I’m sure there used to be a festive statute of limitations; a point in the year when it was no longer classy to launch into one’s political opponents. Even at the height of Corbyn-phobia – when the guy couldn’t walk down the street without someone finding the colour of his socks disrespectful to the queen – he caught a break just before Christmas.
Not so Keir Starmer, who is under attack on two flanks. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian philosopher-king spinning life lessons out of pure gold such as “be a man” and “sit up straight”, warned in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that, should the UK elect a Labour government, “you’re gonna be Venezuela for 20 years”.
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has unearthed the case of Dino the alsatian, whose owner Starmer represented in 2002, back when he was “making his name as a leftwing barrister”. Dino was facing a destruction order, having bitten a woman who came between him and another dog. Starmer had the cheek to appeal to the European court of human rights, which dismissed the case, but Dino was eventually saved after an appeal to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in the UK.
But back to this Venezuela business. There are certain case studies from the past 100 years of economic history that rightwing commentators hit like an eject button, often with a triumphant flourish: “Boom! I bounced out of the argument, wearing the parachute: sayonara, sucker!”
If anyone suggests anything vaguely different from vulture capitalism, these commentators suggest, they are a socialist who will drag down the economy to Venezuela’s level. If anyone suggests the state do anything to alleviate widespread poverty, they are tarred as a money-tree fantasist who will recreate Weimar Germany, where you needed a wheelbarrow of cash to buy a loaf of bread. Any sudden change of regime will result in a Zimbabwe situation – more inflation, more wheelbarrows. Dare to question the prevailing anything since the 2008 financial crash? You will go the way of Greece.
No question, the Venezuelan economy sounds like a tough place in which to thrive. But the parallel doesn’t have the satisfying thunk of plausibility it would need to strike fear into the hearts of voters. We know what economic vandalism looks like, because we have been watching it for years.
It looks like David Cameron and George Osborne, talking about “backroom savings” when they mean “let’s cut funding to everything and see what’s standing at the end”. It looks like the Brexiters, with their blithe “sovereignty today, prosperity tomorrow, or maybe in 50 years”. It looks like Liz Truss, daring the markets to reject her ideological certainties, only to find they were happy to do so. But what was the harm? It’s only people with a mortgage (more than 14 million of them) who are bearing the brunt; oh, and people who rent, which is nearly everyone else.
It’s quite the argument to make to this benighted country: whatever hardship you are living through, a reckless socialist could make it so much worse. First, it requires ignorance of the nature and causes of hardship in Britain; second, it requires his majesty’s opposition to look anything like socialists.
While Peterson lives at the outer edges of audacity, untroubled by considerations such as making sense and being knowledgable, these are still arguments that crop up a lot, from far more mainstream sources. Perhaps the risk of the left is still too high; perhaps the Tories, for all their harsh arguments and infighting, are still the safer pair of hands. Voters aren’t buying it, because they can’t afford to. The fantasy of the fiscally responsible Conservative has turned out to be shockingly expensive.
Dino the dog, meanwhile, has died of natural causes since Starmer tried to ride a coach and horses through British justice to get him his bleeding-heart European reprieve. Does that case speak to a wider danger – that dogs all over town will escape justice in the event of a Labour victory? Probably not. These red perils are falling flat. Give it a rest, everybody; concentrate on Santa.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
