Abbott’s dire warning for Britain if Labour wins election

The Brits don’t take kindly to the opinions of foreign pollies, so what will they make of our ex-PM’s withering takedown?

Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott says Jeremy Corbyn is ‘

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has weighed into the British election campaign, claiming that a Jeremy Corbyn-led government would lead to the disintegration of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

Mr Abbott wrote a strongly worded column in the British Sunday Telegraph about Mr Corbyn, including his fears that “Britain’s economy would shrivel, Britain’s military strength would disappear and – except to a small coterie of left-wing cranks to whom it would be the veritable New Jerusalem – Britain’s soft power would be at an end.’’

Mr Abbott doesn’t elaborate about the Five Eyes’ arrangements – which is the intelligence sharing co-operation between the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia.

But he stresses: “the Corbyn platform of a crackdown on private schools, widespread renationalisation of industry, confiscatory taxes on the middle class, the effective withdrawal of Britain from NATO, and the disintegration of the Five Eyes security partnership – even though each of these are appalling enough – would not be the worst of it.’’

He says the worst would be “the effective sabotage’’ of the referendum result for the UK to leave the European Union.”

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Mr Abbott, who was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics in the early 1980s, claims that Mr Corbyn’s “vague, cowardly’’ and self-interested positions on Brexit were a calculated distraction.

The British public is sceptical of overseas politicians making their views known, particularly when Barack Obama supported the then Prime Minister and Remain in the 2016 Brexit campaign. But both Mr Abbott and the Australian high commissioner to the UK, George Brandis, warmly spoke in favour of Mr Johnson at the Tory party conference in October. Mr Brandis referred to Mr Johnson as “cometh the hour, cometh the man’’.

In the Sunday Telegraph column, Mr Abbott wrote that Mr Corbyn desired to become prime minister by hook or crook and then wanted to oversee the transition of Great Britain into something like the old East Germany.

He wrote that Mr Corbyn’s plans would be complete “with Stasi, anti-Semitism, and dreadful homemade cars’’.

He attacked Mr Corbyn’s “nostalgia for the Soviet era’’ as “evidence of a form of intellectual and moral disorder’’.

Mr Abbott added: “You can’t take anyone seriously as a potential British leader when his first instinct after the Salisbury poisonings was to believe the Russian dictator rather than his own police investigators. ‘’

Mr Abbott also grieved for the mess of a Brexit deal that the previous Conservative government under Theresa May came up with, an agreement that would have made the UK a “virtual economic colony of Europe’’.

But he said prime minister Boris Johnson believed in Britain, will definitely leave the EU, and will then work to finalise free trade and fair movement of people between a fully sovereign Britain and the countries of the EU.

Curiously Mr Abbott also remarked there was much to admire in the Blair Labour government because it stood up for Western values abroad and moved the state towards being a purchaser of health and education services rather than just a near-monopoly supplier.

Mr Abbott also said: “doubtless, Corbyn is a nice enough man at one level; but, if ever given power, his ideas will debauch a great country.’’