Everyone loves communism. When they’re 17-18 years old and don’t know what it means. It sounds so ‘fair’, so equal. A life of working for the community, never needing anything, never wanting, working for the good of all, decisions made by committee. Brilliant. Except it doesn’t work. Never has, never will. Not on a large scale, anyway.

When I was 18 I went to work on a kibbutz for a summer. Cheap holiday. Holiday? Up at 6, collecting eggs from chickens who, in the most part, didn’t really want their eggs collecting, they wanted to keep them. I still don’t know which came first. But for my toils I was housed (in a shed), fed very well, even got paid a little, given all the horrible cheap Israeli cigarettes I could eat and had a great time. The kibbutz ran by a committee and it was efficient and profitable (fertilised eggs and furniture plus a bit of agriculture, obviously). Decisions were made collectively and although there would be disputes (Jews love a dispute) these were minimal and rarely produced gun-play. Which was good because everyone on the kibbutz was armed. To the fucking teeth. And I thought ‘communism is a wonderful thing’.

Then I learned the brutal truth. The kibbutz model is on such a micro-scale that it can function well and everyone can gain. But on a bigger, macro society, it just can’t. It crumbles to corruption, state-armies to control the masses and worse inequality than in a non-communist state. Communism effectively replaces democracy with starvation for the majority. All enforced with secret police, random arrests, imprisonments without trial, all the good bits that make Russia and China such great places to live. Never mind North Korea. All of which are ‘lands of equality’ in which a select group of billionaires run a nation that can’t feed its people, so it locks them up instead. Least you get fed in a gulag, I suppose. Well, I assume you do?

So where does Jeremy Corbyn fit in with all this? He may claim to be a ‘socialist’, he may pay lip service to a ‘fairer society’, but he’s a communist, pure and simple. You have to be to dress that badly. And the first thing communists do is remove democratic process. It gets in the way. So Corbyn’s best mate and main party funder, Len McClusky, head of the Unite Trade Union, just gave a wonderful demonstration of how to be a good ‘comrade’ and ‘bruvva’. He just sacked from the Union the man who was due to stand against him in a leadership election. For ‘allegations’ that may or may not prove to be true, so we can’t say what they are.

Jeremy Corbyn is a horrible and divisive man, he’s even divided his own party, many of whom are fleeing rather than be ‘tainted’ by association. His ideas come from Tsarist Russia and he has no economic plans other than ‘tax the rich’, that ill-defined group. Almost as ill-defined as ‘the working people’. Captains of industry are not included in that, despite their 97-hour working weeks creating the employment we need.

And I’m worried. What if… what if… you know what I mean.

Happy anxious Friday

A xxxx