John mcdonnell

With Diane Abbott recently given the nickname Madame Mao by her colleagues over her behaviour since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour leader, Mr S had thought that Corbyn’s team would be at pains to distance themselves from the Chinese Communist revolutionary. Yet think again, as not only did John McDonnell bring up Chairman Mao today during the today’s Spending Review announcement, he also decided to quote the communist leader at length. McDonnell attempted to make a joke about Mao in response to Osborne’s questionable business relationship with China — the shadow chancellor said that he had brought Osborne a gift of Mao’s Little Red Book: ‘Let’s quote from Mao — rarely done in this

Jeremy Corbyn’s response to the Paris terrorist attacks has been heavily criticised by the media and it appears the public have similarly negative views. According to a new ComRes poll from the Sunday Mirror/Independent on Sunday, the Labour leader’s net favourability rating has dropped to –28 — a ten point decrease since the last ComRes poll in mid-September. Notably, 53 per cent of Labour voters view Corbyn favourably, compared to 85 per cent of Conservatives for David Cameron. While George Osborne has a -19 net approval rating and John McDonnell -12, the only politician with a worse score than Corbyn is Vladimir Putin on -41. There is also bad news for

The far left controls the Labour leadership because the centre left did not take it seriously until it was too late. For a generation indeed, Labour and much of the rest of liberal-left Britain has lived with the comforting delusion that there was no far left to fight. The left, on this reading, was one family. It may have had its troublesome teenagers. Their youthful high spirits may have made the little scallywags ‘go too far’ on occasion. But everyone was still in one family, still on the same side. The old notion that the far left was the centre left’s enemy died away as the Labour party gave up

There are two faces to Corbynism. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are doing everything they can at the moment to appear reasonable, not radical, but behind the scenes they are starting to stuff their offices with figures from the hard left. Look at their hiring of advisers such as Andrew Fisher and former Guardian columnist Seumus Milne. This week, two other names are being mooted as new advisers that again show where Corbyn and McDonnell really want to take the party. The first is Karie Murphy, one of the central figures in the Falkirk scandal. As the FT’s Jim Pickard reports, the close ally of Len McCluskey is being lined up to be Corbyn’s political adviser

George Osborne and John McDonnell went head-to-head at Treasury Questions today and one topic predictably dominated: tax credits. There was a charged atmosphere in the Commons as the shadow chancellor explained ‘the Chancellor has a choice before him’ and outlined his proposal for reversing the planned cuts to tax credits. The plan differs somewhat from Osborne’s: ‘He can push on with the tax giveaways to multinational corporations. He can press on with tax cuts to the wealthiest few in inheritance tax that he announced in his summer budgets. Or he can reverse those tax breaks for the few and instead go for a less excessive surplus target in 2019-20 and be in

John McDonnell has accused me of telling an untruth. Yes, I know, worse things have happened. But still. His accusation refers to the closure of the Redcar SSI steel plant. Mr McDonnell claimed that a visit to the area, where he met with tearful workers, prompted him to do a u-turn on supporting the Conservative plan to balance to budget. I said on Question Time last week and again in The Sunday Times this Sunday that this was utter cant. A charge I will cheerfully repeat now. It is utter cant, McDonnell. The shadow chancellor made his commitment to abide by Osborne’s budget surplus proposal at the Labour conference on 28

The Labour leadership has abandoned plans to effectively neuter the party’s whips office after realising it is quite useful, Coffee House has learned. I understand that John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn had considered making the whips’ office more of an administrative entity which didn’t try to herd MPs into the right lobby. There had also been plans afoot to get rid of Rosie Winterton, the party’s chief whip, as she had initially been identified as someone hostile to a Corbyn leadership who represented the old way of doing things. But the vote on the fiscal charter this week was much less troublesome than the Labour leadership had anticipated, thanks to

Over 20 Labour MPs rebelled against their party whip and abstained on the government’s fiscal charter this evening. The Labour party claimed there were 20 abstentions, but the Tories claimed the number was closer to 28. This is the full list of abstentions which didn’t include authorised absences (some of whom would have been would-be rebels who were encouraged to find a speech to make or ailing relative to visit in another part of the country at the last minute) from the Labour whips office: ​​​​Fiona Mactaggart Rushanara Ali ​​​Ian Austin Ben Bradshaw Adrian Bailey Shabana Mahmood Ann Coffey ​​​​Andrew Smith Simon Danczuk Jamie Reed Chris Evans ​​​​Graham Stringer ​​​​Frank Field ​​​Gisela

John McDonnell has tried to explain why he U-turned on the fiscal charter this afternoon, saying that he has only ‘changed my mind on the parliamentary tactics’, not the principles of the matter. He told Sky News: ‘I have changed my mind, but I haven’t changed my mind on the principles of what the charter is standing for which is we need to tackle the deficit and we will tackle the deficit. Labour will tackle the deficit – we are not deficit deniers, I haven’t changed my mind on that. ‘But I have changed my mind on the parliamentary tactics. Originally what I said to people was look that charter

John McDonnell has just made his first U-turn as Shadow Chancellor, announcing that Labour will vote against the fiscal charter on Wednesday – having previously told the Guardian that it would support it. Labour’s support for the charter was previously to show that it wants ‘to balance the books, we do want to live within our means and we will tackle the deficit’, but in a letter today to MPs, McDonnell says: ‘I believe that we need to underline our position as an anti-austerity party by voting against the charter on Wednesday.’ Labour will publish its own statement on budget responsibility before the debate. The new politics does look rather

Plenty has been written about the hatred some on the left feel towards their ‘enemies’, something on display at the moment in Manchester, with journalists being called ‘Tory scum’ for covering a party conference. I’ve bored for Britain on the subject of political hatred of the left, but less has been written about how self-defeating it is. For example, one of the best things that could happen to the Tories is for the Labour faithful to convince themselves that Corbyn was defeated only because of a biased, Tory-dominated press. This means that, rather than brutally analysing their weaknesses after Corbyn goes, they’re more likely to retreat into their own comfort

The Conservatives are wrapped in the quiet cocoon of Manchester Central today and the conference has a subdued vibe — many activists might be staying away until the anti-austerity protests are over. But the halls are packed out with the exhibitors, shops and merchandise you’d expect for a party that has won its first majority in 23 years and is in celebratory mode. Here are some of the most Tory things in Manchester (click on the pictures to enlarge). One of the more interesting additions to the exhibition hall this year is the Conservative Party Archive. The Tories now have a whole stand dedicated to the party’s vast archives at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. As

There’s a hard, hard mood out there among the public and I don’t think our newspapers get it at all. Could it be that the general populace are now more cynical than their journalists? At Tim Farron’s closing speech to his Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth last week, I sat through nearly an hour of one of the biggest cartloads of sanctimonious tosh it’s been my fate to endure in decades. And who do you suppose was lapping this up as avidly as any misty-eyed Lib Dem conference-goer? The hardened hacks, the sketchwriters, analysts and reporters. The press are old-fashioned: they love this emotional stuff. But the 21st-century public have