Lord Sugar, who was given his peerage by the Labour Party, has inadvertently raised a problem to which I, for one, can relate.
Having left the party last May, His Lordship yesterday expressed his horror at the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn ever forming a government: “If they ever got anywhere near electing him… then we should all move to China or somewhere like that and let this place just rot.”
The thought is sound in principle, but wanting in detail.
It’s true that Corbyn, speaking through his shadow chancellor, has pledged to “ferment the overthrow of capitalism.” It’s also true that every attempt to overthrow capitalism, in whichever part of the world it has been made, has been accompanied by a massive cull of capitalists, a term loosely defined as anyone the overthrowers don’t like.
And yes, escaping from such developments is a time-honoured practice. It’s not just an attack on capitalism that can trigger an exodus – any form of oppression is a powerful stimulus for people to run away.
The country in which I had the misfortune to be born provides a useful illustration to this law of history. Russia became Russia (as opposed to Muscovy or Tartary, which was how it was tagged in Elizabethan maps) in the 16th century, in the reign of the first Russian tsar, Ivan IV.
Ivan the Terrible was one of the most carnivorous rulers in Russian history, which is saying a lot. Hence, when he sent an expeditionary corps under Prince Kurbsky to fight in the west, the corps closed ranks and defected in its entirety, mostly to Poland and Lithuania.
That established a useful precedent. Emulating proverbial rodents, Russians have been fleeing from their perennially sinking ship throughout history. Hundreds and hundreds of diplomats, intelligence officers, writers, scientists, sailors would defect the moment their feet touched foreign soil – this even during relatively quiet periods.
During more turbulent periods, the numbers reached thousands and then millions. For example, when the Russian army entered Paris in 1814, some 20,000 soldiers deserted, having decided they’d be better off as farmers in France than serfs back home.
And in 1941, whole Soviet divisions would joyously march into German captivity. In the first six months of the war the Nazis took over four million prisoners, and many of them sought their imprisonment voluntarily.
After the war, those survivors who weren’t delivered to Stalin’s executioners by the Americans and the British, settled all over the world. Their descendants can be found as far as Patagonia and Tasmania, to say nothing of Western Europe and North America.
There they rub shoulders with the descendants of the millions who escaped from Russia after the revolution – and with a couple of million of those who, like me, got out in the 1970s and thereafter.
Russia is the most graphic example, but far from the only one. Millions escaped from religious persecution and economic hardship in Europe to North America. French Huguenots ran for their lives, with most settling in England – and 200,000 Frenchmen have followed in their footsteps in the last few years. And if we look at the low-rent parts of the world, mass emigration from there has never ceased.
All those migrants have had an infinite number of stories to tell, each story as different as people are, both individually as persons and collectively as nations. What unites all those displaced persons is that THEY ALL HAD A BETTER PLACE TO ESCAPE TO.
This is a sine qua non of successful emigration – and an option that, alas, doesn’t exist for the British.
“China or somewhere like that” proposed as a possible haven by Lord Sugar doesn’t work. After all, Corbyn’s government would be likely to turn Britain into a communist dictatorship but that might take a few years. China, on the other hand, is a communist dictatorship already, complete with concentration camps, government-controlled press and the general aroma of vomit that inevitably wafts through communist air.
And what’s “somewhere like that” like? Where is it? Cambodia? Vietnam? North Korea? As a veteran of two emigrations, one from Russia, the other from the United States, I can absolutely guarantee that those places wouldn’t be preferable even to Corbyn’s Britain.
Where then? Where in the modern world can one hide from the modern world? The question is tautological, and there is no possible answer.
Europe is going to the dogs, America isn’t far behind (and in any case she’s unlikely to welcome a few million Brits), nowhere in Asia would be acceptable for most of us, Israel has a restrictive immigration policy for gentiles, Australia has it for just about everyone – and who’d want to live there anyway, considering that 90 per cent of the world’s deadly creatures reside Down Under, and the humans drink vats of Foster’s?
Our best chance seems to lie in preventing the likes of Corbyn from getting anywhere near Downing Street. Perhaps Lord Sugar could contribute a few of his millions to this cause.