Quintin Jardine's blog

As regular visitors to my blog will be aware, I am not, never have been and never will be a supporter of the Labour Party. However I have friends who are, and it is for them that I fear the future, if the crazy rules for voter qualification are not changed pronto.

I have just filled in on-line a form to become a registered supporter of the Party. If I was so minded I could buy the right to vote by forwarding it, with a £3 payment, then cast a mischievous ballot for Jeremy Corbyn. I’m not about to do anything so irresponsible, but a hell of a lot of people will; as far as I can see from the process there is no way of screening out the imposters, whatever Harriet Harman etc. may say.

There is a clear and present danger that Corbyn will be elected as Leader of HM Opposition. That would put him at the head of a parliamentary group that would never have nominated him for the position had he not been handed votes by other candidates in the half-baked belief that the Left, in his case the extreme Left, should be on the ballot paper.

The daftness of that proposition when allied to  the wacky voting eligibility set-up is, as Denis Thatcher’s fictional self used to say in the ‘Dear Bill’ letters, as clear as the balls on a dog.

So far Corbyn’s headline plus point is re-nationalisation of the railways, a move which polls indicate would command 80% public support. Andy Burnham has already put on that jacket, and you can bet that before the next election, the Tory Governmennt will have enacted or enabled something that won’t be called re-nationalisation, but which will have much the same effect.

This morning I read Corbyn’s headline negative, a demand that the UK stop bombing ISIS targets and instead isolate it. How exactly do you isolate a brutal extremist army? You don’t; you destroy it.

On the same platform, he went on to propose that a former leader of his party should be put on trial for war crimes, over the invasion of Iraq. There might be some popular support for that, but it’s difficult to see how it could be done without also indicting the entire Cabinet of the day, who backed him, and possibly also every MP who voted to give Blair the authority for military action.

Apart from being a walking economic own goal, Corbyn is also a threat to national security. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in Palestine that he would ever be elected Prime Minister. However the way things are heading there is a strong possibility that he will soon stand opposite David Cameron at the Dispatch Box. If that happens, then the party that my pals have supported for their lifetimes will face virtual extinction as a political force.

Last year Scotland voted to remain under the yolk of Westminster. If that is how it must be, then there must be stability in that Chamber. We could be headng for chaos.