Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Labour’s manifesto reveals one thing: the Left has run out of ideas

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse for Labour, Noam Chomsky goes and endorses Jeremy Corbyn. ‘If I were a voter in Britain, I would vote for him…He’s quiet, reserved, serious, he’s not a performer,’ Chomsky told the Guardian. But the more you read of Chomsky’s endorsement, the more you wonder if he was put up to it for a bet. He says that: ‘The shift in the Labour party under Blair made it a pale image of the Conservatives.’ Tony Blair, that infamous electoral dud.

Chomsky is regularly cited as the world’s ‘top public intellectual’. It’s a slippery phrase. Friedrich Hayek called his ilk ‘the secondhand dealers in ideas’. I certainly wouldn’t buy a used ideology from Noam Chomsky. After all, Chomsky isn’t an intellectual – he’s a dogmatist, churning out catechisms on war, the mass media, and Middle Eastern politics for his faithful followers to memorise and repeat in tutorial rooms the world over. You can see why Corbyn appeals to Chomsky. They share much of the same politics, made up of anti-Westernism and an attitude that portrays liberalism and its supporters as innately corrupt.

Chomsky’s support of Corbyn is a reminder that those who are most enthusiastic about the Labour leader are also the ones least exposed to the political and economic consequences of his leadership. The irredeemable villains right now are the angry middle-aged men who are old enough to know better. The Paul Masons and the George Monbiots, who were around in the 1980s to witness what their fallacies did to Labour and the people who depend on it. Chomsky is an older version of those who have never forgiven history for not going their way.

It seems fitting that Chomsky’s endorsement should come as Labour’s manifesto is leaked to the press.

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