To appreciate just how dangerous this phenomenon is likely to be, it is important to understand the transmutation hard-Left politics has undergone over the past generation or so. Its concerns are no longer local (or even national). Nor are they much to do with improving the condition of sections of society through normal government mechanisms.  The ideology on which Corbyn-Milne Labour is based presents itself for domestic political purposes as being committed to the interests of the working class. Given that Mr Milne is the son of a former director-general of the BBC (who fell out spectacularly, as it happens, with the Thatcher government), that he attended Winchester College and read PPE at Balliol, it is presumably safe to assume he has not had much personal experience of working-class life. This is something he has in common with Mr Corbyn, who grew up in a middle-class home in Shropshire.  The people with whom the Corbyns and the Milnes of this world associate, and for whom they believe they fight, are not the ordinary tabloid-reading, football-following, X Factor-watching working people of this country. They are something quite different: what is known in dedicated circles as The Organised Working Class. This term used to be code for the membership of trade unions, but it now applies to activists whose interests are outside the parochial limitations of a particular industry or workplace: it is an international movement in the true Leninist sense.  The Corbynites, and Mr Milne in his hugely entertaining Guardian columns, devote so much time to discussing foreign issues – viz, America is the satanic force behind all global disasters (including attacks on itself); Vladimir Putin’s actions are a necessary antidote to the imperial ambitions of Nato; the brave Chavez economic experiment in Venezuela was undermined by a diabolical Western plot, etc – because the Left in its present incarnation is not really interested in arguments about how its own country’s democracy should be organised. And this is not just because it has given up on the idea of ever being elected by the benighted voters who have shamelessly succumbed to the bribery of “consumerism”. It is a positive thing, this renouncing of democratic ambition: the electoral process, known as “bourgeois democracy”, is seen as a fatal and deliberate distraction from the proper business of taking back power from the ruling class.  Real power – and thus real freedom – for the proletariat can come only through seizing the means of production and the economic levers of society. Parliaments, Houses of Congress and elected representative governments of all kinds are a sham because they give the people no direct ownership of the economic forces that control their lives. So the democratic process is worse than irrelevant: it is pernicious because it deceives the population into the false belief that it can decide its own fate. Honestly, I am not making this up. Every true disciple of Marx is taught to believe these things. When Corbyn enthusiasts say, “It doesn’t matter if we’re unelectable, it’s better to be ideologically pure”, this is what they mean.  In one sense, this position has become less problematic to hold since the collapse of Communism. During the Cold War, one could be accused of consorting with a dangerous enemy that hoped to “bury” the West, as Nikita Khrushchev so memorably put it.  We now have an official Opposition whose tacit goal is to discredit the entire enterprise of democratic government  If you are positively uninterested in being elected to govern, and you genuinely believe democracy in your country is a fraud that serves only to divide the people in trivial ways rather than uniting them in the struggle to take power, you are in a very strong position to create the sort of alienation that Marxism has always seen as a first step to revolutionary consciousness. (This is, you will notice, becoming increasingly theological and arcane, which helps to explain why class war is now an almost exclusively middle-class preoccupation.) Thus what might have seemed like a weakness in the Corbyn position – that it has no plausible programme to offer as a potential government – is, in fact, no problem at all. Corbyn-Milne Labour is not interested in being a credible democratic alternative. At its heart, there is the sincere conviction that democratic elections are a deceitful sideshow.  Nor is it troubled by the accusation that it now stands for nothing but a collection of disparate grievances (of which Mr Corbyn reads out a selection each week at Prime Minister’s Questions): grievances are the whole point. If Labour can persuade people that their own lives, or at least the lives of many unfortunate people, are blighted by injustices and deprivations that the elected Government will do nothing to remedy, he is making real progress toward his goal of persuading them that democracy is useless to them. The fact that he is proposing no systematic answer himself is just further evidence that the whole process of putting one party after another into government is a waste of time. It is a dangerous mistake to think Corbyn’s Labour is at a loss to present a practical, electable platform. Not conforming to the expectations of the existing democratic framework isn’t incompetence: again, it’s the whole point.  I’m sure you can see where this is going. We now have an official Opposition whose tacit goal is to discredit the entire enterprise of democratic government as we presently understand it. Having written off – on principle – the possibility of being elected, it can devote all of its time and energy – on principle – to being negative and destructive of public confidence in the political system.  Ironically, the “new kind of politics” will be about style rather than substance because it will consist of nothing but attempts to discredit any measure that the sitting Government takes without ever needing to offer substitute solutions. All you need to do to succeed in these terms is obstruct and attack, as recklessly and irresponsibly as you like. You can exploit every conceivable popular discontent without scruple or consistency. In the process, you do much more than bring the presiding party into disrepute. You make the whole business of elections seem futile. And that, as I said, is not an unfortunate accident: it is the whole point.
The hiring by Labour&rsquo;s leader of Seumas Milne, an ultra-Left spin doctor,   proves that his aim is to destroy public faith in our democratic system