Jeremy corbyn

A general election is called and in a matter of hours a neutral and unbiased BBC presenter has likened our Prime Minister to Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Governments rise and governments fall, but some things stay just as they always were. It was Eddie Mair on Radio 4’s PM programme who made the comparison, while interviewing the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. In fairness to Mair, he had been alluding to Theresa May’s apparent wish to create ‘unity’ within Westminster, a truly stupid statement within an address which sometimes made no semantic sense and sounded, to my ears, petulant and arrogant. Then along came the opinion pollsters to tell us exactly what

The opposition parties about whom Theresa May complained in her speech launching the snap election are grinding into action. Their size and resources seem to be inversely proportionate to how prepared they are: the Lib Dems say they have already selected around 400 candidates to contest seats, while Labour hasn’t selected any candidates in seats it doesn’t hold. The party is contacting its 2015 candidates to see if they might stand again so it might mount reasonably well-informed campaigns in key seats (or formerly key seats: a campaign with an ounce of wisdom would have to name seats it already holds as ‘key seats’ while accepting that many of its

‘There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics,’ reflected James Callaghan in 1979, conscious he was about to be turfed out of Number 10. He didn’t know the half of it. While Margaret Thatcher’s election did herald the end of the post-war consensus, it kept the Conservative/Labour ‘mould’ intact, despite later attempts by the SDP/Liberal alliance to break it. But with a ‘Brexit election’ now called for 8 June, Labour will be fighting for its very survival. The last great national political realignment was the 1922 general election in which Labour beat the Liberals into second place for the first time. This was

The French have their uses, don’t they? They offer us their food, their wine and their bankers, and they also offer some reassurance. No matter how demented our politics may seem, things are never quite as dramatic, as emotional, as they are over the Channel. The best Britain offers Nigel Farage is an embarrassed slap on the back in the hope he’ll move down the bar to tell his war stories to someone else; the French are considering making Marine Le Pen head of state. As if that wasn’t mad enough, they’re now taking Jean Luc Melenchon, the Gallic Chavez, seriously, or at least seriously enough to ruffle the markets. More proof

When a shell-shocked Ed Miliband stepped down as Labour leader following the party’s defeat in the 2015 election, he concluded his speech by saying that: ‘The course of progress and social justice is never simple or straightforward. Change happens because people don’t give up, they don’t take no for an answer, they keep demanding change’ The change that party members demanded from the blank slate of Labour’s election defeat turned out to be Jeremy Corbyn; and Miliband slunk back to Doncaster to not ‘take no for an answer’ – from the scenic climes of the backbenches. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Last week, I voiced my frustration that Miliband was appearing

Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party is coming to resemble a drunk trying to get home on a bike. Most of the time he just pushes it along, but occasionally he mounts the saddle and whirls into action — only to find himself swiftly spread-eagled on the road. Take next month’s local elections. Corbyn launched his party’s campaign trying to bemoan the state of Britain. There are plenty of statistics which he could have trotted out to depict a country underperforming on living standards, debt levels and social mobility. But he chose to cite a supposed decline in life expectancy — which is demonstrably and famously wrong. Life expectancy

The sorry saga of what Labour decides to do about Ken Livingstone isn’t over yet. In the last few moments, Jeremy Corbyn has released a statement saying Livingstone will now face a fresh probe into comments that he made about Hitler since yesterday – when he avoided being booted out of the party for doing exactly the same thing. Corbyn said that it was ‘deeply disappointing’ that Livingstone had refused to apologise for his remarks. He also criticised the former London mayor for continuing to do what he seems to do best these days: talk about Hitler. The Labour leader said: ‘Many people are understandably upset that he has continued to make