{"id":32754,"date":"2015-09-16T05:00:08","date_gmt":"2015-09-16T09:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32754"},"modified":"2017-01-25T11:38:43","modified_gmt":"2017-01-25T16:38:43","slug":"daniel-hannan-on-the-inexplicable-rise-of-jeremy-corbyn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/09\/16\/daniel-hannan-on-the-inexplicable-rise-of-jeremy-corbyn\/","title":{"rendered":"Daniel Hannan on the inexplicable rise of Jeremy Corbyn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Place your bets, folks … will the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn lead the UK Labour Party back into power or keep it far from that goal for years? Daniel Hannan<\/a> is of the latter opinion:<\/p>\n

For the first time in a lifetime of political analysis, I find myself lost for words. Nothing I write can do justice to the calamity that Britain’s Labour Party has just inflicted on itself. The best I can do, to give you a sense of the man newly elected as Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, is to summarize some of his opinions.<\/p>\n

Jeremy Corbyn is happy to talk to Irish Republican Army men, avowed anti-Semites and Hezbollah militants; but he refuses “out of principle” to talk to the Sun newspaper, a right-wing tabloid.<\/p>\n

He campaigns for the national rights of Venezuelans and Palestinians; but he opposes self-determination in Northern Ireland and the Falkland Islands.<\/p>\n

He’d like to admit as many Syrian refugees as possible, but is curiously ambivalent about why they became refugees in the first place, telling RT<\/em> that Assad’s chemical attacks may have been a Western hoax.<\/p>\n

He is relaxed about Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, but he can’t stand the idea of Britain having one.<\/p>\n

He says taxpayers should be able to opt out of funding the military, but not out of funding trade unions.<\/p>\n

He wants to re-open coal mines that have been uneconomical since the 1960s; yet, oddly, he wants to wean us off fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

He can’t even unequivocally condemn the Islamic State without adding a “but\u2026” to the effect that America shouldn’t have been in Iraq.<\/p>\n

He is, in short, happy to ally with any cause, however vile, provided it is sufficiently anti-British and anti-American.<\/p>\n

Jeremy Corbyn, whose steady and surprising march to victory runs parallel to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ unexpected success in the Democratic presidential race, is a shambling, self-righteous repository of every second-rate, lazy, 1960s Marxist nostrum. And Labour’s activists can’t get enough of him. They haven’t just picked the lowest card in the deck; they have slammed it belligerently on the table, giving Corbyn 59.5 percent of the votes in a four-candidate race. Fifty-nine point five percent for a man who has never held any office, who has spent 30 years rebelling against his party, and whose speaking style makes Ron Paul look like a mesmerising demagogue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Place your bets, folks … will the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn lead the UK Labour Party back into power or keep it far from that goal for years? Daniel Hannan is of the latter opinion: For the first time in a lifetime of political analysis, I find myself lost for words. Nothing I write can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,53],"tags":[188,1090,143,76],"class_list":["post-32754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-politics","tag-electionwatch","tag-jeremycorbyn","tag-labour","tag-socialism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8wi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32755,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32754\/revisions\/32755"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}