Labour party

My guess is that the people who voted for Naz Shah at the last election think she did not go anywhere near far enough in her comments about transporting Jews. Ms Shah is, somehow, still the MP for Bradford West, a seat she yanked from under the feet of someone we had all assumed had the votes of anti-Semites in the constituency sewn up. This is problem number one, for Labour. The loathing of Israel, and concomitant anti-Semitism, among its core Muslim vote is implacable. But problem number two is that Labour’s white middle-class metro liberal halfwits, of which Jeremy Corbyn is undoubtedly a member, are also disposed towards anti-Semitism. They

What has Jeremy Corbyn got against McDonald’s? He wants to block the fast-food chain from having an outlet at the Labour party conference, a position which has been blasted by quite a few MPs in his party, who presumably enjoy a Big Mac every now and then. It raises a more serious question though. According to their website, McDonald’s employ about 85,000 people in the UK. Most of these workers are voters. Add to that the number of British people who dine at McDonald’s – which must be in the millions – and you start to see why Corbyn’s McBoycott has gone down badly. Is snobbism behind it? Possibly. McDonald’s working conditions may not be the best in the labour market, but are they really

Although the weekly meeting of the parliamentary Labour party is a private affair, Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman offers journalists lurking in the committee corridor outside a briefing as soon as it has concluded. Today he had to take questions from hacks on whether or not his boss goes to McDonald’s – prompted by the news that the Labour party is banning the fast food outlet from having a stall at its party conference. Both the staff and the burger ban came up at the meeting. It started with an observation from Baroness Armstrong that the Labour leader now has a phalanx of staff with him when he attends these sessions, as opposed

It’s been a good week for Vote Leave after they were given the official designation to campaign for Brexit in the EU referendum. Despite this, they still have a few problems they need to overcome. One of these comes in the form of Rick Astley, the eighties singer. A Belgian expat by the name of Mario Van Poppel has decided to try and cause some problems for the Leave camp’s digital operations. Van Poppel — who is based in London — has purchased several Vote Leave domains. While the official Vote Leave website can be found at www.voteleavetakecontrol.org, a visit to voteleave.com, voteleave.co.uk, voteleave.net or voteleave.org now leads to a video of Rick

A vandal smashing a window and calling it air conditioning. A mother marrying her son and declaring it a lesson in advanced sexual morality. A shoplifter caught with a chicken up his jumper and congratulating the store detectives on their commitment to property rights. That’s how David Cameron ducked the tax-abuse row at PMQs today. He basked in hypocrisy. He wallowed in smugness. He luxuriated in panic measures and called them far-sighted statesmanship. He chose to posture as the brilliant leader of a brilliant government whose brilliant new policy is to rip down the cloaks of secrecy that protect Britain’s tax-dodge paradises overseas. And he contrasted his zeal with the

As David Cameron finds himself in hot water over his admission that he once owned shares in an offshore fund, today ought to be a walk in the park for Labour. In fact, all Jeremy Corbyn need do is give the press a few soundbites on the Tories’ troubles and then sit back and relax. Alas this is Corbyn we’re talking about so things were never going to be that simple. Instead the Labour leader has managed to become the story after he was filmed scolding an LBC journalist outside his home after she attempted to ask for his thoughts on Cameron’s admission. Rather than answer, Corbyn told her that he

During the Labour leadership election, Jeremy Corbyn found himself in hot water after he appeared to claim in an interview with the Independent on Sunday that he wanted to reinstate clause IV of the Labour party constitution. The clause — which Tony Blair scrapped — commits the party to nationalising industry: ‘To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.’ Corbyn’s apparent desire

Jeremy Corbyn has launched Labour’s local election campaign today with the promise that his party will stand up to the government, and the claim that it is being effective in doing so. He said: ‘Now, being in Opposition is never easy, I think we all know that. But Labour in Westminster has proved you can still have influence and you can still make a difference. it was by speaking out and standing up with people with disabilities that we shamed the government into abandoning their disgraceful cuts to personal independence payments. ‘But we’re not done yet. We will continue the campaign to stop the cuts to disabled people’s ESA that

Sajid Javid is the driest and most Thatcherite member of the government. So, it is no surprise that he is — rightly, to my mind — rejecting calls for the nationalisation of the steel industry following Tata’s announcement that it plans to sell its UK steel-making business. But the steel issue has now got caught up in the EU referendum, with the Out side pointing out that EU state aid rules limit what the UK government can actually do to help the steel industry. Now, personally, I doubt that the government would want to do more even if it was allowed to. Yet, some ministers keep suggesting that the government

The upcoming EU referendum has proved to be a divisive issue for families as well as politicians. With Boris Johnson the lone Out-er among his siblings, another famous family are now to take different sides in the great debate. Although Jeremy Corbyn is known to have held Eurosceptic views in the past — recently deleting articles scathing of Brussels from his website, the Labour leader insists that he is backing Remain. However, Mr S understands that his brother Piers is to get behind the Leave campaign. In a series of tweets, Corbyn’s older brother has begun to make the left-wing case for leaving the EU: What’s more, Piers — a climate change sceptic — is

It’s been a bad week for the Tories, but it hasn’t exactly been a great week for Labour. After a list categorising Labour MPs as ‘supportive’ or ‘hostile’ towards Jeremy Corbyn was leaked, things seem to have taken a turn for the worse, because it appears that Corbynistas are now ranking MPs in terms of how ‘politically black’ they are. The Evening Standard reports that during a speech given by Marlene Ellis – a Momentum activist and member of Chuka Umunna’s local party – she claims that her local Labour party branch in Lambeth is ‘very, very right-wing’. In a recording passed to the Standard, she is reported to claim that she

Why have David Cameron and George Osborne overreached? Why are so many in their own party no longer disposed to obey them? Obviously the great issue of Europe has something to do with it. But there is another factor. Victory at the last election, followed by the choice of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, has convinced too many Tories, including Mr Osborne himself, that they will be in power for ten more years at least. So they get careless and cocky. Then they make mistakes. Then they come up against the most admirable fact about parliamentary democracy, which is that you can never guarantee being in power for ten years.