Jeremy corbyn

Amid Labour’s jubilation over the Supreme Court decision yesterday it would have been easy to miss Jeremy Corbyn’s latest attack on the market economy. But it shouldn’t go unremarked because what Corbyn proposed would seriously damage the pharmaceuticals industry – either meaning that taxpayers would have to bear the enormous costs of developing drugs, or would mean fewer drugs being developed at all. Corbyn cited the case of nine year old cystic fibrosis sufferer Luis Walker, who is being denied the medicine, Orkambi, because the drugs manufacturer is refusing to sell it to the NHS at an affordable cost. Labour, he said, would end the outrage of drugs companies which put

Jeremy Corbyn has just delivered one of his better party conference speeches. It wasn’t just because it was much shorter than the average political address, but also because it made clear that Labour knows what it wants to do when it gets into power. There were a lot of policies in there. Some had popped up in other speeches this week, like the plan for free personal care. Others were new and very significant indeed, like the plan to take on pharmaceutical companies. This is Labour’s ‘Medicines for Many’ programme which will make government funding for medical research conditional on the drugs being offered at an affordable price to the

Once again, question marks surround Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. This is not new. While I was at 10 Downing Street, with the small but significant possibility of a sudden Corbyn departure, we spent some time exploring the electoral impact of who might come next. To work out who might put up the best fight and how best to counter them, I discussed potential candidates in focus groups, played videos to voters, and polled frontbenchers’ perceived attributes. The most consistently effective potential leader? Shadow chancellor, John McDonnell.  This may seem surprising – and as a Conservative it was a painful discovery. But he ‘focus grouped’ remarkably well. Voters described him as ‘strong’, that he ‘knows what he is doing’ and that he understands the economy. When I played interview footage, including to those who do

Labour was supposed to be having only one big row this week at conference – on Brexit. Instead, it’s ended up having two: one about how the party will campaign on Britain’s future relationship with Europe and the second on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Today has not seen a good recovery from the Labour leader after yesterday’s attempt to oust Tom Watson. Corbyn appeared to save the day by refusing to allow the motion to go ahead at the NEC meeting, but is much wounded by the fact that the putsch was attempted at all. That there are suspicions one of his own aides, Karie Murphy, was part of this plot,

Labour has yet again shown it doesn’t care about its Jewish members. Jeremy Corbyn said earlier this year that “there is no place for anti-Semitism or any form of racism in the Labour party”. But not for the first time – and not for the last – Jews who still belong to the party have been sidelined.  The latest cause for disquiet is the decision yesterday by the party’s National Executive Committee. Not content with scrapping the party’s student wing ahead of next week’s gathering in Brighton, the NEC has now agreed new rules concerning the handling of allegations of anti-Semitism and disciplinary procedures for expelling members. Yet it has done so

Boris Johnson’s opponents love to accuse him of using the ‘Trump playbook’. Some on the left have become so obsessed with this comparison that they’ve even demanded that the Prime Minister be impeached. But over the past few weeks, Johnson’s behaviour has borne a far closer resemblance to a man he claims to look down on: Jeremy Corbyn. Both men stand on an anti-politics, anti-establishment platform. When Corbyn became leader he promised a ‘kinder, gentler politics’, and eschewed many of the traditions of the Commons. His advisers still believe that he is going to be the man-of-the-people candidate in the looming election, arguing that attacks from the media only bolster

Boris Johnson’s best route to a majority is turning the election into a question of whether you want him or Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister, I say in The Sun this morning. Polling shows that 43% of voters regard a Corbyn premiership as the worst outcome to the current crisis, compared to 35% for no deal. If Boris Johnson can get the vast majority of that 43% to vote Tory, then he’ll get the majority he so desperately needs. This desire to frame the election as a choice between Boris Johnson and Theresa May means that he is taking a very different approach to TV debates than Theresa May did.