Jeremy corbyn

A few of us on the Labour left decide to see if it is possible to conjure, from nowhere, a #FinalSay campaign for a second referendum. The Labour front bench does not sound ecstatic about a second referendum, and Chuka Umunna’s lot are bound to screw it up if they’re in charge. So we schedule a meeting in the Commons, commission a meme and spread the word. Not long after this goes public, numerous Twitter users with random numbers in their handles begin accusing me of being a ‘pro-Nato White Helmet shill’, a ‘coup-monger’ and a ‘neoliberal’. The reaction at my Labour branch is more positive. We pass a motion

Jeremy Corbyn decided to re-release his greatest hits at Prime Minister’s Questions today, starting with Brexit but then moving on to poverty, education, police cuts and ‘burning i justices’. We’ve heard these questions many times before, and often in the same sequence, but today the Labour leader was using them once again to try to underline that Theresa May’s government is failing not just on Brexit but on everything else too. This didn’t work, though, because Corbyn only tried to tie the topics together in his very last question, and that question was particularly rambling. Last night the Labour leader’s spokesman delivered a crisp line about the government being unable

Labour MPs who want a second referendum are threatening to table their own motion calling for one next week if their frontbench fails to do so. Jeremy Corbyn is expected to call for a vote of no confidence in the government once Theresa May’s deal is defeated in the Commons this evening. The Labour leadership has refused to do this until now because it doesn’t want to hold a vote it is certain to lose, but the pressure has now grown so great for a vote that it will be extremely difficult for Corbyn to dodge it, even though the DUP have said they will stop the government from falling

As a hack who lived and breathed the financial crisis, you might think that at the start of 2008 and 2009 I would have been more anxious about what lay ahead than I am today. Wrong. In my understanding of the mechanistic link between a bust banking system and the wallop to our prosperity, I could at least broadcast about what needed to be done to clean up the mess. A problem understood is a mendable problem. I am more unsettled today than at any time in 35 years as a journalist because of a political paralysis that makes the destiny of this nation so uncertain. The Prime Minister’s Brexit

It’s hard to think of a time when an opposition leader has had such a promising start to the new year. Jeremy Corbyn finds himself up against a prime minister who barely survived a confidence motion, with more than a third of the Conservative parliamentary party voting against her. The Tories have no majority of their own and have fallen out with their partner, the DUP. That same government is facing a make-or-break Brexit vote in two weeks’ time. It’s quite possible — some cabinet members believe probable — that it may soon collapse with a new general election called. All Labour needs is to be ready. In parliament, Corbyn’s

It’s the lowest point in British espionage since Pierce Brosnan. A top secret cyber hit squad has been busted trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn through the medium of Twitter. At least that’s the claim from the Sunday Mail, a left-leaning Scottish tabloid, which has exposed the Institute for Statecraft as ‘a secret UK Government-funded infowars unit’.  The Institute is based in a grotty old Victorian mill in Fife and can be distinguished from every other building in Fife in that it’s a mill. It doesn’t look like a place where they knock back shaken-not-stirred martinis in between designing fountain pens that double as rocket launchers but, what with austerity, maybe

On Tuesday, MPs will face something rare: a Commons motion which really does deserve to be described as momentous. It will set Britain’s place in Europe and in the world for years to come. The vote will place an especially heavy burden on Conservative MPs, for they have the power to inflict a hefty defeat on their own government, an administration which has no majority and which governs thanks only to a confidence and supply agreement with the DUP. It is all too easy to see where defeat on Tuesday could lead: to the collapse of the government, a general election and the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street.

What’s wrong with UK financial markets? The global economy is recovering, but British stocks and shares are not keeping pace. The pound has failed to recover from the slide it experienced in the wake of the EU referendum. This is frequently blamed on investors being spooked by Brexit, even more so by the possibility of a no deal. But has anyone actually asked the markets what is spooking them? Look closer and it becomes clear that while Brexit is a problem for some investors, most are much more worried about a far bigger risk, even if they rarely speak about it in public. It is the possibility of a Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn has been clear for a while that Labour will vote against Theresa May’s Brexit deal in the Commons. But it’s worth keeping an eye on the reaction in his party to the development of a second line in the Labour position, which is that the party has a better plan for Brexit. Today the Labour leader urged the Prime Minister to ‘prepare a Plan B’, telling the Commons that ‘there is a sensible deal that could win the support of this House based on a comprehensive customs union and strong single market deal that protects rights at work and environmental safeguards’. This is of course based on the

With Theresa May’s government seemingly on the brink of collapse over the backstop agreement, the Prime Minister can take heart that the Opposition are also experiencing Brexit turbulence. Over the weekend, Jeremy Corbyn set the cat among the pigeons by telling a German newspaper that Brexit cannot be stopped. The Labour leader’s comments dismayed a lot of pro-EU Labour voters. But fret not, in the space of two days Labour’s Brexit position appears to have changed again. Keir Starmer – the shadow Brexit secretary – has just told the Today programme: ‘Brexit can be stopped.’ Expect the position to change again by end of play.

Given relations with her own party, Theresa May will have been far more worried about the second half of Prime Minister’s Questions than the first. On the basis of the backbench questions that were asked, the session went pretty well. Only one Tory MP raised Brexit at all, and that was Jacob Rees-Mogg, who asked for assurances that the European Court of Justice would not get the final say on cases arising from the Brexit withdrawal agreement. May was able to tell the Chamber that this wasn’t true – though the Sun’s report this morning on the matter was pretty strong – and that was all for Brexit. Instead, her

The news that Chuka Umunna is getting paid £451 an hour to chair a new centrist think tank will go down very well indeed with some of his Labour colleagues. It’s not so much that those MPs are just delighted for Umunna, as it is that they can use his £65,000 salary to undermine the chances of the new centrist party that this think tank might be working for. The Labour leadership is naturally worried about the idea of a breakaway centrist party, as it could rob Jeremy Corbyn of his chance to become Prime Minister at the next general election. But the Corbynite attack line against such a party

Oh, what a delicious twist in the internal bickering of the Labour party. Chris Williamson, an MP who has spent the past few months touring the country campaigning for the mandatory reselection of his colleagues – or, as he prefers to brand it, a ‘democracy roadshow’ campaigning for all MPs to go through an ‘open selection’ from their local party every electoral cycle – is being threatened with deselection himself. Williamson finds himself a target after launching into a row with the trade unions at last month’s Labour conference. The unions blocked plans for open selections, and instead went for a change in the party’s rules that makes trigger ballots

As you’d expect on the eve of Tory conference, everyone in the party is offering plenty of advice for Theresa May. Some are tugging the Prime Minister leftwards, while others are fretting that the Conservatives risk abandoning their values. There’s Jacob Rees-Mogg arguing that the Tories need to support the institution of the family, Sam Gyimah worrying that the party has ‘lost our way’ and is both ‘talking business down’ and ‘ignoring the concerns of voters’, Boris Johnson complaining about, well, quite a lot, and Liz Truss saying Labour’s latest PPB ‘does capture the heart of where we need to be as a party’. And it’s not even the real

Labour’s lost centrists weren’t just physically absent at the party’s conference: they were also absent from the debate. Perhaps those who had turned up from the ‘moderate’ wing of the party had expected frequent denunciations of ‘Blairites’ from the main stage, but it didn’t come. In fact, even in the fringes, the moderates came up far less as enemies than the unions and Momentum. This is partly because the Labour Party now feels very comfortable in its Corbynite skin and is more interested in ensuring it can deselect those moderates in the most efficient way rather than attacking them. But the moderates themselves are also quiet because they are on