Be careful what you wish for: a response to "Tories4Corbyn"

There are some Conservatives who derive a strong sense of schadenfreude from the car crash into which Labour's leadership election appears to be descending.

 

I can understand that, though I am trying to resist it.

 

I hope those who are talking about being "Tories4Corbyn" and suggesting that people should register as Labour supporters to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in order to destroy the Labour party are joking.

 

Because if people actually did it the joke could be on Britain.

 

Jeremy Corbyn is certainly not Labour's best prospect to win the next election. My main concern about the damage he could do to Britain is that I think he would be a very weak Opposition Leader, far worse than Ed Miliband, who nobody would take seriously. It would be better even for the Conservatives, and much more so for Britain, if the government were kept on its' toes by somebody who was seen as a credible alternative.

 

But the fact that I don't believe a Corbyn victory would be at all likely does not make it impossible.

 

The European referendum may be extremely difficult for the Conservatives: there will be prominent tory figures on both sides and it could get extremely heated. (It is entirely possible that Labour will have the same problem, but splits over Europe are not as important to the Labour party because they do not care as much about the issue.)

 

And sooner or later there is going to be another recession. It might not come this side of the 2020 election, and it may or may not be the fault of whoever is in government when it arrives. But they will probably get the blame for it.

 

Suppose the referendum splits the Conservatives badly, there is another recession, and a couple of "black swan" events which nobody could predict make the re-election of the government impossible.

 

In that circumstance, analogous to the Greek election which put Alex Tsipras in office, it is not impossible that a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party could sneak into power, and probably put on the same sort of pantomime here here which Syriza have been performing in Greece.

 

I dare say "Tories4Corbyn" would be laughing on the other side of their faces in that circumstance, and serve them right, but unfortunately the rest of us would have to live with the consequences too.

 

There is a good piece from the Sun below on the most likely consequences if Corbyn became Labour leader. The idea of a "perpetual Tory government" may sound attractive to many Conservatives but actually, as an Edmund Burke small-government Conservative, I don't think any party can be trusted with perpetual power, even us. There is a saying, be careful what you wish for. It applies here.