VLADIMIR Lenin wrote: "Give me just one generation of youth and I’ll transform the whole world."

I am sure Jeremy Corbyn is fully au fait with that quote. Corbyn’s popularity with the youth of this country is undoubted.

His avuncular style and simplistic left-wing solutions to complex problems have struck a chord.

To be a student with conservative views at both school and university is to keep one’s head down and keep quiet. Generations of youth have rebelled but probably none so much as in the 60s and 70s when I was a young man.

At that time socialism was the word and the power of the trade unions, Labour’s paymasters, dominated by the left wing caused mass social unrest and strikes. It led this country to be known by the rest of Europe as ‘the sick man of Europe’.

That all changed under Margaret Thatcher who, whilst vilified by the left, nevertheless set the country on a course of renewed prosperity.

That is until the advent of the Labour party ruled by Blair and Brown, who abolished financial controls on the banks (with the Nat West lending more than £2 trillion ­— more than the UK’S GDP) and racked up public spending to an unsustainable level making the eventual downturn so much worse, which we have been paying for for the past eight years.

Of course, the Conservatives get blamed for this.

Finally, there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, but that might change if the Labour Party, dominated by Momentum, wins the next election and goes on another spending spree with our money.

Of great concern is the prospect of the Jeremy Corbyn’s desire to abolish our nuclear weapons, which perhaps is the only tool in our defence capability which might act as a deterrent.

I am reminded, at this time of remembrance for our war dead, that in the run up to the Second World War, the Labour Party voted down every budget to increase defence spending to counter the Nazi war threat and in 1936 when Germany occupied the Rhineland 127 Labour MPs voted to abolish the RAF!

Where would we be now if that had come about?

I am not sure what is covered in the history curriculum in schools these days, but I am reminded by Winston Churchill’s quote "those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it".

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