UNTIL now, the conduct of this election has been so utterly tedious, the outcome so predictable and the dearth of talent and good ideas on offer so total that I have been paying almost no attention at all. I did not expect to get involved, beyond voting, and certainly did not expect to be making an endorsement. Only the caprice of the polls forces my hand, so I will keep it brief: vote Tory.

There is no enthusiasm behind this injunction: I am a leftist, albeit a slightly unorthodox one. I voted and campaigned for Remain, and despair of the recent tilt of our politics towards paranoid nationalist demagoguery – an omen far more ominous than Brexit itself. The defining transformation of this new era is the supposedly conservative Daily Mail’s reinvention as a Pravda, whose hysterical headlines now scream for the blood of the enemies of the Revolution. Theresa May has failed to resist even the worst excesses of this dynamic, such as the frenzied attack by the right-wing press on the judges who ruled against the government in the Article 50 case. Perhaps she subscribes to the Yes Minister take on democratic leadership: I must follow them; I am their leader! I have other objections: by her jeering speech on “citizens of nowhere” and attacks on the obligingly villainous “liberal elites”, egged on by the usual unsavoury newspapermen, she and her supporters have made clear that they hate people like me; that they hold us and our values in open contempt. As Home Secretary, she displayed all the maladies we have come to associate with that office: obsessive secrecy and paranoia; a disregard for the rule of law; hostility to basic liberties; constant efforts to expand the state’s snooping and prying; and a fondness for scapegoating more junior officials for departmental mistakes. Her pitch for the leader’s job at the 2015 party conference, where she devoted her speech to bemoaning the high levels of immigration for which it was her own department’s responsibility to regulate, was seen as tawdry and self-promoting, even within the conservative press. She is a drab and dismally provincial politician; more often clumsy than adroit; holding her present office by a chain of lucky events: Cameron’s need to keep a senior woman in the cabinet, and his lack of alternatives to her; and the ineptitude of her rivals in the leadership race last year. I have little faith in her ability to govern, but what alternative exists?

The Liberal Democrats? The Party is merits a protest vote, but only where it is safe to do so: I live in a safe Labour seat, so the Liberal Democrats have my vote. But understand that they have no hope of winning, and that stopping Corbyn or the chaos of a polarised Parliament takes priority. Their strategy and animating force is the campaign for a second referendum – a hopeless cause. Forget for a moment that the vast majority of voters, including most Remain voters, are resigned to Brexit and just want the government to get on with it. Imagine a sudden reversal of fortune, and Tim Farron sweeping to a shock victory, or winning enough seats to force a referendum on the Brexit deal. Even were such a referendum winnable, which I doubt, there is little reason to believe the Article 50 process can simply be reversed. Doing so would require the unanimous agreement of all 27 remaining EU states, which would take a decade or more of negotiations to achieve, and would without doubt demand the loss of our traditional opt-outs and privileges within the EU. Brexit cannot now be stopped.

And Labour? There is much to praise in his manifesto, but Corbyn is not fit to be Prime Minister. Forget his shambolic management of the opposition; forgive his fundamental ignorance of the modern world; overlook his benevolence towards blatant antisemitism within the Party; ignore his decision to accept money from Press TV, the Iranian state’s foreign propaganda arm. He is unfit to govern because his entire world view is delusional and poisonous. He has repeatedly sided with and supported the vilest terrorists and religious fanatics not by accident, but because of his ideology. He genuinely sees Western states as “imperialist” and, by farcical deduction, their enemies as heroic revolutionaries. Never mind that the Provisional IRA ran large sections of Belfast and Derry in the manner of a Soviet Republic crossed with mafia state, killing, stealing and torturing as they pleased: the important thing is that they were resisting British imperialism. The same logic excuses Hamas and Hizbullah: their genocidal pretentions mean nothing to Corbyn, because they’re bravely resisting Israel and America. Are you some kind of Zionist? Whose side are you on? I know this is how he thinks, because when I was a sixteen year-old bourgeois Bolshevik my comrades and I thought the same way. Every bomb that rips through a British nightclub is the fault of Blair and Brown, Churchill, Thatcher or Cameron; anyone but the bomber and his friends. After all, they’re probably brown – and it’s hardly their fault they were victims of imperialism, is it? There is no despotism he would not excuse, however monstrous, so long as it stood in opposition to “the West”. (Indeed, he’s all in favour of aggressive imperialism, so long as the invading power is Russia, Iraq or Iran). As Prime Minister, his anti-Western and isolationist stance would catastrophically weaken NATO at a time of American withdrawal and Russian revanchism, further jeopardising European peace. He must be stopped, and the members must be punished for electing him. The latter point is very important: even in a safe seat, do not vote Labour. Every vote for Labour in this election is a vote for Corbynism, and will stiffen the hard left’s resistance. Understand that they seek to use your loyalty for their own ends: their priority is not winning this election, but consolidating control of the Labour party. Only when the traitors within are defeated, their thinking goes, can we take the fight to the Tories.

As leftists, Corbyn is our responsibility. The most sinister feature of the Trump phenomenon (“administration” does not adequately capture the spell he has cast over American politics) has been the astonishing spectacle of hitherto respected and independent conservatives fawning at his feet. No outrage is too egregious for them to defend; no lie too blatant to repeat. Nothing – not the open corruption of his government; nor the profiteering of his foul family; nor its shredding of traditional alliances and flirtation with tyrants; nor its brazen contempt for due process and the rule of law; nor its war on free and truthful journalism – warrants more than the most hollow rebuke from these writhing invertebrates. The elite of the Party – men like Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnel, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John McCain, all senior lawmakers or former Presidential candidates – cringe on suppliant knee before the omnipotent cretin. Besides the courts, they are the only check on Trump’s excesses, and their failure to resist his corrosion of American democracy sinks them in deep disgrace. One could not ask for a more strident parable on the consequences of unthinking tribalism. It falls to us to rise to the standard that America’s self-proclaimed Republicans has so woefully fallen short of. Corbyn is not fit to govern, and it is the duty of we on the left to point this out. So it is with great reluctance, and no small self-importance, that I urge you: vote Tory where they can win, and Liberal Democrat where they can’t.

Nathan

Saturday June 3^rd, 2017

London