Toby Young Toby Young

What would a Corbyn victory mean for me?

Until now, I haven’t been too worried about Jeremy Corbyn. True, he exceeded expectations two years ago, but that was because no one thought Labour would win. It was a protest vote, a way for Remainers to signal their disapproval of Theresa May’s approach to Brexit. If the good burghers of Kensington thought there was the slightest chance Labour would be elected they never would have returned a Labour MP. And since then the bloom has gone off the rose. It has finally dawned on Remainers that Corbyn has his own, hard-left reasons for wanting to leave the EU and that behind his ‘anti-Zionism’ lurks something more sinister. Not so much ‘magic grandpa’ as a relic of toxic, 20th-century ideology.

But that was before the government committed hari-kari. Thanks to May’s inability to get Brexit through, Corbyn may well win the next election and my thoughts have been turning to the terrible aftershocks that would follow. I don’t mean the calamitous economic impact: capital flight, a run on the pound, asset prices tumbling. No, I mean the threat to free speech. What would a Corbyn victory mean for me and other outspoken critics of the loony left?

The greatest risk would be from the Praetorian guard of Labour’s most passionate supporters — Corbyn’s equivalent of Brownshirts. Numerous Conservative parliamentary candidates were targeted by these thugs in the run-up to the last election, and since then they’ve gone after Labour MPs whom they regard as insufficiently enthusiastic about the Great Leader, such as Stella Creasy. To date, the attacks have been on their property and constituency offices, but it’s not difficult to imagine an escalation — one reason Jewish MPs had to hire bodyguards to accompany them to the last Labour conference.

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