Jeremy corbyn

‘Wherever Sir Stafford Cripps has tried to increase wealth and happiness,’ wrote the Conservative Scottish journalist Colm Brogan, ‘grass never grows again.’ But Roundup has its uses. When Brogan made this comment, Sir Stafford was Britain’s postwar ‘austerity’ chancellor of the exchequer, a post he held from 1947 to 1950. Dry as dust, Cripps had rejoined the Labour party only two years previously, having served as ambassador in Moscow, then in Churchill’s war cabinet. A leading voice on the hard left, he had been expelled from Labour for his advocacy of co-operation with communists in 1939, but his judgment had proved shrewd. Hard-edged, essentially pragmatic, but fiercely moral and always

Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to Labour conference showed how confident the Labour leader is now. He knew his way around the text enough to be able to make little spontaneous jokes, rather than reading the ‘strong message here’ instruction from the autocue, as he did in his 2015 address. He varied his pitch, his pace and his tone. None of these things have been guaranteed with Corbyn until now. The speech itself was well-written and structured, starting with a lengthy but effective values-based section where Corbyn praised the membership and attacked the press, which warmed up those in the hall no end. Not that the members needed warming up. They were,

Jeremy Corbyn could be subject to a trigger ballot designed for the deselection of MPs, under plans discussed tonight by members of one of his most supportive party groups. The Labour Representation Committee, from which both Corbyn and John McDonnell hail, met this evening to discuss how to get its way when it comes to party democracy. Save for when McDonnell popped in to thank the LRC for continuing to organise when it looked as though the Left would never win a foothold in the party, the mood was one of frustration. Members were largely cheerful yet also irritated that plans for ‘open selections’ – more commonly known as mandatory

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

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’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

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

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

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