Labour’s manifesto reveals one thing: the Left has run out of ideas

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse for Labour, Noam Chomsky goes and endorses Jeremy Corbyn.

‘If I were a voter in Britain, I would vote for him…He’s quiet, reserved, serious, he’s not a performer,’ Chomsky told the Guardian. But the more you read of Chomsky’s endorsement, the more you wonder if he was put up to it for a bet. He says that: ‘The shift in the Labour party under Blair made it a pale image of the Conservatives’. Tony Blair, that infamous electoral dud.

Chomsky is regularly listed as the most cited public intellectual. It’s a slippery phrase. Hayek called his ilk ‘the secondhand dealers in ideas’ and I certainly wouldn’t buy a used ideology from Noam Chomsky. After all, Chomsky isn’t an intellectual – he’s a dogmatist, churning out catechisms on war, the mass media, and Middle Eastern politics for his faithful followers to memorise and repeat in tutorial rooms the world over. You can see why Corbyn appeals to Chomsky. They share much of the same politics, made up of anti-Westernism and an attitude that portrays liberalism and its supporters as innately corrupt.