Corbyn is dead in the water, but not for refusing to sing the National Anthem.
He's dead in the water because his principles and policies are informed by wonky data, statistics and information, and he has no idea how the world actually works.
For example, I read his economic plan. Some of the statistics made in that plan are so far adrift from official statistics, and basic observation, that you start to wonder whether Corbyn has any common sense.
I'll give you the example that sparked my interest. Corbyn's plan claims £120bn is lost every year through the "tax gap": the combined figures for avoidance, evasion and debt. HMRC claims the tax gap is £35bn. That's quite a difference. £120bn is an extraordinary amount of money, more than a sixth of the entire fiscal spend a year.
So I had a look into where this figure had come from. Turns out it came from a report commissioned by PCS (the union), so I read that. Some of the estimates and conclusions in that PCS report, backing up the £120bn claim, are extraordinary. It claims, for example, that £40bn a year is lost through trading in the shadow economy, and that 10 percent of all net retail sales go unrecorded.
Yes, let me just say that again ... according to the PCS report, one in 10 net retail sales in Britain go unrecorded.
The idea is laughable. And incidentally, the author of the report does not back up this estimate with published figures, which he wouldn't, because the notion is as daft as a squirrel wearing a top hat and singing "My way" while tap-dancing across a dry stone wall.
What is even more amusing is the idea that, supposing in some alternate world that the claim were true, a Corbyn government could do anything about it without implementing a police state -- because that is what you would need. Constant surveillance on small to medium-sized businesses across all sectors, regular raids on shops and offices, real time labour and earnings monitoring of the self-employed, crack finance squads glued to ebay to catch mums selling old kid's clothes for a few bob ... the Soviet Union couldn't even do it, so God knows how Corbyn would.
The even more amusing thing is that the scale of such a constant operation would require the police and justice service to more than double in size, so you would, best case scenario, lose three-quarters of your return of £40bn through the necessity of doubling the current law and order budget, which currently stands somewhere around £30bn. So you would piss off huge numbers of people, implement a big brother state, jack boots all over everyone's faces, and all over the matter of £10bn.
But Corbyn must read this nonsense and believe it.
Incidentally, the other glossed-over aspect of Corbyn's economic plan is that it works from the basis of Osbourne either wiping out the deficit by 2010, or, worst case scenario, halving it.
So Corbyn saying "down with austerity" is rather odd when his economic plan depends upon it. Part of me wonders whether he even knows what is in his economic plan in the first place.
And don't even get me started on the cost of "reversing austerity". Corbyn would need somewhere in the region of about £125bn to £150bn for that. Total tax take is only £647bn.