Jeremy corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn has called reports of his departure ‘fake news’. This despite the Labour leader having a net approval rating of minus 40 per cent and polling suggesting that only 15 per cent of voters think Corbyn stands any chance at all of triumphing in 2020. It seems that, at any cost, the Labour leader is determined to stumble on. Yesterday, he announced a reshuffle – shaking up the cast of nobodies in his shadow cabinet. Whatever Corbyn does, though, if he stays put it’s clear that these next few years are going to be a ‘miserable experience’ for him, says the Daily Telegraph. It’s inevitable that whether the Labour leader has a

On Wednesday, 52 Labour MPs chose to defy Jeremy Corbyn’s three-line whip and vote against Brexit in the Article 50 vote. With rebels Clive Lewis, Rachael Maskell and Jo Stevens all resigning from the frontbench as a result, Corbyn has today had to begin a reshuffle of his shadow cabinet. The Labour leader says he is ‘pleased to announce’ that Rebecca Long-Bailey will replace Lewis as shadow business secretary, with Peter Dowd moving to fill Long-Bailey’s previous position as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury. Christina Rees replaces Stevens as shadow Welsh secretary, while Sue Hayman will succeed Maskell as shadow environment secretary. As for the 14 frontbench MPs who rebelled but are yet to

Isabel Hardman has been investigating the social care issue in Surrey for the Spectator in recent days. Yesterday, she spoke to the man whose texts Jeremy Corbyn quoted at PMQs today, the leader of Surrey County Council, David Hodge. Isabel and Hodge spoke just after Tory-run Surrey County Council had made the decision not to hold a referendum on a 15 per cent council tax increase to pay for social care. He told Isabel that ‘we have always believed that there was a way forward which wouldn’t involve a council tax referendum and I genuinely believe that the government now understands the scale of the crisis’. Hodge seems to think that

MPs will shortly begin their Committee stage of the Article 50 Bill in the Commons. Before that begins, Theresa May had one more chance to try to reassure colleagues who are considering voting for amendments to that Bill by giving a statement to the House on the informal EU summit in Malta that took place last week.  She repeatedly told MPs, both in her statement and in her answers to questions afterwards, that reaching an agreement on the status of EU citizens in the UK was a priority and that it needed to be a ‘reciprocal’ agreement. She also warned the Commons not to obstruct the Article 50 Bill. The

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t going to become Prime Minister. But if the housing crisis isn’t solved, the next left wing populist could—I say in The Sun this morning. Home ownership has dropped to a 30 year low and homes are becoming increasingly unaffordable. In London the average house costs 11 times earnings. Without radical reform, the Tory idea of property owning democracy will wither and, eventually, die. The government’s housing white paper due out next week is meant to try and solve these problems. Councils will be told to come up with realistic views of the housing needs of their area that take into account the growing population. If government thinks

Oh dear. Earlier this week, Mr S reported that Derek Hatton — the ‘socialist firebrand’ who joined Labour with the Trotskyist group Militant (before being expelled) — had turned on Jeremy Corbyn. The former Corbynite said the Labour leader’s Article 50 stance showed ‘a real lack of leadership’. In a further sign that Corbyn is losing support among the hard left, Owen Jones has used an interview with the Standard to declare that he would ‘find it hard to vote for Corbyn’. Jones, who originally championed Corbyn’s leadership bid, has been critical of the Labour leader of late — but did still vote for him in the most recent leadership election. Alas he’s

Is the government trying to avoid scrutiny of its Brexit policy? That’s the charge that MPs on the Labour and SNP benches are levelling at ministers today as the White Paper on leaving the European Union is published. Keir Starmer told the Commons this afternoon that he and his colleagues were being hampered in their attempts to ask decent questions and properly scrutinise the government’s approach because they had been handed the document just minutes before David Davis gave his statement on the publication. The SNP’s Stephen Gethins complained that the whole situation was a ‘mess’ and that Parliament was being mistreated. These complaints were echoed from the benches behind

Mrs May has spent the week meeting naughty presidents. Today she was made to pay for it. Parliamentarians were queuing up to scold her for missing a great opportunity to bleat, pout, whine and nag on the world stage. She’s been to America where she failed to lecture Donald Trump on his meanness to Muslims and his impatience with climate change dogma. She was also supposed to bring up his waterboarding habit and his rapacity with women. Then she went to Turkey where her haranguing of President Erdogan was insufficiently shrill. Labour MPs seem to want the PM to traverse the globe like an irascible fitness instructor, bull-horn in hand, barging into

Oh dear. Although Jeremy Corbyn faces plenty of opposition on the right of his party, up until now he has managed to keep those on the left of Labour on side. But his decision to issue three-line-whip on MPs to vote in favour of Article 50 means that this could all be about to change. Derek Hatton, the ‘socialist firebrand’ who joined Labour with the Trotskyist group Militant (before being expelled), has been one of Corbyn’s most vocal supporters. However, in a column for the Liverpool Echo, he has turned on the Labour leader — expressing doubts over his future: ‘I can’t believe Corbyn is arguing for Labour MPs to vote with the

Perversity is a much undervalued British trait, much more redolent of our real psyche than queuing, drinking tea or being tolerant of foreigners and homosexuals — all things for which we are better renowned. Seeing Dunkirk as a victory was magnificently perverse. So, too, was electing a Labour government in 2005 shortly after we had invaded a sovereign country and created a civil war. For ‘perversity’ I suppose you could read ‘complexity’, although the two often amount to the same thing. Our reactions to stuff are never as straightforward as they should be — they are complex and therefore can seem perverse. And so it is right now. For three

Mr Corbyn has spent a week shuddering at goblins that don’t exist. At least outside his head. But he wants his posse of demons to exist in our heads too. So he keeps conjuring them up. He says Mrs May is about to turn Britain into ‘an offshore tax haven.’ Being a Puritan he hasn’t noticed that this has an attractive, Hefner-ish feel. It suggests white sands and azure waves, the tinkling of steel-drums, and bottles of Red Stripe being served at ten cents a time by pouting lovelies straining out of their bra-cups. To be fair, Corbyn’s team of wordsmiths have spotted the problem. So the boss has been

He was supposed to be the third man of the French Socialist primary held on Sunday. While all eyes were on Manuel Valls, the steely former Prime Minister, and Arnaud Montebourg, the charismatic former Economy Minister, the somewhat subdued former education minister Benoît Hamon was never considered a potential frontrunner. And yet only a couple of weeks after Francois Fillon’s shock victory in the conservative primary, history seems to be repeating itself. Hamon has not won yet, but with over 36 percent of the votes he has a comfortable advance after the first round. Valls, who finished second with 31.1 percent of the votes, was quick to state that ‘a

Jeremy Corbyn is a famous rebel, so famous that when he was elected, many in his party wondered how he might tell MPs to vote the way he wanted them to when he himself had refused to listen to the whips throughout his backbench career. When he was still a backbencher, he enjoyed telling a tale about Sadiq Khan, then his whip, ringing him up to check he would definitely be rebelling on a certain vote, and not bothering to waste his energy trying to get him to abstain instead. Now the Labour leader is faced with one of those awkward moments that involve him telling his MPs to vote