Jeremy corbyn

How Corbyn opponents are now turning to the trade unions

The Overton Window is a concept beloved particularly by the Left. It’s a theory about the range of political ideas that the public will accept, and the reason the Left has been particularly interested in this window in recent years is that there is a belief you can move it in a certain direction so that previously radical and frightening ideas become quite normal. Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters certainly believe that their party has succeeded in moving the Overton Window over the past few years, and that the old political adages about the public not wanting an overly left-wing party no longer apply. But within the party itself, there has also

Nick Cohen

J.K. Rowling and the darkness on the left | 24 September 2018

You rarely come across a character in modern literature like Jimmy Knight. He’s a racist, but that’s not what makes him a novelty act. racists, after all, are deplored everywhere in the culture industry, from Hollywood to Pinewood Studios. Of this racist, however, his ex-wife says: ‘I wouldn’t trust him if it was anything to do with Jews. He doesn’t like them. Israel is the root of all evil, according to Jimmy. Zionism: I got sick of the bloody sound of the word.’ Knight is also a misogynist, a type which is once again a familiar figure in contemporary fiction. But when his girlfriend cries out after he hits her,

Steerpike

Labour conference 2018, in pictures

It’s that time of year again: Labour conference. With Jeremy Corbyn’s grip on the party tightening in the past year, the conference, too, has taken on a distinctly Corbynista feel. The exhibition hall is made up of a mix of business stands – including Apple – and campaign groups. Meanwhile, over at the sister festival – Momentum’s World Transformed festival – pictures of Marx adorn the walls alongside banners making clear Sun journalists are not welcome. Viva la revolución! (Mr S will update this post as the conference goes on.)

What Jeremy Corbyn wants to talk about at Labour conference

A lot of Labour’s energy at the moment seems to be spent on internal battles over which faction wins power on which committee, and whether it should be easier to deselect sitting MPs. A measure of whether its conference is a success is whether it manages to talk about what it wants to do in government. I understand that the leadership’s aim this week is to try to produce an analysis of where society has gone wrong. This sounds rather ‘Broken Britain’, though unsurprisingly the party won’t be using that line. Instead, the tag is ‘rebuilding Britain’, and Jeremy Corbyn and his colleagues will be talking about the impact of

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s deputy leader move highlights the party’s most interesting split

Generally, talk of a ‘split’ in the Labour Party focuses on the chasm between Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters and those ‘moderate’ MPs who want to leave. But there’s another, bigger split, which is between the Corbynites and a large chunk of MPs, including Deputy Leader Tom Watson, who disagree with the party’s leader but think Labour can change. Watson did go through a phase of staying rather quiet in the months after the last general election, avoiding both party events and interviews where he might be forced to take a stand against the leadership. But he has recently become far more vocal, disagreeing with the Corbynites on a number of key

Robert Peston

Jeremy Corbyn is getting more serious about Brexit and Theresa May ought to worry

The most important statement by Jeremy Corbyn in today’s Sunday Mirror interview is not that Labour’s leader will embrace a so-called People’s Vote if that were what Labour’s conference backs this week. It is that Labour is “not happy” with the PM’s Chequers Brexit plan “and we would vote against it”. This is Labour’s strongest and least ambiguous attack on Chequers. And – as if that were needed – it underwrites the view of many Tory MPs and ministers that the PM’s attempt to sell Chequers to Brussels is even more fatuous than dead-horse flogging, given that some 50 odd True Brexit Conservative backbenchers are adamant that they would vote

Labour’s conference, day one: The Spectator guide | 23 September 2018

Labour return to Liverpool for the party’s annual conference. But amid tensions over Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and the party’s anti-Semitism troubles, the gathering is unlikely to be an entirely happy occasion. Here are the events to keep an eye out for today: Labour conference: 10:30: Morning Plenary Session: Opening Formalities NEC Chair’s Address CAC Report General Secretary’s Report 11:30: Party democracy and campaigning 14:15: Afternoon Plenary Session: Party democracy and campaigning 17:25: Votes   Fringe events: 12:30: Real Britain: Where People Have A Voice Kevin Maguire (chair), Len McCluskey, John McDonnell MP, Ros Wynne, People from the Wigan Pier Project; Meeting Room 11A 12:45: The Jewish Labour Movement Rally

Corbyn’s Salisbury response is straight from the Trump playbook

It is deeply weird that Jeremy Corbyn will not condemn Russia for carrying out a chemical weapons attack on British soil. Actually, it’s beyond weird. It’s astonishing. Earlier this year, Corbyn saw the same intelligence that convinced everyone else – including his closest comrade John McDonnell – that the Salisbury novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia was carried out by Russian agents and approved at the highest levels within the Kremlin. This same evidence was deemed sufficient grounds by 27 countries to expel more than a 150 Russian diplomats. Yet rather than express outrage and condemn what was clearly a peace-time atrocity, Corbyn obfuscated – “assertions and

Jeremy Corbyn and Novichok: what did the Labour leader really say?

Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman this afternoon caused something of a stir when he insisted to journalists that the Labour leader had always said that the evidence from the Salisbury attack pointed to direct or indirect Russian involvement. This didn’t seem quite right: Corbyn attracted a great deal of opprobrium for failing to blame Russia for the attack at the time. It’s worth going back over what precisely the Labour leader did say after the attack – and what he didn’t. On 12 March, when Theresa May made her first statement to the Commons about the matter, she told MPs that ‘the government have concluded that it is highly likely that Russia

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Corbyn accuses May of ‘dancing round’ on Brexit

It’s a measure of quite how badly split the government is on Brexit that Jeremy Corbyn, who would previously avoid the matter because of problems in his own party, looked comfortable as he devoted all six of his questions at Prime Minister’s Questions today to the subject. Theresa May came prepared, not so much with answers on who in her government is telling the truth about the Chequers agreement and the chances and consequences of a no deal, but with attacks on Corbyn’s handling of Labour’s anti-semitism row. This preparation gave the Prime Minister some decent pay-offs, including her final answer, when she closed the exchanges by saying ‘he should

Why did Corbyn visit Palestine when it was mourning the co-founder of Hamas?

Jeremy Corbyn is a man of peace with an unfortunate tendency to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong wreath – when it comes to anti-Semitism. Just last week it emerged that the Labour leader once claimed that Israel’s Prime Minister and other leading politicians compete to see ‘who can kill the most’ people in Palestine. Only Corbyn seems to be more relaxed about leaders who talk up killing Israelis and Americans. In the spring of 2004, the Labour leader – then a lowly backbencher – visited Palestine. It was a rather curious time for a visit given that after a series of assassinations

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Ken: Corbyn is the man to tackle Britain’s anti-Semitism problem

Labour has been embroiled in a summer long row about anti-Semitism, with no sign that the issue will be resolved any time soon. Yet according to Ken Livingstone, there is only one man for the job of tackling anti-Semitism across Britain: Jeremy Corbyn. In an interview on Sky News – in which Ken, once again, talked about Hitler – the former mayor of London had this to say: ‘I’d be prepared to bet you now 100 quid that once we get a Jeremy Corbyn government, by the end of that government, anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia will all have declined quite significantly.’ If Corbyn’s attempts to resolve the anti-Semitism debate in his

Labour NEC results: when will Corbyn’s opponents accept it’s over?

It is quite clear what today’s NEC results mean for the Corbynites in the Labour Party: they’ve consolidated their control over the party structures. All the candidates who won were backed by Momentum, apart from Peter Willsman, who had seen the Corbynite grassroots organisation drop its support after a recording emerged of him making anti-Semitic comments. Willsman pushed moderate candidate Eddie Izzard out and will remain on the party’s ruling body. Izzard and ‘independent left-winger Ann Black’ came 10th and 13th respectively. Less clear is the implication for that rather nebulous group of anti-Corbynites generally known as ‘the moderates’. One of the reasons that the implications are less clear is

Robert Peston

Will May or Corbyn fall first?

Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are both on that Italian Job bus dangling over the cliff, with gold bars at one end and survival at the other. May wants to pursue her Chequers Brexit plan, even though doing so is alienating up to half her own MPs, True Brexiters and some erstwhile Remainers like Nick Boles (though, in truth, he has always been more Govean – or the agriculture secretary’s representative on earth – than europhile). According to her senior colleagues, May will not turn back – even though continuing to negotiate with the EU on her Brexit scheme would deliver a deal even less palatable to the Davises and

Nick Cohen

In the cult of Corbyn, dissent will not be tolerated

The far left is preparing the ground for its coming purge of the Labour party by burning down every rational objection that stands in its way. To take the most rational objection to its plans, consider the case of a Labour MP who breaks with Jeremy Corbyn on Brexit or racism. He or she is doing nothing more than following the example of Jeremy Corbyn, who broke with the Labour whip 428 times during his decades as a backbencher. A left that reserves a special place in its demonology for ‘McCarthyism’ – the persecution of individuals for their political beliefs – should have no difficulty with Corbyn’s opponents following their

Corbyn has made criticism of Israel impossible

If I were Benjamin Netanyahu (and I’m not) I would be thanking whatever gods there be for sending me, at a tricky time, the most useful ally it is possible to imagine in UK politics. To Bibi’s aid has come probably the only man in Britain capable of single–handedly silencing public criticism of the Israeli government’s disturbing new Basic Law, entitled ‘Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People’. If I were a British crusader for the Palestinian cause (and I’m not) I would be cursing whatever gods there be for sending — at a time when it might have been possible to rally critics of this unpleasant eruption of

Is Jeremy Corbyn preparing to back down over Labour’s anti-Semitism row?

Labour is belatedly about to adopt the IHRA anti-Semitism definition with all its examples, according to three members of its ruling NEC. They tell me this should happen at the next full NEC meeting on 4 September. This would seem to represent a big climbdown by Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in the face of great pressure from many in the Jewish community. In particular, he and his closest advisers, led by Seumas Milne, have been fervently resisting the IHRA examples which define as anti-Semitic any statement that the Israeli state is racist or that question the right of Jewish people to national self determination. “It looks like we will adopt

Jeremy Corbyn says he likes my journalism – so why does he want to muzzle the press?

Any local reporter would be pleased to hear a leading politician stand up for public interest journalism. Jeremy Corbyn did just that in his speech on media reform yesterday. But let’s not forget that Labour – and Corbyn himself – are adamant supporters of Leveson 2. Make no mistake: this is a dangerous attempt to muzzle local newspapers and expose reporters like me to crippling and needless law-suits. The most worrying aspect of Leveson 2 is Section 40, which would force papers to pay legal costs for people suing them regardless of whether they won their case. This would make the work of journalists much more difficult. After all, many of

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David Lammy turns on Jeremy Corbyn

David Lammy has always had Jeremy Corbyn’s back, but it seems his patience in the Labour leader might be wearing thin. In a story that emerged yesterday, Corbyn was caught on tape claiming that Zionists ‘don’t understand English irony’ despite them having lived in Britain ‘for a very long time’. It appears that Corbyn’s remarks – which are being taken by some as a reference to Jews, rather than merely Zionists – are a step too far, even for Lammy. The Labour MP condemned the comments and called them ’insidious’: It wasn’t long ago that a leaked list ranking Labour MPs by their loyalty to Corbyn emerged, which placed Lammy

Jeremy Corbyn’s plan for the media: make it more boring

It should be said that Jeremy Corbyn’s ideas for shaking up the media aren’t all bad. The Labour leader is right for instance to focus on the need to help out local media; the death of regional newspapers in recent years means that local government is almost entirely unaccountable nowadays. It’s only when things go badly wrong that people actually sit up and pay attention. Corbyn is also right on the need to reform freedom of information laws, which have now been rendered virtually redundant by those in authority who know exactly how to prevaricate and obstruct requests at every turn. But too many of the Labour leader’s other ideas