Bernard Ingham: It's a free society so choose Corbyn if you relish chaos

Well, they have both said the system is “rigged” against the people. Corbyn has put himself on the side of the populace against the establishment, just as Donald Trump targeted a rotten Washington.

He has also had a go at the media among those “at the top who leech off those at the bottom”. President Trump has had a wonderful time lambasting the hacks and come this weekend will have survived 100 days. No doubt this encourages the Labour leader.

But in one important respect they are like chalk and cheese. Trump was elected on a populist platform while the opinion polls put Corbyn ever further behind Theresa May, who is no Hillary Clinton.

He succeeded for one simple reason: he never threatened to wage war on capitalism. In contrast, Corbyn has said that people with brass should be very worried about the verdict on June 8 and specifically “the gilded elite” of bankers, yacht-owning plutocrats, privatised railway operators, cosy cartels, wealth extractors and tax dodgers. Mercifully, he forbore to add “Uncle Tom Cobley and all”.

This is where I should make a confession. I have been against privilege and for those who try to better themselves from my days in the Labour League of Youth in Hebden Bridge. But we did not want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg any more than did Clement Attlee’s 1945-51 government, even if Aneurin Bevin felt all Tories were “lower than vermin”. After the unemployment of the 1930s, they aimed at a mixed economy but with far more control over its “commanding heights”.

Corbyn is also being stymied by the PM. She does not run an Eton/Oxford “chumocracy” like Cameron or take unrecorded decisions on a sofa as Tony Blair did with his narrow inner clique.

All the evidence is that she thinks rather deliberately for herself and is much more explicit than previous Tory leaders in wanting to make the economy work for everybody, including those “just about managing”. We are all more explicitly socially conscious now.

Let us be clear. Corbyn, extracted from the alien establishment environment of the Commons, is a revelation on the hustings. He is articulate and passionate. The only trouble is that he spouts the class war he has preached for 40 years or more, apparently oblivious of its consequences.

Like the rest of the pretentious and pious intellectuals who dine in Islington, he is utterly incapable of understanding that you cannot reform capitalism by nationalising a lot of services and bossing brass around.

In a free society those motivated by the power of money will take it elsewhere, to the detriment of the mass of the people. Meanwhile, trades unions that fund Labour, such as the dictatorial Unite, RMT and Aslef, will run amok, especially if Corbyn were to nationalise the railways. Don’t expect your trains to run on time then.

It does not seem to have occurred to these Champagne socialists that Harold Macmillan felt able to tell us in 1959 that we had never had it so good; that Ted Heath blew it by introducing a tightly controlled economy under the label of a prices, incomes and dividends policy; that Margaret Thatcher eventually converted a nation racked by a winter of discontent into a successful economy and left a budget surplus, just like John Major in 1997.

And what did Gordon Brown achieve? A monumental budget deficit of £153bn that we are still trying to eliminate.

In my career as a journalist and civil servant, I have seen these leftie ideologues at work. They are consumed by a hatred for those who oppose them. Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, is a classic example and both she and Corbyn deserve each other.

But we, the downtrodden masses in their eyes, don’t deserve them. This is because for all their superficial commitment to freedom they have no time for independent minds.

You may feel that I am becoming paranoiac and that it will never happen in a month of Sundays. But Corbyn is right. I am deeply worried lest he either wins outright or forms a coalition with the Scottish Nationalists.

We can then confidently expect not just that the economy will go bust but that our precious freedoms will be eroded with Momentum’s Trots, Len McCluskey and now the Communist Party behind Corbyn. You have been warned. Don’t trump Trump.