Jeremy corbyn

Lord Ashcroft’s reports from his election focus groups give a flavour of attitudes. All group members were asked to name a fictional character whom each party leader most resembles. One suggested Worzel Gummidge, the scarecrow, for Jeremy Corbyn. That was what everyone called Michael Foot in 1983. I wonder if the group member was old enough to remember this, or whether the comparison just swam naturally into her mind. This is an extract from Charles Moore's Notes. The full article is available tomorrow.

One of the complaints that allies of Jeremy Corbyn often issue is that his critics - whether in his own party, the media, the Tory party or the general electorate - tend to focus on the man, not his policies. His policies are, those allies argue, actually very popular with voters -- when you test them without mentioning either Labour or Jeremy Corbyn. Which seems to be proving rather difficult in this election. There are two problems with this. The first is that voters don’t give a fig about your wonderful policies if they don’t trust your party’s leader to be competent enough to enact them. Every Labour MP I have spoken to across the country says that the number one issue on the doorstep is Jeremy Corbyn.

Jeremy Corbyn wants to put up income tax only for people who earn more than £80,000 a year, he says. Anyone below that figure is safe. This reminds me of John Smith’s ‘shadow Budget’ in the 1992 general election. Smith said that the top rate of income tax would rise to 50 per cent for everyone earning more than £36,375 a year (which would be just under £72,000 today). Most people earned much less than the sum chosen, but voters decided they did not like such a clear intention to damage the higher earnings they hoped they might one day achieve. The shadow Budget was said to have lost Labour the election. Perhaps bearing this in mind, Mr Corbyn has so far avoided a specific percentage and pitched the taxable sum a little higher, but the signal is similar.

Nothing better sums up middle-class millennials’ sense of entitlement than their demand that they be paid for interning. ‘Paid internships now!’ has become the rallying cry of young media people and the Twitterati and now the Labour Party, too. Its throwback manifesto, leaked this week, promises to ‘ban unpaid internships’, on the basis that ‘it’s not fair for some to get a leg up when others can’t afford to’. Self-regarding youths will cheer this, as will their sad-eyed supporters in the press, but the rest of us should raise a collective eyebrow. There are many grating things about the call for paid internships. Here are just three of them.

Chatham House has been at the forefront of thinking on Britain’s role in the world. So with the General Election less than a month away, it’s a great place to set out my approach: on how a Labour Government I lead will keep Britain safe, reshape relationships with partners around the world, work to strengthen the United Nations and respond to the global challenges we face in the 21st century. And I should say a warm welcome to the UN Special Representative in Somalia,  Michael Keating, who is here today. On Monday, we commemorated VE Day, the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in Europe. VE Day marked the defeat of fascism and the beginning of the end of a global war that claimed seventy million lives.