Labour party

Thursday

Nick Cohen

The counter-revolution begins, comrades, on 12 June

Think of the Parliamentary Labour Party as a regiment ordered over the top in the First World War. The soldiers know the generals haven’t a clue. They know the battle was lost before it began. The only question in their minds is who makes it back from the slaughter. The projected casualty rates vary. Corbyn’s supporters want to justify the left continuing to cling onto the leadership by getting close to Ed Miliband’s share of the vote in 2015. If they succeed they will keep the Labour party at 30 per cent and give the Tories a majority of 60 or 70. London Labour MPs also feel that the losses

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Labour’s manifesto reveals one thing: the Left has run out of ideas

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse for Labour, Noam Chomsky goes and endorses Jeremy Corbyn. ‘If I were a voter in Britain, I would vote for him…He’s quiet, reserved, serious, he’s not a performer,’ Chomsky told the Guardian. But the more you read of Chomsky’s endorsement, the more you wonder if he was put up to it for a bet. He says that: ‘The shift in the Labour party under Blair made it a pale image of the Conservatives.’ Tony Blair, that infamous electoral dud. Chomsky is regularly cited as the world’s ‘top public intellectual’. It’s a slippery phrase. Friedrich Hayek called his ilk ‘the secondhand dealers in ideas’. I

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Corbyn’s car drives over BBC cameraman’s foot

Jeremy Corbyn’s day is going from bad to disastrous. Labour’s draft manifesto has been leaked and is splashed all over the newspapers. And the Labour leader was a no show at the party’s poster launch. So you might be forgiven for thinking that things couldn’t possibly get any worse for Corbyn. Not so. When the Labour leader arrived at the party’s manifesto meeting, his car – reportedly with Corbyn still inside – ran over a BBC cameraman’s foot. Here’s a video of the injured cameraman being tended to afterwards: This BBC cameraman has just had his leg ran over by the car Jeremy Corbyn arrived in at Labour’s manifesto signing. #GE2017 @5_News

Matthew Lynn

The last thing Brexit Britain needs is Labour’s old-fashioned socialism

Big hikes in corporation tax. A sweeping programme of nationalisation. Large increases in the minimum wages, a 20-1 cap on executive pay, and, just in case it gets lost in that blizzard of promises, hefty tax increases on anyone earning more than £80,000 a year. Even in a normal year, the leaked Labour party manifesto has more than enough in it to make anyone in business or industry feel just slightly nervous. But hold on. This is hardly a normal time for the British economy. We know Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell would like to pretend it simply wasn’t happening, but 2017-22 will also see the most crucial, and in many ways

The Spectator

Leaked draft of Labour 2017 manifesto – full text

Labour’s draft manifesto for the general election has been leaked; here’s the full text: Manifesto: For the many not the few Creating an economy that works for all Our economic strategy is about delivering a fairer, more prosperous society for the many, not just the few. We will measure our economic success not by the presence of millionaires, but by the ability of people to make ends meet. Labour understands that wealth creation is a collective endeavour – between investors, workers, public services, and government. Each contributes and each must share equitably in the rewards. This manifesto is about rebalancing the economy and re-writing the .rules of a rigged system,

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What’s in Labour’s leaked manifesto?

Labour is meeting today to finalise its manifesto. The only sticking point? A draft manifesto has already been leaked. The party’s plans to woo voters are splashed across the Daily Telegraph and the Mirror. They’ve also been leaked to the BBC. Make no mistake: this is a huge embarrassment for the party and does nothing to dispel the Tory attack line that Labour would be at the forefront of a coalition of chaos if it wins come June 9th. After all, if it can’t get its manifesto launch right, how can Labour be trusted to govern? So what does the manifesto say? There are few surprises. But for Corbyn’s supporters,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Twelve months of May

Normally, the first anniversary of a prime minister taking office is the occasion for a lot of opinion polls and assessments. But by going to the country early, Theresa May has pre-empted that. By the time she has been in No. 10 a year, the voters will already have delivered their verdict via the ballot box. Still, it is worth assessing what May has done so far. When she arrived in No. 10, her team had three main priorities. They wanted to complete the modernisation process by making the Tories more appealing to the so-called ‘just about managing’ classes, and to those outside the party’s heartlands. They were determined to shore

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Jeremy Corbyn is starting to sound like a decent Labour leader

I didn’t see a ferret, reverse or otherwise, during Labour’s campaign launch or after. I heard some quite silly, grandstanding, questions from Laura Kuenssberg. And I heard a Labour leader who sounded a bit like…..well, a decent Labour leader. None of this is to deny the patent catastrophe of Corbyn’s leadership of the party hitherto, or to suggest that I agreed with everything he said. But he spoke from the heart, passionately, with a conviction I do not hear in Theresa May’s frankly automaton repetitiveness. And much of what Corbyn had to say about tax avoiders, inequalities and hardship will play very well with his core vote north of the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theresa and Philip bored the nation with their strong and stable relationship

How was last night’s TV squirm-athon? The sacrificial victims handled it pretty well, at first. Theresa May and her unknown husband, Philip, were roasted live on a BBC sofa. The idea, presumably, was to make them seem relaxed, normal, unexciting, not too posh, at ease with themselves and, above all, genuine. Dull Phil sported a bland shirt, no tie, and a forgettable jacket. With his gnomish pallor and his thick-rimmed spectacles he resembled Sir Ian McKellen entering a Woody Allen lookalike contest. Mrs May was in headmistress mode. Her wandering lips – each has a life of its own – were painted in hard-Brexit scarlet. She wore a black-and-white tunic

Tuesday

Steerpike

Watch: Jeremy Corbyn dodges Brexit question seven times

Jeremy Corbyn said this morning that Brexit was ‘settled’. Now, it seems, he isn’t quite so sure. The Labour leader was quizzed repeatedly on whether the UK would definitely leave the EU behind if he becomes Prime Minister on June 9th. Seven times, Corbyn refused to answer. Instead, Corbyn insisted that he would ‘get a good deal from Europe’ – but wouldn’t say what would happen if he didn’t. Here’s what he told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg: LK: …My question is if you’re prime minister we will leave come hell or high water whatever is on the table at the end of the negotiations? JC: We win the election we’ll get

The Spectator

Jeremy Corbyn launches Labour’s election campaign, full text

It’s great to be launching our campaign in Greater Manchester where you showed the way for the rest of the country by electing a Labour mayor, Andy Burnham.Andy will be a great mayor – but just think how much more he will be able to achieve if he is working with a Labour Government committed to the many not the few. We have four weeks. Four weeks to take our message to voters to convince them Britain can be better. It can be transformed. It doesn’t have to be like this. We can transform Britain into a country that – instead of being run for the rich – is a one

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Corbyn wins some rare praise

Jeremy Corbyn wins an unlikely supporter today: the Sun newspaper, which throws its weight behind the Labour leader’s plans to axe hospital car park charges. The paper’s support might come as a surprise for Corbyn – particularly as its editorial goes on to criticise the health secretary Jeremy Hunt for talking ‘tough’ on scrapping charges but doing little in practice. It isn’t all good news for Corbyn though. The Sun says Corbyn ‘gets half Marx’ because of the ‘barmy’ tax on private health insurance he plans to fund it with. The Sun argues that it simply ‘never occurs to Labour to make a saving elsewhere’. Instead, it ‘aways involves more tax’, according to the

Monday

Tom Goodenough

The Tories hit their highest poll lead since 1983

The Tories have just hit a new high in the polls: 49 per cent, handing them a 22-point lead over Labour. This margin is virtually uncharted territory for the Conservatives, with ICM pointing out that the party’s current lead has only been bettered once in the last 34 years of polling – back in May 1983. As ever, it’s less good news for Labour: the party sits on 27 per cent, according to ICM – a number which precisely matches the share of the national vote they picked up in last week’s local elections. If – and it’s a big if – this means the pollsters have pinpointed Labour’s share of

Steerpike Steerpike

Listen: Vince Cable says he would find it difficult not to vote for Labour MP

Tim Farron has said the Lib Dems won’t be forming a coalition with Labour. But it seems Vince Cable didn’t get the memo. Cable has been taped suggesting that Lib Dem voters should back Rupa Huq, Labour’s candidate in Ealing Central. Here’s what he said: ‘I’ll just give one example – there’s Rupa Huq, who’s the candidate in Ealing. Purely but coincidence I found myself – I think it was on ‘Any Questions’ or one of those programmes in Warwick a few months ago, and I gave her a lift back home to Ealing. We talked for a couple of hours and it was very clear that on almost every

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

Labour’s election strategy – vote for us and watch us lose | 6 May 2017

The crapness of Corbyn’s Labour is a phenomenon. It fascinates me. Frankly, it does my head in. For there is a theory, you see, that Corbyn’s Labour isn’t really crap at all. That it is all a conspiracy. That journalists such as me, who I suspect are ‘neoliberal’ or something, merely construct a narrative demonising it as such. Where politicians match our prejudices, this theory goes, we give them enormous leeway and spring to their defence. When they don’t, we supposedly deem them ‘mad’ or ‘radical’ or, yes, ‘crap’, in a spirit of sheer defensiveness. It’s a neat theory, this, and very occasionally I even find myself wondering if it

Friday

Jo Green

How to save the Labour party

Labour is now five weeks away from the election hammering it signed up to when Jeremy Corbyn was elected and re-elected leader. Sadly, the local elections are only a taste of things to come. Labour’s national vote share will be lower, the Tories’ higher and many of the PLP’s best talents will be ejected from Parliament. The only question now is whether the party’s response to its inevitable defeat kills off Labour as a party of government for good. There will be huge decisions to be made, and if the party gets them wrong – again – then oblivion awaits. The first question is whether Labour wants to give up or fight

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Where I’m from in Northumberland, the Tories don’t win – until now

The story of a council election decided by drawing straws isn’t the most remarkable thing to happen in Northumberland today, not by a long way. Pegswood. Cramlington. Morpeth.  These aren’t the names of places that normally figure much in national political reporting or debate. That’s because they’re in Northumberland, or more accurately, south Northumberland, where Labour has dominated for my entire lifetime until now. The first half of that life was spent in Northumberland, and I still call the place home even though I’ve lived somewhere else for more than 20 years.  I grew up in the glorious rural north of the county, but I went to school in Morpeth;

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Is the end nigh for Ukip?

Ukip is a party dwelling on its past glories rather than its future this afternoon. The party’s leader Paul Nuttall has very few crumbs of comfort from the results so far: Ukip has lost every single one of the seats it had previously held. It has, just moments ago, snatched a single seat from Labour in Lancashire. Yet even the most optimistic Kipper would struggle to put a spin on the performance so far. The line that there are still results to come through is rapidly wearing very thin. Instead, when Nuttall broke his silence earlier he talked of the party’s ‘electoral success over recent years’ and how the party had forced the

Steerpike Steerpike

Thornberry’s BBC gaffe: ET can’t phone home

Poor old Emily Thornberry. Labour is having a torrid time in the local elections and during her appearance on the BBC this morning, things took a turn for the worse for the shadow foreign secretary. Thornberry – who Mr S previously revealed is known as ET by Jeremy Corbyn — was there to try and defend Labour’s dire results. The only sticking point? ET could not phone home. Alas, her phone wasn’t working so she couldn’t stay in touch with Labour HQ. Thornberry spent several minutes attempting to get her mobile to work before a worried Huw Edwards stepped in to ask her what was wrong: ‘It’s not even my iPhone. I don’t

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Local elections: West Midlands win caps off a day of stunning successes for the Tories

The Tories are up 540 seats, have gained control of 11 councils and enjoyed success in the Tees Valley, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and West of England mayoral races. Conservative candidate Andy Street has won the West Midlands mayoral contest. Labour’s vote has plummeted, with the party losing 360 seats as well as control of six councils. Labour’s Steve Rotherham won in Liverpool’s mayoral contest; Andy Burnham won in Greater Manchester. Ukip has lost every seat it was defending. The party has gained one seat across the whole country – in Lancashire, from Labour. The Lib Dems have lost 24 seats but have seen their share of the national vote jump by seven per cent. The SNP are