Jeremy Corbyn would have been a better prime minister than Boris Johnson. It’s something most of us have said in jest in the last 12 months, but now we have evidence that it is true.
Corbyn, now sitting in Parliament as an independent, was one of only 76 MPs who voted on Thursday night against the Coronavirus Regulations Bill.
This legislation, which extends the government’s lockdown powers for yet another six months, is among the most draconian, illiberal, anti-human, cruel, economy-destroying, and pointless in British parliamentary history. Every MP who voted it for it should be ashamed of themselves.
So the fact that Corbyn voted against this monstrosity makes him a more honourable and democratic politician than Prime Minister Boris Johnson, than the entire Tory Cabinet, than more than three-quarters of the Tory backbenchers, and than the majority of his old party Labour.
Sure, if you read Corbyn’s speech, you see he couldn’t resist hedging it about with usual Marxist nonsense about “NHS workers”, “food banks”, and so on. But buried in the waffle were some really good points: the kind of ones that all parliamentarians worth their salt should have been making rather than going along with the government’s outrageous power grab.
He made a very good point about the unequal levels of suffering imposed by lockdown. If you’re a smug middle-class tosser with a big house and a large garden, then it’s more than bearable: in fact, you probably wish it could go on forever because of something you read in The Telegraph or the Mail about how it’s really good for the environment. But if you’re one of the Deplorables, it’s been a living hell.
Here is how Corbyn put it:
If you are a family with three or four children living in one or two-bedroom flat with no balcony, no open space, insufficient computer access and insufficient income because of the coronavirus crisis, it is a very different story indeed. They are the children underachieving in school and the people going through a mental health crisis and, sadly, that has led to an increase in domestic violence.
He also made a key point about liberty:
Our liberties are at stake under this Act. Why on earth could the Government not at least review section 21 on the powers of the police to prevent protest and demonstration? We need to live in a free society in which people can express their wishes. That surely is the very least we can expect from this Parliament and this Government.
I agree with Corbyn. It really ought to be the least we should expect from this Parliament and this government. But for the most part, we haven’t got it, have we?
Here, for example, is the supposedly independent-minded Herefordshire Conservative MP Bill Wiggin, at the end of his contribution:
When we look at the statistics, we see that our record is fantastic. That is why I will dig deep into the loyalty vault and today vote with the Government…
Wait, what? Your party has been taken over by raving fascists like Health Secretary Matt ‘Messiah Complex’ Hancock; your constituents are subject to laws so strict — they aren’t even allowed to travel abroad; Britain is effectively a giant prison camp — it’s like living behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s. And yet, instead of opposing this outrageous nonsense with every fibre of your being, you decide instead to dig into something you jocularly describe as “the loyalty vault”. Because it’s always party before principle, and definitely party before constituents, right?
Truly the fact that just 35 Conservative MPs voted against this bill makes me ashamed that I ever voted Conservative — a mistake I shall certainly never make again.
Not, of course, that Labour is any better. But no one would expect them to be, led as they are by the only man even more committed to the ‘Build Back Better’ agenda than Boris Johnson and his cronies: Keir Starmer.
Starmer, who has been listed a member of the Trilateral Commission, thinks that, if anything, “building back better” doesn’t go far enough — “We know what the Conservatives want to do. They want to build back. But I don’t want to go back,” he said recently.
Corbyn’s Brother Found Guilty of Breaking Coronavirus Law at Anti-Lockdown Protest https://t.co/yT5F71djKP
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 3, 2020
Corbyn may be a Marxist loon but, like his brother Piers, he understands the government’s Coronavirus Regulations Bill power grab threatens Britons’ rights and freedoms.
Yes, it’s odd to think that an IRA- and Hamas-sympathising Commie would have made a better job of running Britain than a classically educated, professedly liberty-loving Conservative. But such is the madness of our age.
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