

 

I expect some of the young can still be tempted by socialism. It is, after all, 40 years since we had an old Labour government but Corbyn is sufficiently extreme to warn off all but the most starryeyed idealists.

Generations have become used to a way of life in which enterprise and wealth creation are no longer dirty words.

Whether or not Labour makes Corbyn redundant after June 8 remains to be seen but his party is fast becoming so.

A senior barrister has been disciplined for claiming in court that a child abuse victim was “not innocent”.

She was 16 and Howard Godfrey QC, representing the man who groped her after giving her alcohol, claimed she was not “unaccustomed to drinking”.

The argument was about sentencing and if this had been a sheltered under-aged girl whose only experience of a tipple had been a small cider at Christmas, would one not have expected to hear that as proof of innocence and helplessness?

Would there not have been outrage if such facts were ignored?

So why shouldn’t we hear that a girl over the age of consent is not innocent and is used to drink?

It does not make the convicted man any less guilty but it does put the crime in context when it comes to sentencing.

Yet the barrister has now wimped out and apologised. He says he will not do it again. That means he will not represent his clients to the best of his ability again.

We need a bit of common sense. It really is more serious when a victim is young and innocent and it really is more serious if a stranger rapes a woman on a lonely road than if she has got drunk and invited her regular boyfriend into her bed.

Assault is still assault and rape still rape but there are degrees of seriousness.

We accept that with all other crimes including murder itself so why are sex crimes differently treated?

Parents are behaving very badly

Louise McGowan, the headmistress of Walderslade Girls’ School in Chatham, has spoken out about parents who resent their children being disciplined at school.

This comes as, at a different school, a teacher is prosecuted and sacked for brushing the back of a boy’s head to recall his attention to his work.

The father insisted on a prosecution and even claimed compensation (unsuccessfully), whereas the police had wanted to leave the matter to the school.

Needless to say school, pupil and vengeful parent remain anonymous while the teacher is pilloried. What do these parents imagine they are teaching their children?

Once, if you went home and said you had got into trouble at school you would have been ticked off again by your parents.

Now children are being taught that if a teacher calls them to account they need not worry because dad will make trouble for the teacher.

They can just misbehave with impunity. What sort of lesson is that for later life?

At yet another school, pupils threw food at Ofsted inspectors.

Do you suppose mum and dad gave them extra pocket money as a reward?

I am so tired of hearing about Pippa

Sorry to be such a curmudgeon but I have got serious Pippa fatigue.

I hope her wedding day is happy and memorable. I hope all the arrangements run smoothly, the cake is tasty, the bride is bonny and the groom is on time, but, dammit, I don’t want to read any more or hear any more about it.

Acres of newsprint have been devoted to this young woman’s nuptials.

Why?

She is not royal. Her marriage has no constitutional significance. Her children will not be in line to the throne.

True, members of the Royal Family will be present but so they are at weddings which get a fraction of the coverage of this one.

My yawns grow wider every time I open a newspaper but at least I can turn over the pages, however many there are.

I can switch off the TV and probably will – not only on the day of the wedding but for days afterwards. Meanwhile there is still a war in Syria.

Ian McEwan’s charmless contribution to the EU debate is unworthy of a great Novelist

Ian McEwan is a seriously gifted writer who should stick to his trade.

Instead he has entered the Brexit debate with the charmless comment that in two years’ time the Remainers could win a second referendum because 1.5 million “oldsters, mostly Brexiters” will be “freshly in their graves”.

In truth I am not as outraged by the phraseology of this comment as I am by the sentiment behind it, which is that if you are on the losing side the answer is simply to go on having referendums until you win, at which point you will expect the losers to shut up for ever.

I had always thought that the essence of being a good writer is to have empathy with, or at least understanding of, people in general rather than just a narrow band of like-minded individuals.

Yet McEwan’s description of those of us who voted Brexit is that we range “from the small-minded to the mean-spirited to the murderous”.

Eh?

Whom do we wish to kill?

I had three criteria for eventually coming down on the side of Brexit: that a country should control its own laws, control its own borders and be ruled by a democratically elected government.

Which of those ambitions, Ian McEwan, makes me a murderess?

Read original at: http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/ann-widdecombe/805581/hard-left-true-face-of-labour-jeremy-corbyn