Jeremy corbyn

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn’s new look Labour leadership means he’s happy not to lead

Jeremy Corbyn had a very good interview on Marr this morning. For anyone in the wider, non-Westminster world tuning in (and they do), the new Labour leader would have come across as reasonable, mild, and normal. When Marr pressed him on certain issues, Corbyn looked as though he was an academic having a good debate in his study over a glass of port (or marrow juice, maybe), rather than a politician panicking as he tried to remember the next line that he’d memorised from the spin doctor’s briefing. He even managed to get some quips about internal Labour democracy in, joking that the programme should film ‘compositing in action’. What

Sebastian Payne

Labour conference 2015: Sunday fringe guide

Good morning comrades! Labour’s annual conference kicks off in sunny Brighton today and it’s set to be one of the most exciting gatherings in years. We usually comb through the fringe listings to point you towards the most interesting events. However, the conference programme was printed before Jeremy Corbyn rose to leader and the majority of notable speakers have either quit or been sacked from the shadow cabinet. This makes picking out the best fringes a little more difficult than in previous years. Plus, in the brave new world of Corbyn’s leadership, the people to watch have changed. We’ve gathered a list below of events today featuring speakers both in and outside the new leadership team.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Shaker Aamer to be released: Jeremy Corbyn and the Daily Mail can rejoice together

Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held in Guantanamo Bay, is to be released, the White House has announced. Aamer is alleged to have led a unit of Taliban fighters and have plotted with Osama Bin Laden, but he has never been charged or been on trial. His case is one that David Cameron has raised in discussions with President Obama, and one the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday have been pressing for a good while too, on the grounds that it is indefensible to lock someone up since 2002 without charge or trial (the Mail’s argument has always been that he may be a ‘very bad man’ but that

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t a man of the people. He’s a man against the people

Corbynistas are always banging on about how we need fewer posh politicians and more politicians who look and sound like ‘ordinary people’. So who has Corbyn appointed as his shadow secretary for environment, food and rural affairs? Kerry McCarthy — a vegan! A member of the snootiest tribe of all, who sustain themselves by nuts and self-righteousness alone and look upon the rest of us as a bloodthirsty, carnivorous blob. When it comes to naked elitism, vegans outdo Etonians every single time. When I addressed the Political Society at Eton in 2013 — the first time I’d ever set my London-Irish foot inside a public school — I was struck

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can the Blairites rescue the Labour party?

The first conference of the Corbyn era has got MPs and journalists scrambling around for a copy of the Labour party’s rule book. Everyone is trying to work out whether or not scrapping Trident will be debated or not. This is the first skirmish in what promises to be a series of procedural fights between Corbyn and his supporters and what is left of the old party establishment. It would be tempting for Labour moderates to end up expending all their energies in these fights, doing what they can to stop the Corbynites seizing control of the commanding heights of the Labour party. But, as I argue in the magazine

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs like Jeremy Corbyn’s PMQs style

Jeremy Corbyn knows he has a lot to prove at his party’s conference, which starts on Sunday. The highlight of his leadership so far has been his new tone at PMQs, which did catch attention, even if the questions he asked rather turned the session into an opportunity for David Cameron to look Prime Ministerial. The Labour leader knows he needs to make changes from that first attempt (his first ever stint at the dispatch box), but he’s not the only one mulling how to manage the session. A number of Tory MPs have told me that they have received a good load of letters and emails since that PMQs

Thursday

Peter Jones

Corbyn’s democracy

The virtuous Mr Corbyn is insisting that New Old Labour should return to its traditional republican ways and take decisions ‘democratically’. The emperor Tiberius (ad 14–37) tried this one and it did not work. The first Roman emperor Augustus agreed to his stepson Tiberius’ accession only because death had cheated him of all his preferred options. The problem was that Tiberius’ heart was not really in it. A man with republican sympathies, he seemed to be keen to persuade the senate to return to involvement in the full process of ‘democratic’ rule and decision-making, duties which that body had embraced for nearly 500 years under the republic, but which Augustus

Tom Holland

Diary – 24 September 2015

Jeremy Corbyn has been compared to plenty of people over the past few months — a geography teacher, Michael Foot, Brian from the Monty Python film — but my favourite comparison was to a horse. Steve Fielding, professor of politics at Nottingham, declared Corbyn’s election ‘an act of political stupidity unparalleled since Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman senate’. As someone with a book just published on Rome’s first imperial dynasty, I was doubly thrilled. First, Professor Fielding had confirmed the conviction in which I had written my history of the first Caesars: that two millennia on, the West’s primal examples of political excess continue to instruct and appal.

Toby Young Toby Young

Corbyn sets off on the wrong track

Amid all the excitement about David Cameron this week, I fear that Jeremy Corbyn’s first major policy announcement may have been overlooked. That would be a shamae because the policy is really, really bad. I’m talking about his proposal to ‘renationalise’ the railways. Now, I have to confess to not really understanding this policy. Aren’t the railways in England, Scotland and Wales already owned by the state in the form of Network Rail? I know the Department for Transport lets franchises to private providers, such as FirstGroup and Virgin Group, but that doesn’t mean these private companies own the railways — the clue is in the word ‘let’. So how

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Exclusive: Steve Hilton jetting in to help with Cameron’s conference speech

Steve Hilton is, I understand, returning to help with David Cameron’s conference speech. Cameron’s one time political guru is now based in California, where he has launched the US political fundraising website Crowdpac. But he has made a point of returning each year to work on Cameron’s conference speech before heading back to the US. The decision to invite him to help out this year is particularly interesting given his view that Jeremy Corbyn is being underestimated. Hilton tweeted a few days ago that ‘cynical, pompous Westminster bubble trashes #Corbyn first week because he can’t play their game. not a pretty sight’. In response to Corbyn winning the Labour leadership,

Steerpike Steerpike

Kerry McCarthy defends saying that meat-eaters should be treated like smokers

Today Labour’s vegan shadow environment secretary Kerry McCarthy has come under fire for comments she has made about meat. In an interview with ‘Viva!Life’ magazine — given before she was given a role in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet — McCarthy said ‘meat should be treated in exactly the same way as tobacco with public campaigns to stop people eating it’. Naturally this has gone down like a lead balloon with farmers, especially since she appeared to suggest people should give up meat and dairy completely: ‘Progress on animal welfare is being made at EU level … but in the end it comes down to not eating meat or dairy.’ Speaking

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will anyone fight, fight and fight again to save what’s left of New Labour?

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreatbritishkowtow/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Stephen Bush discuss the upcoming Labour party conference” startat=1650] Listen [/audioplayer]Five years ago this Saturday, Ed Miliband was crowned Labour leader. Three days later, he had to deliver his first conference speech in that role. It was a distinctly underwhelming address. Miliband was overshadowed by his brother, who ticked Harriet Harman off for clapping. To try to give its new leader a better start this time round, Labour decided to announce the result of its leadership contest a fortnight before the party conference. But two weeks has been nowhere near enough time for Labour to come to terms with what has happened. The Parliamentary Labour

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Corbyn’s salvation

On religion, Jeremy Corbyn is interestingly moderate, circumspect — not the angry atheist you might expect. In a recent interview with the Christian magazine Third Way, he said his upbringing was quite religious: his mother was a ‘Bible-reading agnostic’ and his father a believer, and he went to a Christian school. ‘At what point did you decide that it wasn’t for you?’ he was asked. He replied very carefully, even challenging the premise of the question: ‘I’m not anti-religious at all. Not at all… I find religion very interesting. I find the power of faith very interesting. I have friends who are very strongly atheist and wouldn’t have anything to

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I knew it! All these toffs have depraved tastes

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreatbritishkowtow/media.mp3″ title=”Rod Liddle and James Delingpole debate if all right wing people have bad music tastes” startat=700] Listen [/audioplayer]A friend of mine once watched Jeremy Corbyn try to rape an owl. This was the early to mid-1980s. The Labour leader used to come round to my squat in Leytonstone and we’d sit cross–legged on the floor, sniffing glue from a large plastic bag, and listen to Camper Van Beethoven’s ‘Take The Skinheads Bowling’. Jeremy was on the periphery of our little clique and we were suspicious of him because he was posh. Sometimes, when we were passing the glue bag around, we’d miss him out from sheer spite. Eventually

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

This will-they-won’t-they rate-rise saga has dragged on long enough

When news broke last Thursday evening that the US Federal Reserve had decided to keep interest rates on hold, I happened to be surrounded by serious economists representing a range of viewpoints and nationalities. None seemed surprised by the decision, though the media had declared it to be on a knife edge. But I did sense disappointment, not so much because the assembled sages thought technical data pointed to a rise but because the whole will-they-won’t-they saga of the first US rate rise since December 2008 (or March 2009 in the case of UK rates set by the Monetary Policy Committee) now feels as if it has dragged on far

Wednesday

James Forsyth

How will Tim Farron make sure the Lib Dems are heard?

When the Liberal Democrats voted for Tim Farron as their next leader, they didn’t know that the Labour party was going to elect Jeremy Corbyn. If they had known that, they might have been more tempted to go for Norman Lamb, the more centrist candidate in the race and the one with ministerial experience. But Farron has adapted pretty well to the new, post-Corbyn landscape. His speech today contained plenty of pops at Labour for ‘abandoning serious politics, serious economics’ and choosing instead the ‘glory of self-indulgent opposition’. Farron, by contrast, tried to cast the Liberal Democrats as the party that is both competent and caring. He combined a defence

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Who are Jeremy Corbyn’s outriders?

Jeremy Corbyn may have a Shadow Cabinet and a full frontbench team, but the Labour leader doesn’t have many genuine outriders even amongst those he has given jobs to. Most frontbenchers seem rather refreshed by how happy he is for them to have open discussions at meetings: yesterday’s Shadow Cabinet meeting, for instance, was quite discursive and friendly, which was quite different to its atmosphere in the Miliband years. But most of those frontbenchers have agreed to serve because they believe it is the best thing for the Labour party, not because they want to help Corbyn. Every leader needs a group of outriders around them, both frontbenchers and backbenchers, who are prepared to

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Speaker Bercow: Corbyn will need to stick with new PMQs tone for months

John Bercow has long made clear that he would like MPs to behave a little better at Prime Minister’s Questions, which he believes is so rowdy that it upsets voters. Well, he seems to have got what he wants, or at least for the first week of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party. Last night, at a lecture to the think tank Policy Exchange, he was asked about the session, and whether he thought it would improve permanently. The Speaker said he didn’t believe ‘that a huge amount of additional work is required in terms of creative construction of the session’, though he added that the session could be

Monday

Alex Massie

Is Labour still a Unionist party?

The answer to this question, it turns out, comes from Kenny Dalglish. The answer is mebbys aye, mebbys naw. At the weekend the Scottish party’s former leader suggested Labour should have (some kind of) ‘free vote’ in the event of there being another independence referendum. Kezia Dugdale, the latest occupant of this poisoned throne, conceded Labour MSPs should, if there is another referendum, be free to campaign for independence if that’s where their heart lies. Now, in one respect this makes sense. Labour are in a hopeless position in Scotland right now. Moreover, the party cannot recover unless it wins votes from erstwhile supporters who have crossed the constitutional aisle to support the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn should forget railways if he wants Labour to be a success

Jeremy Corbyn’s first policy pronouncement as Labour leader hasn’t been all that surprising: he wants a ‘People’s Railway’ that will bring the railways back into public ownership line by line. He will have noticed the excited noises that party members made at hustings whenever he mentioned rail renationalisation – and the impatient sighs from the same audience when his rivals for the leadership were cool on the issue. But as Peter Kellner explains today, even though this individual measure is popular, unless Corbyn is able to deal with the public’s fundamental lack of trust in Labour over the economy, he could promise voters every single retail offer they’ve ever dreamed