Jeremy corbyn

With rumours flying around the Commons that if elected, Labour leadership hopeful Jeremy Corbyn would appoint a Shadow Peace Secretary in the place of a Shadow Defence Secretary, Mr S is also looking forward to hearing Corbyn’s plans to reform judicial punishment. However, Mr S is happy to place a bet on his approach not being as radical as a crime policy Tony Blair heaped praise on while in power. In today’s Times, Blair’s former chief speechwriter Philip Collins reveals what happened when he put forward a paper which suggested Blair take a less liberal approach when it came to dealing with crime: ‘The Blair government was, to my mind, daftly authoritarian

Despite frequent claims from both sides of the political spectrum that Labour leadership hopeful Jeremy Corbyn is ‘unelectable’, he has so far managed to win the endorsement of Unite as well as the highest number of nominations from constituency Labour parties. Could he now be on his way to an endorsement from the Guardian? Steerpike only asks after the Labour leadership hopeful was the guest of honour at today’s news conference at the paper. While it was Andy Burnham’s turn last week to grace the newsroom, Mr S is assured that Corbyn was the more popular of the two guests. In fact, such fan-mania hasn’t been witnessed since Hollywood star Benedict Cumberbatch paid the paper a visit:

The four Labour leadership contenders took part in another televised hustings today, this time chaired by Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics. With just over 50 days left of this contest, the candidates are now more comfortable in each other’s company and seem much happier to attack each other. Although no one spectacularly won or failed, a few moments did provide some insight into the current state of the race. Here are five key points from today’s hustings. 1. Corbyn is comfortable running as the far left candidate. The rise of Corbynmania has overlooked that he has no frontbench experience and little idea of how to do serious politics. His appearance on the Sunday

Oh dear. According to a recent poll Jeremy Corbyn could win the Labour leadership. This news has brought joy to left-wing activists and Tories alike, though granted this is for two very different reasons. A lot of the swing towards Corbyn has been attributed to the #ToriesForCorbyn campaign, which has seen Conservatives sign up as supporters of the Labour party in an attempt to sabotage the party’s leadership election. With more than two thirds of Labour’s new recruits reportedly supporting Corbyn, the Telegraph have tried to boost the leader hopeful’s chances even further by publishing a step-by-step guide on how to sign up and ‘condemn Labour to years in the political wilderness’. Although

Labour is in an almighty mess at the moment. Those involved in the leadership campaigns are surprised by how the mood in the party has changed from quite open acceptance of a need to change in the days after the election defeat to angry dissent when change is suggested, as evidenced by the reaction to Harriet Harman’s welfare policies this week. The party isn’t quite having a row about what it should stand for at the next election, preferring instead to argue about how it does opposition for the next eight weeks, most of which are in Parliamentary recess. Here are the various options for what Labour does, both in

It is often said that British ambition and influence in the world are on the wane. But there can be few greater demonstrations of this than our country’s lack of attention to one of the biggest issues of our time. I am in Washington at the moment, and have been admiring how intensely the Vienna negotiations have been on the political and news agendas here. But in Britain? Obviously the British Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, has been involved in the P5+1 talks. But it would have been easy to miss the fact. There has been no meaningful criticisms from within the Conservative party to the deal which Philip Hammond has

Jeremy Corbyn is finally receiving the scrutiny he deserves. On Channel 4 News this evening, the hard-left Labour leader hopeful was quizzed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy on comments about engaging with ‘friends’  in Hamas and Hezbollah over the Middle East conflict. Corbyn refused to apologise for using the word ‘friends’ and snapped several times at Guru-Murthy for not letting him finish a long-winded answer: ‘I’m saying that people I talk to, I use it in a collective way, saying our friends are prepared to talk. ‘Does it mean I agree with Hamas and what it does? No. Does it mean I agree with Hezbollah and what they do? No. What it means is that

Throughout his career, Andy Burnham has been keen to point out that he is not one of the ‘metropolitan elite’. The Labour leadership hopeful says that ‘for too long there has been a sense of a metropolitan elite at the top of the Labour party’. So Mr S was curious to learn the venue for a talk he is giving next week. Burnham will appear at the Soho House private members’ club on Tuesday to read ‘a short story about equality and justice’. While Steerpike is sure Burnham’s words will be sincere, he worries that the venue – which is popular with Hugh Grant, Madonna and Kirsty Young – may distract from the message. To

The People’s Assembly, the self-appointed left-wing pressure group behind the recent anti-austerity demonstrations, portrays itself as the voice of the masses struggling under oppressive Tory rule. It claims that no fewer than 250,000 demonstrators went to its rally in central London last month (a figure dutifully regurgitated by broadcasters). But photographs of the event in London indicate no more than 25,000 attended. The bogusness does not stop there. Despite its demotic name, the People’s Assembly is no spontaneous uprising of the angry British public. On the contrary, the organisation, which counts the comedian Russell Brand and the Guardian columnist Owen Jones among its noisiest advocates, is bankrolled by the trade

Never let it be said that Jeremy Corbyn is the most anti-business of the four Labour leadership candidates. The left-wing politician appeared to endorse BT today on Twitter: So, is this corporate sponsorship for his campaign, a tech-savvy leadership pledge or simply the result of a Twitter hack? Given that he has since deleted the tweet, Mr S suspects the latter.

There’s a lot to admire about Jeremy Corbyn. For one, you can’t fault his conviction. While his entire party falls over itself to adopt as many Tory policies as possible, Corbyn remains a stalwart voice of the left. The ideological antithesis of Kendall and the Blairites, Corbyn appears to want to finish the job that Ed Miliband started: bringing Labour back to the left. It’s no wonder, then, that Toby Young and a cadre of other Conservatives want to see Corbyn win. After all, Miliband led Labour to its worst defeat since 1983; he achieved the seemingly insurmountable by appealing to the electorate less than Gordon Brown. To witness that

Tonight’s Newsnight debate will see the four Labour leadership hopefuls — Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Jeremy Corbyn — head to Nuneaton in a bid to boost their campaigns. Given that this week, Kendall’s supporters have been dubbed the ‘New Labour Taliban‘ by a Labour source, relations are likely to be strained between the four. However, Kendall can at least take heart that she is on safe ground in Nuneaton, a seat which Labour failed to win the election. The party’s candidate in the election, Vicky Fowler is backing Kendall. She says that after the failure of Labour to win the seat became the ‘point at which the scale of Labour’s defeat across