Bernard Ingham: Corbyn waging civil war in place of fighting terror

The UK, with its glorious background in defending freedom, can no longer be relied upon to go to even limited war against terrorists who employ beheading, crucifixion, indiscriminate slaughter and rape as the means to world domination.

This is what we have been reduced to, even though the Commons may well vote tonight to join the bombing of the murderous so-called Islamic state in Syria. Please do not get me wrong. I am no warmonger. Declaring hostilities is never to be undertaken lightly. And Syria is a complex problem. But Islamic militants are killing people daily.

We Britons knew their capability long before the bloody Paris atrocity and our allies want us to join this limited extension of our air war.

Yet David Cameron is unable to go to the House of Commons absolutely confident of a positive vote today.

Tony Blair is partly to blame for taking the country to war against Saddam Hussein on a false prospectus while we were pouring blood and treasure with doubtful success into Afghanistan.

Britain, like the free world, is war weary. Unfortunately, militant Islam is not.

David Cameron did not improve matters by charging in to help make the Arab Spring an Arab (and European) winter in Libya.

But Red Ed Miliband is the real whipping boy. He not only left the then coalition Parliamentarily paralysed by refusing to intervene in Syria but also invented the £3-and-no-questions-asked membership of the Labour party. In one mad moment, he reversed Neil Kinnock’s good work in ridding Labour of Militant.

The Labour party now has about as much idea who sits in its ranks as Europe does of the identities and credentials of those migrating from the mostly Muslim Middle East and Africa.

But we do know that Jeremy Corbyn leads this rabble, that he would meet an enemy coming belligerently up the Thames with a cup of tea; and that last weekend he set the party’s militant entryists to threatening moderate Labour MPs who would defend Britain with de-selection. His politics is war against moderation by another means – intimidation.

So long as he is there he represents, among many other things, a threat to Britain’s security. We shall see what Oldham voters make of him in tomorrow’s by-election.

He has also dangerously exposed another threat to our well-being by laying waste to coherent opposition. Already he has corrupted a euphoric Tory Government in two ways:

into seeking popularity only seven months after a general election when it should be getting unpopular measures over early; and

by easing up on what is curiously described as austerity. After embracing Labour’s meaningless “working wage”, George Osborne has now slackened his hold on the economy on the basis of highly uncertain forecasts of better growth and higher tax revenues.

You would not think that:

the Government is still spending £70bn more than it raises in tax;

national debt continues to pile up;

we have a serious trade deficit;

the European and wider world economy is in a fragile state;

we are beseiged by migrants; and

whether or not Parliament sanctions air strikes against Syria, we are still spending billions we don’t have on anti-terrorism and, God help us, overseas aid of unknown value.

All this means we may well come to rue 2015. If so, it will be entirely the fault of our politicians across the parties.

It reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s second term after the 1983 general election when the risks were less.

After Michael Foot’s uncertain opposition followed by Neil Kinnock’s Militant-ravaged apprenticeship, the government hubristically entered its “banana skin years”. If it could step on one, it did.

As No 10 press secretary, I campaigned for Willie Whitelaw to take charge of instilling discipline but did not succeed until the annus horribilis of 1986. In the meantime John Biffen, who was supposed to be the Minister responsible for the disciplined presentation of policy, brought laissez faire to a fine, neglectful art before his preposterous call for Thatcher to be replaced by a collective leadership.

This caused me to call him “that well-known semi-detached member of the Cabinet” not, as the conspiracy theorists supposed, to signal his demise (which was a year in coming) but to get myself out of a hole by telling the truth about him.

He may have been in the Cabinet but was seldom of it.

Now the mighty have much further to fall if the politicians do not recognise reality.

Attenshun, you ‘orrible shower.