The most edifying feature of our reluctant election here in the United Kingdom is the welcome tempering of that modern scourge—the three-month Christmas.
There is no time for gaudy festive jingles or silly hats. Instead, we British have engorged on an all-you-can-eat buffet of political crazies, weirdos, strangelings, and madpeople.
In an orgy so lurid, a tolerance sets quickly.
For the Christmas-averse, this is a welcome distraction. Pubs lured with tinsel. Seasonal drinkers whose dietary “advice” should be quarantined within the gym. That “cheerful” forced-fun.
Crazy people, however, make it all tolerable. That is provided their zany opinions are kept from power.
One such “alternative thinker,” as he dubbed himself, asked me, mid-bottle of Shiraz, who gets my vote.
“Boris,” I said, somewhat murky, the answer not obvious.
“I’m voting for Jeremy,” he replied. (It’s always “Jeremy.”) Half-cut, I asked whether the “anti-Semitism thing” colored his vote. Surely, he considered that?
A smile threatened. Softly touching my shoulder, he shifted his eyes on his own. Toggled his voice to funeral service. “To be honest,” he said, confidentially, “I don’t like the Jews much, either.”
Oh.
This kind of nutty thinking was once confined to night buses among the demented ramblings of the improperly medicated.
Did you know that Jews control the weather? Neither did I! (If anyone of Jewish ancestry is reading this: please have a word with whoever controls Britain’s weather this week. It’s inhospitable to the tropically inclined.)
You would hope this depth of grotesquerie is spewed only from the mouths of pub-nutters of the sort from whom people tend to shuffle away in any case.
Not quite. Since Jeremy Corbyn’s hostile takeover of the Labour Party in 2015, such tropes have become mainstream. And the scent isn’t emanating from just a few putrid eggs. Labour is under investigation at present for institutional anti-Semitism.
So measled is their state that Chief Rabbi Mirvis broke precedent in urging the nation to abandon Labour. He said Corbyn was “unfit for high office” and that a Corbyn premiership would put at stake “the soul of our very nation.”
Jeremy Corbyn, in just two weeks, could become prime minister. A colonial guilt-trip could become school “history.” And so could we.
Jeremy, of course, wondered why the rabbi “would say such a thing,” as his interview with Andrew Neil tickled the two-minute mark.
That interview, dear reader, is essential Thanksgiving viewing. Jeremy outdid Prince Andrew in that regard.
The BBC’s Andrew Neil (who you might remember marmalizing Ben Shapiro) asked Corbyn whether the following statement could be considered anti-Semitic: “Rothchild Zionists run world governments.”
A visibly convulsing Corbyn could not bring himself to admit so. It took him a while.
It got worse. Corbyn then refused to apologize to British Jews for the long-running saga of anti-Semite nutters poisoning his party.
You’ll have to watch it to quite understand the scale of haplessness. Envisage swimming in bleach Jell-O, on Ketamine.
Just hours earlier, Corbyn shared a stage with three delightful anti-Semites at a big reveal of policy.
Under a Labour government, school children would be taught the ills of the British Empire. The syllabus would focus on “historical injustice” and “colonialism.” In short, self-loathing lessons for every child.
That is perhaps Corbyn’s most idiosyncratic proposal. Those lucky children indoctrinated to be just like “Jeremy”—a self-loathing, intellectual derelict and a bitterly tainted soul taught to understand that every “injustice” is the fault of someone else.
It’s telling that Corbyn does not insist on teaching the horrors of Communism, or the stains of many his own heroes. He’s never encountered a murderous despot he didn’t like.
That interview revealed the true faultline of post-2016 politics. Gone are the defunct Left and Right. A battle not even between the modish “national” and “global.” This battle is all about reason versus emotion.
Every deployment of reasoned thought met Corbyn’s impregnable shield of emotion.
When asked how he would find $75 billion for a pension payout his party had not included in Labour’s already profligate manifesto, Corbyn shrugged.
That sum, just tacked on to the manifesto’s $107 million blood-red splurge, would just materialize itself by magic because, in Corbyn’s words, it was a “moral debt.”
And, I suspect the “progressive” half of Great Britain agreed regardless of the reasoning which asked from where that money would come.
Corbyn and his spiritual kin are not concerned with such details. How one feels is all that matters.
Perhaps they will soon feel the burden of reality.
Back in 2017, a major YouGov poll broke the country into mockery when it predicted a hung parliament loomed. Theresa May was streets ahead, said the other pollsters.
YouGov got it right. In almost all 650 seats.
That same model this week suggested that Boris Johnson would win a majority of 68.
By hammering down the ancestral Labour “red wall,” Boris could plant Tory lawmakers in seats that have never returned a Conservative.
He is on course to repeat this in dozens of seats that have been Labour since World War II. Meanwhile, Corbyn would ensure their worst result since 1983.
Yet, it is just a poll, with all the caveats polls entail. There is plenty of time for emotion to overshadow the puny light of reason.
A late Remainer swing behind Labour would rout that survey and Boris’s apparent majority.
Corbyn’s latest conspiracy theory, that Boris Johnson will sell the National Health Service to President Trump, could infect the emotionally minded.
Jeremy Corbyn, in just two weeks, could become prime minister. That colonial guilt-trip could become school “history.”
And so could we.