Jeremy corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn’s speech today in which he confirmed that a Labour government would keep Britain in a Customs Union with the EU was about so much more than trade. It was about the future of the Labour party itself. It sent a clear message about what, and more importantly who, Labour is for these days. It confirmed that Labour has finally made its choice between which of its two, quite conflictual support bases it will represent in public life: the better-off ones, the middle-class ones, the Southern ones. This is what Labour’s cosying up to the idea of a Customs Union — which is a betrayal of Brexit, whatever Labourites

The Labour shadow cabinet have been out in full force on the airwaves this morning dropping heavy hints that Jeremy Corbyn will use a speech tomorrow to announce that his party backs the UK remaining in ‘a’ customs union  post-Brexit – which would mean the UK would be unable to strike its own free trade deals. Speaking on the Andrew Marr show, the shadow Brexit secretary said Labour’s front bench was ‘unanimous’ in its backing for striking a new deal with the EU after Brexit that would see the UK leave the customs union but then negotiate a treaty that will ‘do the work of the customs union’. Only Corbyn

Oh dear. When the Sun reported this month that Jeremy Corbyn met with a Czech spy – posing as a diplomat – during the cold war, the story appeared to raise serious questions over the Labour leader’s judgment. A spokesman for the Labour leader admitted he had met a diplomat, but said Corbyn had never knowingly talked to a spy. However, things took a turn for the obscure when former Czech intelligence officer Jan Sarkocy claimed that he met Corbyn and recruited him as an intelligence asset – a claim Labour dismissed as a ‘ridiculous smear’. This denial wasn’t enough to stop some Tories going on the offensive. Tory vice-chair

It’s fair to say that the Conservatives’ attempts to use the allegations about Jeremy Corbyn’s links with a Czechoslovakian spy have had mixed results. The high point came when Theresa May managed to produce a joke about blank cheques and Czechs at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, and everything else has been competing to be the low point, from Steve Baker’s deeply awful interview on the Daily Politics, to Ben Bradley receiving a letter from Corbyn’s lawyers. Perhaps there could have been a slightly less ham-fisted way of engaging with the story. Or perhaps it would be better for the Tory party’s dignity, if nothing else, if it left these

Bit of a rum PMQs today. Jeremy Corbyn, who has always loathed the EU and now pretends to admire it, asked May about Brexit. May, who has always admired the EU and now pretends to loathe it, fobbed him off with glib sound-bites. ‘Take back control of our borders,’ ‘protect workers’ rights,’ and so on. Corbyn asked a long question about the Government’s ‘desired outcome’. He got a four-word answer: ‘A bespoke economic partnership.’ Mr Speaker decided that he should be the star-turn today. Perhaps he sought to wow a posse of French MPs who were witnessing the bun-fight from the gallery. Quelling an early outbreak of shouting, the Speaker

What a convenient inconvenience the row about Jeremy Corbyn’s links with a Czechoslovakian agent is for the Labour leader. While the allegations that he was an informant during the Cold War may well be the ‘nonsense’ that he claims they are (they certainly don’t seem to correlate with anything released at the end of that period), the way a number of newspapers have covered them has given him an opportunity to launch an attack on the press. In what tabloids might term a ‘bizarre video rant’, Corbyn said the newspapers had ‘gone a bit James Bond’ with these ‘smears’, before warning the ‘media barons’ that ‘change is coming’. Some of

There are two competing theories about how the Soviet Union collapsed. One holds that Ronald Reagan’s moral leadership against communism and bolstering of US defences weakened Moscow’s will and buried them economically. The other contends that Mikhail Gorbachev’s domestic reforms and wise diplomacy brought down the Iron Curtain in spite of the cowboy in the White House. We can now add a third hypothesis: Jeremy Corbyn did it. If the claims of a former Czechoslovakian agent are to be believed, the Labour leader was a paid informant for the secret police. That would certainly explain the devastating collapse of state socialism. Even the mighty Warsaw Pact could not have withstood the

Although it’s the Conservatives nowadays who are best known for in-fighting, this weekend we were offered a reminder of the divisions in Labour. At a meeting of the National Policy Forum (NPF), a row broke out between the Momentum contingent and the moderates. The subject of the row was – once again – Ann Black, the veteran activist who was ousted as chair of the Disputes Panel last month (and replaced with Corbyn favourite Christine Shawcroft) after the Corbynistas won a majority on the National Executive Committee. Black was expected to defeat union representative Andi Fox to be elected as chair of the policy forum, which sets Labour policy for future

Jeremy Corbyn began the 2017 election campaign 20 points behind the Conservatives in the polls; he ended it just two per cent behind in the actual vote. The remarkable turnaround has been attributed by many to his effective use of social media, which allowed him to broadcast his message to people whom traditional campaigning fails to reach, people who in some cases may never have voted before. Social media is one aspect of how technology is changing politics – an issue debated at a recent Spectator lunch, in association with Michael Tobin OBE and involving a notable collection of people from the worlds of politics and technology. Do the unexpected

The case of Jeremy Corbyn and the Czechoslovakian diplomat has taken another turn today. The officer who met Corbyn has alleged that Corbyn took money from them and was a paid informant. The Labour leader’s office has vigorously denied the charge, citing the director of the Czech security force archive who has said that their records don’t back up this version of events. There’s clearly a contradiction between the accounts of Corbyn and the Czechoslovakian diplomat—and the Labour leader is entitled to the presumption of innocence on this point. Corbyn, though, would undoubtedly be the most anti-Western figure ever to become Britain’s Prime Minister. His record show that he has