Labour party

I interview Angela Rayner, the Shadow Education Secretary, for the forthcoming edition of The Spectator. I met her before Christmas and was fascinated by the way she explains her politics in terms of her biography. She tells me how much she owes to a welfare state that was there for her, in a way that it wasn’t for her mum, who left school aged 12. She worked her way up, and says a few Tories ask her why she isn’t a Conservative. Simple, she says: Labour is the party of the helping hand, and the Tories are not very sympathetic to single parents like her. The ones who’ve made it:

Diet nannies will spend Christmas telling us ‘you are what you eat’ but in the House of Commons ‘you are where you sit’. Are you a Tory Whips’ stooge or a Dominic Grieve groupie aching to block Brexit, a braw new blue Scot or an English provincial plodder without hope of advancement? Parliament-watchers discern plenty about your political leanings from where you park your posterior. Each side of the Commons chamber has five green-leather benches that are divided by a gangway. On the government side of the chamber, all MPs are Conservatives except for a couple who have had the Whip withdrawn. On the opposition side, the lower four benches

Tory MPs are now sufficiently worried about the changes to the way that refuges for domestic abuse victims are funded that they have started to speak out publicly. This morning, in a Westminster Hall debate, three Conservative backbenchers told the Communities and Local Government minister Marcus Jones that the government ‘must intervene’ to stop refuges closing as a result of these funding changes. Sutton and Cheam MP Paul Scully, Bolton West MP Chris Green, and Ochil and South Perthshire MP Luke Graham all expressed concerns about the new funding model. Both Scully and Graham described how members of their own families had been victims of domestic violence. Scully paid tribute

Despite the government reaching its long-awaited milestone of ’sufficient progress’ in the Brexit talks last week, certain key figures on both sides of the debate seem intent on muddying the waters as much as possible. Mr Steerpike reports on David Davis’s latest efforts on that front, while Labour MPs are trying to understand the implications of Keir Starmer’s latest utterances on their party’s Brexit position. The Shadow Brexit Secretary appeared to walk into a trap laid by Andrew Marr yesterday, in which the presenter asked him reasonably innocent questions about Labour’s demand for a ‘single market variant’ and the need for a new treaty enshrining the full access to and

John McDonnell looks exhausted, slumped in his parliamentary office chair. Nobody said the revolution would be easy. Do he and Jeremy Corbyn have any catchphrases, I ask, to gee themselves up when battered by the right-wing press, the pundits or the moderates in their own party? ‘This will send the Daily Mail wild, OK,’ he says. ‘It’s Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” ‘No matter how bad it gets, determination is what you need. We’re doing something we’ve been working for for 30, 40 years of our lives. And this opportunity has come. We didn’t expect it. But now it’s come we’re making the most of it.’

Christmas is meant to be the season of goodwill. Alas, no-one at Labour HQ appears to have got the memo. The Labour party have released their Christmas cards – with a distinct Conservative vibe this year. Corbyn’s party has used the festive opportunity to make fun of Theresa May’s conference speech where the letters fell from the board behind her – meaning the slogan of ‘building a country that works for everyone’ soon became confused. Yours for a mere £8…

John McDonnell has busied himself today on the airwaves setting out Labour’s five key demands for the budget. His call for an end to austerity would mean pausing the roll-out of Universal Credit, ditching the public sector pay cap, more money into infrastructure, health, education, and local government along with a large-scale house-building programme. All very well. Only the shadow chancellor’s Today programme interview took a turn for the worse when McDonnell tried to explain how his party would fund this. He appeared to concede this would mean borrowing – along with a mega-crackdown on tax avoidance and changes to corporation tax. But the most telling point in the interview came when he was

This week, there was a rare sight for the post snap-election political landscape: two Labour MPs having a barney. On the first day of the Committee Stage of the EU Withdrawal Bill, Frank Field and Hilary Benn became engaged in an argument after Field, a ‘reluctant Brexiteer’, used a house analogy to argue in favour of the government amendment calling for the date of Britain’s departure from the EU in the bill. He said he had never bought a house ‘without having in the contract the date when it’s mine’. Benn, the son of Tony Benn, hit back by saying the analogy was lacking as ‘nobody commits to a date to

I didn’t want to write this piece. I supposed I always hoped that Labour would come back to its roots; back to being a broad-church drawn from diverse backgrounds and cultures united in solidarity with workers and the poor, standing up for free speech and the weakest, most vulnerable in society. But as time has passed the drumbeat of intolerance has only grown louder. Labour used to be a party where conscience and difference were respected. A party where Jim Dobbin (of fond memory) and Harriet Harman could link arms against economic injustice while being diametrically opposed on matters of social policy. It is a sad irony that, while so

Oh dear. Since Labour’s surprisingly good defeat in the snap election, the hard left has managed to tighten its grip on the party. As last month’s conference proved, Jeremy Corbyn’s party is intent on socialism for the 21st century. But behind the scenes there are still battles being fought between the moderates and the Corbynistas. On Wednesday night, elections took place for the Labour Party Irish Society executive. Ahead of the event, Corbynistas plotted to try and elect some true believers to the executive in order to return it to ‘its radical roots’, with Squawkbox – the Corbynista website – running an article urging like-minded activists to help transform the society into

How did Jared O’Mara end up in Parliament, and will he remain there for much longer? Today he was suspended from the Labour whip, and an investigation was launched into the allegations about his online posts and conversations, including an allegation that he used misogynistic and transphobic language to a constituent this year. The suspension happened just before Prime Minister’s Questions, and after the session, Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman said the party had acted today because the latest claims, which O’Mara disputes, related to more recent behaviour. The curious thing is that while some of O’Mara’s colleagues say they had known about the allegations for weeks – as well as the

The Women and Equalities Select Committee is a member down today after one of its male intake was forced to resign on Monday over his formerly misogynistic behaviour. However, to the surprise of some feminists, it’s not Philip Davies, the man many have spent the past year calling a misogynist, but Labour’s Jared O’Mara. The MP for Sheffield Hallam’s equality credentials have been cast into doubt after Guido uncovered a series of online messages from him dating back ten years or so. They include calling gay people ‘fudge packers’ and ‘poofters’, asking Girls Aloud for an orgy (on the condition the blonde member wasn’t in the picture), and claiming fat women don’t

With the Labour party currently leading in the polls, it’s easy to think that the party’s problem with anti-Semitism must have been resolved. However, Andrew Neil was on hand this week to remind the public that this is not the case. In the keynote speech at the Holocaust Education Trust dinner in London, Neil launched an attack on the left for getting away with it ‘in the way that the anti-Semitism of the far right is not allowed to get away with it’: ‘At the Labour Conference, in a fringe meeting, but official enough to be on the official programme of the Labour Party Conference, one person – a chair

For George Osborne, it was the 5:2 diet that was credited for sculpting his political ambitions. His decision to shed the pounds was taken as a sign by the commentariat that he had serious leadership ambitions. So, Mr S was curious to hear that Labour’s Tom Watson is now on a mission to lose weight. Writing in his newsletter, Labour’s deputy leader says he is on a diet – or a ‘lifestyle change’, if you’d prefer: ‘Did I tell you I’m on a diet? I know you’re not supposed to call them that anymore, to be on message they have to be a ‘lifestyle change. Using rudimentary ‘nudge theory’ every time

If Labour’s party conference in Brighton suggested the party was in a celebratory mood, that sense of triumphalism has been vindicated by the shambolic gathering of Conservatives in Manchester. The comparison between the two parties has been starker than ever: the buoyant Corbynistas laying out Marxism to unwavering applause, whilst bickering Conservatives can’t even sell their policies to a paying audience. If the Labour party looked in rude health last Wednesday, they look an even more attractive proposition after the Maybot suffered an all too human malfunction during her headline address yesterday. A circular that went out to Labour party members after the Prime Minister’s speech was clearly drafted before