Jeremy corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn plays it safe in Hastings

With a recent YouGov poll giving Labour a six-point-lead over the Conservatives, it’s little wonder that Jeremy Corbyn is keen to pitch his party as a government-in-waiting. In this vein, the Labour leader has been visiting Tory marginals on weekends. On Saturday, Corbyn was in Hastings & Rye, where the Home Secretary clung onto her seat by the smallest of margins in the snap election: ‘Once a ‘safe Tory seat’, now a marginal, we will win Hastings & Rye at the next election.’ We took our campaign to Amber Rudd’s constituency. Once a “safe Tory seat”, now a marginal, we will win Hastings & Rye at the next election. pic.twitter.com/aIjLrmtDEd

Age need not weary them

Prime Minister May is aged 60, the Labour cult-personality Jeremy Corbyn 68, and putative Lib-Dem leader Sir Vince Cable 74. All too old? The biographer and philosopher Plutarch (2nd century ad) wrote an essay entitled ‘Whether the Older Man Should Serve in Government’, and came to the view that he should — on certain conditions. First, he said, there was no greater honour (and therefore, to an ancient Greek, no greater reward) than serving both the community and the state in a legal and democratic government. If one had been doing that all one’s life, it was disgraceful to abandon it, allowing one’s hard-earned standing to wither away in favour of

Isabel Hardman

Everyone in Labour is pretending to get along. It won’t last

Since Jeremy Corbyn’s surprisingly good election defeat, his MPs who previously plotted to get rid of him have been queuing up to pledge their allegiance to the Labour leader. They have been doing this partly because they did make some rather dire predictions about the impossibility of holding their own seats, or indeed of Labour surviving at all with Corbyn at the helm, and partly because most of them are under pressure from the Corbynites in their local party to apologise and show loyalty from now on. Luciana Berger’s local party is demanding an official apology from her to Corbyn for her previous criticisms of his leadership – something she

A reply to a young Corbynista

Dear Sebastian, Thank you for your reply to my letter. Your words are a reality check. I have spent decades closely following economics and politics in various parts of the world and reading a lot of history. You, as you say, are not particularly political. You have pursued your career, played in a rock band and done really well. But the result of our different paths is that we think about politics in a different way. I have to admit that your way is probably more typical than mine. The thing that strikes me, above all, about your letter is how much weight you put upon the personality of individual

James Forsyth

Corbyn can be beaten – here’s how

The Tory party is suffering from an intellectual crisis of confidence. Before 8 June, its collective view was that Jeremy Corbyn was simply too left-wing to be a serious candidate for the prime ministership in modern Britain. He hadn’t learnt the lessons of Labour’s defeats in the 1980s, and while he might excite a noisy 35 per cent of the electorate, thought the Tories, he’d never be able to put together a general election-winning coalition. Corbyn, however, came closer to victory than any Tory had expected. His Labour party got 40 per cent of the vote and took seats off the Tories. Not one of them had seen it coming and,

Theresa May is slowly steadying the Tory ship

It was better from Theresa May today. She was combative, prickly and forceful at PMQs. The ship is moving on a steadier course. And two toxic enemies have returned to the fold. In the days following the election, both Anna Soubry and Nicky Morgan were ‘helpfully’ suggesting a possible timetable for Mrs May’s departure. Today they both asked supportive questions. And Mrs May read out the answers, tight-lipped. Only those within a yard of her could hear her molars grinding. The Labour leader got a rather glum cheer from his party. He suggested that the PM should fund a pay-rise for nurses because ‘she seems to have found a billion

James Forsyth

May turns back the clock to the Cameron and Osborne era at PMQs

During the general election campaign, Theresa May was strikingly reluctant to defend the Tories’ economic record. But today at PMQs, Theresa May sounded like the man she sacked as Chancellor as soon as she became PM. She defended the Tories economic record with vigour, pointing out how much progress the party had made in reducing the deficit it inherited from Labour and even chucking in a reference to Greece for good measure. It was like going back to 2014. The Tory benches lapped up this return to the old religion. May was also helped by the fact that Jeremy Corbyn didn’t make as much of the money that the Tories

The brave new world of Brexit Britain

Although attributed to Milton Friedman, the assertion that ‘there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch’ had been around long before he took it for the title of an economics book in 1975. It has been used since by many who have never given monetarism a second’s thought. Physicists say the universe is a closed system. No magic source can give it free energy or indeed calories. Mathematicians and computer technicians are as adamant that something cannot come from nothing. Everyone agrees the lunch bill must be paid. Everyone, that is, except British politicians and the voters who endorse them in their millions. If it is true that a

What the papers say: It’s time for the Tories to stop panicking

‘The unexpected appeal of Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto has thrown the Tories into panic’, says the Sun. With Damian Green suggesting a ‘debate’ may be needed over tuition fees and other ministers ‘piling in every day with demands for more spending’, the Conservative party seems to be making the assumption that the best way to tackle the threat of Corbyn is to copy him. This is ‘suicidal’, says the Sun, which argues that not only would it be wrong to try and take on the ‘hard left’ on their own terms, it would also be dangerous for the economy. ‘Labour’s manifesto was built around bribing people’ with cash Britain does not

Owen Smith: If I was Labour leader, I might have got us to win

Oh dear. After Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to a better than expected general election result, the various party factions have done their best to put their differences to one side and come together. The Labour leader’s decision to invite his former leadership rival Owen Smith back into the shadow cabinet was seen by many as a unity gesture. But will Corbyn regret the move? Mr S only asked after witnessing Smith’s interview with Sky’s Sophy Ridge. Asked how he would have fared in the election had Smith been leader, the Labour MP muses that he might have gone one further than Corbyn and ‘got us to win’: SR: If you had

J.K. Rowling’s schizophrenic politics | 1 July 2017

On the face of it, there is nothing complicated about the politics of Harry Potter, who made his first appearance in The Philosopher’s Stone 20 years ago. Like his creator J.K. Rowling, who once gave £1 million to the Labour party, he is a left-wing paternalist in the Bloomsbury tradition — the love child of John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf. He feels a protective duty towards the common man (‘muggles’ in the lexicon of the novels) and a loathing for suburban, lower-middle-class Tories like the Dursleys, his Daily Mail-reading foster parents. The arch-villain of the saga is Voldemort, a charismatic Übermensch who believes in purity and strength and in

Jeremy Corbyn should give Nigel Farage a job

Jeremy Corbyn is ‘almost a proper chap’, says Nigel Farage, lauding the Labour leader for sacking frontbenchers who voted for a Commons motion seeking to keep Britain in the Single Market. That’s a policy that, one suspects, quite a few recent middle-class metropolitan converts to Corbynism would agree with. Perhaps Mr Farage’s praise will help them see that JC isn’t quite the prophet of pro-European liberalism some of his admirers have somehow managed to imagine him as.  The Farage praise will doubtless appall many Corbynistas, who see him as the antichrist, the nasty, xenophobic antithesis of their cuddly, inclusive and not-at-all anti-Semitic messiah. It shouldn’t, though, since Jeremy and Nigel have always had a

Diary – 29 June 2017

To Fortnum & Mason last week on the hottest evening of the year to present the Desmond Elliott Prize for this year’s best first novel, which I helped judge. I had to acknowledge the weather in my speech: I was perspiring, ahem, liberally. Sweating like a… what? The traditional comparator is now definitely verboten. Like Keith Vaz before a select committee? Like Boris in an Eddie Mair interview? Too niche. I went for ‘like a British Brexit negotiator’ and got a gratifying laugh. They won’t be laughing two years from now. We had two superb runners-up in Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You and Kit de Waal’s My Name Is

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 29 June 2017

At Guildhall on Tuesday, the Centre for Policy Studies held its Margaret Thatcher Conference on Security. Its title is an implied reproach to the way security is seen by current governments. You couldn’t have a Barack Obama Conference on Security, or a Donald Trump one, because neither cares about the subject. You could, I suppose, have a Theresa May Conference about Security, but that would have nothing to say about international institutions and alliances, the values of democracy, totalitarian ideology, and the needs of global defence. It would concern itself with second-order subjects like the surveillance of terrorist suspects and the state of deportation law. Many have complained that the

Barometer | 29 June 2017

Sharon and Tracy MP Darren Jones, the new Labour MP for Bristol North West, says he is proud to be the first person called Darren ever to be elected to Parliament. Other MPs whose first names have been subject to snobbish derision from some quarters: Gary Streeter CON Gavin Newlands SNP Gavin Robinson DUP Gavin Williamson CON Keith Simpson CON Kevan Jones LAB Sir Kevin Barron LAB Kevin Foster CON Kevin Hollinrake CON Lee Rowley CON Michelle Donelan CON Michelle Gildernew SINN FEIN Sharon Hodgson LAB Tracy Brabin LAB Tracey Crouch CON Proletariyurts Jeremy Corbyn told a Glastonbury crowd, ‘Nothing was given from above by the elites and the powerful.

Portrait of the week | 29 June 2017

Home In preparation for the vote on the Queen’s Speech, the Government, after weeks of negotiations, bought the support of the Democratic Unionist Party in the House of Commons by promising to spend a billion or two pounds in Northern Ireland on broadband and other good things. In reply to expostulations from the Opposition, Nigel Dodds, the parliamentary leader of the DUP, told the Commons: ‘We might publish all the correspondence and conversations we had in 2010 with Labour front-benchers, and in 2015 with Labour front-benchers, and indeed also the Scottish National party, because some of the faux outrage we have heard is hypocrisy.’ Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party,

Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: The Corbyn delusion

On this week’s bumper episode we discuss the cult of Corbyn, sharia courts, the golden age of gossip, and orchid delirium. First: in this week’s magazine Rod Liddle examines the phenomenon that is Jeremy Corbyn, and describes how he has brought Labour voters together in a ‘bizarre coalition’. To discuss this subject, we were joined by Hugo Rifkind, who writes his column this week on witnessing Jeremy Corbyn at Glastonbury, and Ellie Mae O’Hagan, a Corbyn supporting journalist. As Hugo writes: “Honestly, the whole Corbyn thing still does my head in. I understand what his adoring fans believe he represents, but I’m buggered if I can figure out why they think he represents it.

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Is it time for a tax hike?

The 48 per cent have spoken – and they want higher taxes, according to the British Social Attitudes survey. In the wake of a general election in which Labour won support based on a manifesto of free spending, is it time for a rethink on tax? And should we wave goodbye to the era of austerity? Here’s what today’s newspapers make of the case for a tax hike: We are ‘at a fiscal crossroads’, says the Daily Telegraph. During their dismal election campaign, the Tories ‘failed to make the case for living within our means’ and the ‘public appetite for prudence’ appears to be waning. Yet for all the cheer from