Next week’s general election in the United Kingdom ought to have been a slam dunk. Britain’s chief rabbi felt moved to warn against Labour’s anti-Semitism — an intervention made all the more powerful by the poor man’s visible discomfort at having to speak out. That alone, in normal times, would put the result beyond doubt.
But these are not normal times. Again and again, Jeremy Corbyn has done things which, according to all the rule books, should knock him out of the race. He has consorted with the country’s enemies, attending IRA funerals, praising Hamas and Hezbollah, refusing to back Britain against Argentinian President Leopoldo Galtieri’s fascist junta in 1982. He regrets the outcome of the Cold War. He wants to nationalize broadband and plans to confiscate the assets of private schools, private pensions, and private companies. In Britain — which, unlike most of Europe, has never known a significant communist movement — these things would until very recently have ruled him out of contention.
True, opinion polls put the Conservative Party in the lead. But so they did at this stage last time, and by a wider margin. Corbyn’s disqualifications — the Marxism, the anti-Semitism, the fondness for tyrants and terrorists — were all on full display at the 2017 election, yet he won 40% of the vote and came within a whisker of taking power. So, what has made Britain lose its head?
Part of the answer lies in a parallel that will, I suspect, annoy both Corbyn and the man whose campaign he is imitating: President Trump. I don’t mean that the two are alike in character or outlook. Trump’s opinions have skipped about over the years, as has his party affiliation, but Corbyn has never budged from his 1970s hard-left activism. Trump built himself a tower with a golden elevator, while Corbyn spends his spare time growing vegetables. Indeed, when Trump visited the U.K., Corbyn broke with protocol and refused to meet him.
But if their politics and their personalities are very different, their electioneering is similar. Corbyn’s promises are dismissed by almost every expert, just as Trump’s were in 2016. His public spending plans have left observers staring openmouthed. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, an earnest and mildly left-leaning think tank treated as authoritative on these issues, calls Labour’s manifesto “not credible.” Business organizations use stronger language. In addition to the nationalizations, Labour wants to give more to public sector workers, benefits claimants, students and pensioners, and to enforce a four-day working week, supposedly funding all this with a tax only on the top 5%.
But Corbyn’s supporters, just as Trump’s, take him seriously rather than literally. They tend to disbelieve all politicians’ promises and have little interest in numbers. Whether Labour was planning to overspend by a billion dollars or $10 billion or a trillion (the actual figure), the lineup for and against would be pretty much the same. Voters, in these situations, don’t sit down with calculators and try to work out what’s credible. They go with their hunches. If they think that the tax rate is high enough already, they oppose Labour’s plans. If they think the undeserving rich and tax-dodging corporations can cough up, then they support those plans. The actual statistics make barely any difference.
It is the same story when it comes to Labour’s deranged claims that the Conservatives want to sell the National Health Service to American corporations. In a surreal moment last week, Corbyn brandished a leaked summary of the exploratory U.S.-U.K. trade talks and claimed that they showed that “the NHS is for sale.” Journalists dutifully plowed through the 451 pages and found no such thing. Indeed, the papers made clear that the United States (unsurprisingly) had no interest in changing the current arrangements on healthcare. But those journalists were missing the point. If your starting assumption is that evil Trumpian businessmen want to get their hands on our beloved NHS, you don’t need documentary proof.
In much the same way, Trump’s claims about rising crime (it had been falling) and out of control immigration (2015 was the first year that saw more Mexicans cross the border southward than northward) struck a chord with large sections of the American electorate, regardless of their technical inaccuracy.
All voters — all human beings — are visceral rather than cerebral. We begin with our gut instinct, and pick whatever statistics sustain our prejudices. The present age, with its multiplicity of media outlets and its almost unlimited number of clashing interpretations, makes it easier than ever to be selective about which facts we want to believe. Trump, whether by fluke, through tactical genius, or in some sort of idiot savant way, grasped this before almost anyone else. The lesson was not lost on Corbyn.
