PETER HITCHENS: Vote in Labour and you will have 20 dispiriting years in which to rue the mistake

This country’s Left-wing elite feel it in their fingers and toes, the prospect of full political power flowing back to their faction. They’re not supposed to gloat before Labour win – as they expect to do on Thursday.

Professional radicals such as Sir Keir Starmer keep their glee under control. They know that you can lose elections in the last 36 hours if you look too sure of yourself. But the Left’s new aristocracy of showbiz grandees have no such discipline.

This is why you should take careful note of the outburst, at yet another awards ceremony, by a very rich and famous actor called David Tennant. I believe he is often on TV.

Mr Tennant decided to attack the Tory Minister Kemi Badenoch, saying he would like to live in a world where Ms Badenoch ‘doesn’t exist any more’. He also said she should ‘shut up’.

David Tennant, pictured receiving his British LGBT Celebrity Ally Award, said Kemi Badenoch should be silenced because he disagrees with her opinions

Sir Keir will have ground his teeth when he heard this. The last thing he wants is for people to notice just how nasty, arrogant and dangerous the Blairite project he leads has become. But he cannot control this branch of his movement, in the way he can discipline MPs and sycophantic media.

What was Mr Tennant saying? He was saying Ms Badenoch should be silenced because he disagrees with her opinions. But far worse than that, he was wishing she was dead. Don’t be shocked. What else does it mean to say he wishes she did not exist? She does exist. How else can she cease to exist except by dying?

This is common currency on the modern compassionate Left. Barely a week passes on anti-social media when some idealist does not go on Twitter to suggest that I should become dead. I take it as a compliment. They think themselves so good that those who disagree with them are not just wrong (as I think they are) but evil.

Now, this does not mean that Keir Starmer, if he wins on Thursday, will begin building Stalin-style Gulag camps in which his opponents can be worked and starved to death. Modern Leftism is far more sophisticated than that.

Why lock people up when you can simply threaten them with unemployment if they step out of line? Amnesty International will never intervene because some local authority worker has lost her job for wearing a cross or whatever it is.

And there is no need at all to actually shoot people you wish did not exist. You cancel them instead, denying them access to broadcasting, publishing, and of course to anti-social media – where we learned during Covid of the many methods by which unwanted persons or opinions can be suppressed or made invisible.

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Do you think that, under a Starmer government, the BBC and Ofcom will become more sympathetic to conservative points of view? Or that school teachers and university lecturers who do not conform will prosper? The children of conservative patriots will be taught, even more than they are already, to despise their parents and their opinions.

This will be a big part of the coming wave of changes, in taxation, in the justice system, in the constitution, in the operation of new ‘rights’ for favoured categories, in the granting of votes to people friendly to the Left.

Then there will be a continuing stream of appointments, to the House of Lords, to state bodies, to key committees, of people loyal to Starmerism. I agree with those who accuse the Tories of failing to counter any of this. But the mere existence of a non-Labour majority in Parliament has been a brake on the total swallowing of the state machine by people who think like Mr Tennant and talk like Sir Keir Starmer.

If Labour wins, all this will happen. But it is still preventable. The election does not take place until Thursday. For most of us there is still time to avoid a terrible mistake. The polls mean nothing if we defy them. Why let your mind, will and hand be influenced by a (quite possibly inaccurate) survey of what other people will do?

Be a human, not a flock animal. No doubt many of my readers think the Tories are useless, but they cannot believe this as strongly as I do. Even so, this week’s poll is not a referendum on the Tories. It is an election which will choose the next government.

And if you fail to vote against Labour in sufficient numbers, I reckon you will have 20 hard, dispiriting years in which to regret your mistake, in putting into government people who think they are so good that they wish you and I were dead.

Marianne’s right – the 1960s were more fun 

Hurrah for 1960s survivor Marianne Faithfull, pictured, who made all our hearts beat faster back in the dawn of the modern age. She doesn’t much like the way it all turned out, saying: ‘I was happier back in the old bohemia. Art was more intense, purer. Sex was hotter, too – more repressed. And there was a genuine intellectual bohemia instead of this hipster-lite culture we have today.’

And how right she is. The new dawn was thrilling, but the day it heralded has ended in a grubby, dull, disappointing mess. Perhaps I shall live to see the counter-revolution, bringing back the authority and self-control she calls ‘repression’, making sex more fun and restoring a real love of beauty in the arts.