Labour party

Jeremy Corbyn: the nation’s therapist

Comparisons between Jesus and Jezza became commonplace long before he chose to end his election campaign with a rally at a church in Islington. As far back as August 2015, which in today’s political currency is at least two lifetimes ago, commentators were asking, ‘Is Jeremy Corbyn The New Messiah?’. It wasn’t just the shared initials (it’s a sign!) but the crowds he drew and the tearful adulation among his audience. But Corbyn is not messiah-like – indeed his very lack of magnetism is part of his appeal. And neither does Corbynism fill some Christianity-shaped hole in British life. The old religion demanded confession, sacrifice and a commitment that extends beyond

Why some Tories are deeply worried about the DUP deal

The Tory DUP deal has been signed in Downing Street this morning, the text of it is on the government website and there’ll be a statement in the Commons on it later. This is as formal as a confidence and supply deal can get. So, why were the Tories so keen on such a formal deal? Well, there were three reasons for it. The whips’ office wanted the certainty of a written agreement rather than having to survive hand to mouth; note that the deal was signed by the chief whip not the Prime Minister. The whips’ hope that this certainty will mean both that the government can get its

Tom Goodenough

Theresa May’s Government is safe – for now

The Government’s deal with the DUP is done – but it has come at a price. The confidence and supply agreement – which falls short of a formal coalition but will be enough to keep Theresa May in power – will set the Government back £1bn. The deal spells out £200m for infrastructure, £75m for ultra-fast broadband, £100m over five years to tackle deprivation, £50m on health and education, £100m on health service reform and £50m on mental health funding in Northern Ireland. Despite the cost, though, there’ll be a big sigh of relief among the Conservatives that the deal (which you can read here) is now, finally, across the line. With a

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Corbynism isn’t funny any more

The laughing should stop, says the Sun, which calls Corbynism a ‘joke’ which ‘simply isn’t funny any more’. The Labour leader has now said himself that he could be PM within six months. If he does make it to Downing Street, ‘terrifyingly, says the Sun, Trident could be gone’. And in just a few days ‘Corbyn would leave Britain open to attack’. A Corbyn government would also be ‘financially ruinous, militarily empty and so confused on Brexit and immigration that his own party contradicts itself at every turn’. After Corbyn’s rapturous reception over the weekend at Glastonbury, ‘let’s hope’ says the Sun, that the ‘enthusiasm’ for Corbyn ‘remains in a

Alex Massie

Britain is in desperate need of a truly national party

I am not sure I can think of any great public assembly in Britain I’d enjoy less than Glastonbury. Within reason, I’m not sure you could even pay me to go there. Glastonbury is a place for dear Hugo Rifkind not for me, and that’s the way I imagine we both prefer it.  Still, there was something worth seeing at Glastonbury this year. Jeremy Corbyn, obviously. His appearance was remarkable, even if it has also prompted a fresh outbreak of one of Britain’s under-appreciated traditional sports: members of the middle-class sneering at other members of the middle-class.  Even so, two things can be said about this. First, the Labour party

Theresa May’s exhaustion makes more blunders inevitable

Theresa May’s body language on leaving the European Council summit last night shows quite how much of a toll the past few weeks have taken on the Prime Minister. She looks exhausted. Now, you don’t have to feel sorry for May: she did, after all, decide to call the snap election that has proved to be her undoing – even though so many people thought she would be mad not to call it with the Labour party appearing to be so weak. But it is worth noting that the most important people in government – and the most important people involved in the attempts to keep the government together – are

Tom Goodenough

Corbyn overtakes May on question of who would make the best PM

Would Jeremy Corbyn or Theresa May make a better Prime Minister? In April, when Theresa May called the election, that question was barely worth asking: 54 per cent backed May compared to just 15 per cent who opted for Corbyn. Now that’s all changed. For the first time, Jeremy Corbyn has overtaken Theresa May on the question of who would do the best job running the country. A YouGov poll in the Times today puts Corbyn on 35 per cent; just 34 per cent picked the PM. We don’t necessarily need a YouGov survey to tell us but this demonstrates the utter collapse in Theresa May’s popularity. More troublingly for

Labour and the Lib Dems are as much to blame as the Tories for Grenfell Tower

I haven’t been in Camden this afternoon, so I can’t vouch for there being no marches of activists holding banners with the words ‘Labour Out’ and ‘Corbyn Must Go’, but somehow I doubt there are – and I certainly haven’t seen them on the news. But why not? Last week we saw no end of left-wing activists out on the streets trying to exploit the Grenfell Tower tragedy for their own party political purposes – trying to present it as a case of callous Tories treating the lives of the poor as worthless as they slash their way through budgets with abandon.   Yes, Kensington and Chelsea is a Conservative-controlled borough

James Kirkup

If Jeremy Corbyn can rise from the depths, why can’t Theresa May?

When John Curtice speaks, listen. That’s one thing we learned in the general election. This week we hosted John at the Social Market Foundation, where he explained just what actually happened on June 8. Among his many observations was that Jeremy Corbyn really had done something unprecedented: he changed the way voters saw him, for the better. In John’s view, no one has ever done this before. Public opinion of Corbyn was settled: he was useless. And voters, once they’ve decided you’re useless, don’t change their minds.  But they did. They still don’t think Corbyn is brilliant, but they don’t dismiss him the way they used to. The great Curtice brain holds no other example

Labour should form a coalition with the DUP

So, they limp on, and Corbyn is justified in holding aloft the Queen’s Speech in jubilantly derisive fashion. Some of you Tories are no doubt hoping that Theresa May ‘recovers her mojo’ and that the past six weeks have been some weird transgression from her norm. No, sorry. She does not have a mojo. She has never had a mojo. Theresa May with a mojo is about as probable as Ruth Davidson getting it on with a hunky fella. The rest of you – me included – wonder who she will be replaced by. Only Davies and Davidson would improve the current position. And even then not by much. But

Isabel Hardman

Corbyn regains his confidence – but his Brexit troubles aren’t far away

Today’s exchanges between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn in the Commons following the Queen’s Speech showed how much difference confidence makes to a leader’s performance. While Corbyn will never be a scintillating orator – speaking for far too long and ending with a sentence that seemed to be aimed more at entering the Guinness Book of Records than at making any sense – he made the most of the opportunity that such a threadbare speech presented him with. The election result may not have delivered him into government, but it has made him look like far more of a winner than the woman who called the poll. The Labour leader

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: The Queen’s Speech is the Tories’ last chance

Today’s Queen Speech will be a muted affair, with Her Majesty dressing down for the opening of a Parliament which will stretch the Conservative Government to the limit. Theresa May heads into the new session with no majority, precious little political clout and the huge task of Brexit looming. Can the Tories somehow make it work? It’s now been nearly two weeks since the general election – yet the ‘cloud of uncertainty’ still hangs in the air, says the Daily Telegraph. There’s no reason why this should be so, argues the paper, which says the Government messed up by claiming last week that a deal with the DUP was imminent. This

Gerard Coyne’s show trial is a stark warning to Labour moderates

‘There is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens,’ wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58’. Unite the Union’s rules appear to operate on much the same basis as the Soviet provision against ‘counter-revolutionary action’. Gerard Coyne, Unite’s West Midlands secretary, has been sacked after what he claims was a ‘kangaroo court’.  So far, so internal union politics. But Coyne is not just some provincial functionary. He was most recently a contender for General Secretary of Unite, losing to incumbent Len McCluskey by around 5,500 votes. It was a process — calling it an election would be something of

Ed West

Labour is now the party of the middle class

I’m not sure I’ve ever been so pessimistic about this country’s future, and I’m not usually a barrel of laughs to start with. Aside from the terrorism, and the recent tragedy in North Kensington, there are real black clouds in the distance. Investors are being put off Britain, a problem that pre-dates Brexit but is surely aggravated by it. There seems little hope that the Tories will follow Philip Hammond in pursuing a more moderate line in Europe. (Would the catchphrase ‘Stop, Hammondtime’, galvanise the public, I wonder? Kids still like MC Hammer right?). Meanwhile the opposition – even moderate members – are now calling for people’s private property to

Steerpike

Listen: Ed Miliband hosts toilet discussion on Radio 2

Poor old Ed Miliband. The former Labour leader was once convinced he was destined for Downing Street. Now, he’s hosting discussions about toilets on Radio 2. Standing in for Jeremy Vine, Miliband introduced music, chatted politics – and talked to guests about what types of loos they have. The Labour MP even asked one guest to flush their WC to hear what it sounded like. But Mr S was worried things hit something of a bum note for Ed when he had to remind one guest to ‘be tactful’ as he discussed trying to clean his toilet: ‘We’re talking loos and you’ve been getting in touch with us…Nicola Richards from Loughborough says ‘As a mum, I have to

Please can the bullying of Theresa May stop?

We all remember it from school, whether as perpetrator, or assistant of perpetrator, or victim: the moment when everyone turns against another pupil and it becomes legitimate to be vile to her. When she is ‘down’, it becomes more and more enjoyable to torture her and to find endless new aspects of her to be woundingly vicious about, every hour of every day. It has been like this for Theresa May in the last week. She’s the outcast in the playground, knowing that if she so much as opens her mouth to say something, she’ll receive a torrent of withering sarcasm. Please can it stop? It leaves a nasty taste

No, the election was not a rebellion against Brexit – or ‘austerity’

The lessons to be learned from the Conservatives’ poor showing in the election could fill more pages than the national curriculum. Don’t unleash on the public a manifesto which has not even been tested among senior ministers. Don’t think you can get through a seven-week election campaign by endlessly repeating the same mantra, especially when you are being ridiculed for it. Don’t underestimate how quickly public opinion can change. Sell yourself, your party and its ideas, rather than just attacking your opponent. Yet there is a serious danger that Theresa May and the rest of the Tory party could pick up the wrong message. There is a growing narrative that

Trying to turn Grenfell Tower into a morality tale about the rich and poor stinks

Who would want to be a political leader in the wake of a disaster such as that of Grenfell Tower? If you show up and hug the victims you run the risk of being accused of opportunism and obstructing the emergency services in their work; if you stay away from the site you will be accused of callousness – even if you are spending your time working on the practical issues relating to the event. But there is a very strong emerging narrative: that Jeremy Corbyn got it right by turning up and sharing the grief of the victims, and that Theresa May got it horribly wrong by restricting her

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May is failing to learn from Gordon Brown’s mistakes

One of the truisms that has emerged from this election is that maybe Gordon Brown was right to veer away from calling an early election after all. Pursuing a snap election turned out to be a grave error for Theresa May, and so perhaps the Labour Prime Minister was wiser than everyone gave him credit for at the time. But while this may seem obviously true, what has actually happened is that May has confirmed her similarity to Brown. The latest YouGov polling on May’s personal ratings reminds us that both reaped a severe punishment for going anywhere near an early poll, regardless of whether they followed through and held

Are conservatives a bunch of neanderthals? Some on the left seem to think so

How tragic that the country – and indeed the world – is being dragged rightwards by a bunch of Neanderthal conservatives who relish ignorance and despise experts. That, in as many words, was the argument advanced here by Nick Cohen on Monday, as well as by many others on the Left. Nick wrote: ‘…in Britain and America one trend is clear: the better-educated you are the less likely you are to vote for the right. Like Mill, I am not arguing that educated people are always clever. Intellectuals have always included fanatics and cranks among their number. But I can say this: in a country where ever more people are going