Labour party

Monday

Sebastian Payne

Labour defaults to Universal Credit attack at welfare questions

Labour has had a difficult summer over welfare, so it’s no surprise its frontbench played it safe at Work and Pensions questions today. Instead of ruthlessly quizzing the government on the recent statistics showing the death of those being found fit to work or even the Welfare Bill, its frontbench team chose to attack on Universal Credit, something it tends to turn to in times of trouble. Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, claimed ‘Universal Credit is going to be a remarkable success’ despite the endless delays and technical missteps: ‘Universal Credit is now available in over half of job centres across Great Britain and available in all Jobcentres early next year.

Friday

Tristram Hunt

Welcome to the era of emoji politics, where debate and rationality are suffocated

I break off the family holiday to campaign for my colleague Liz Kendall in the Labour leadership election. In Ipswich and Colchester, I found party members not so smitten by Corbynmania. In both constituencies, more people voted Tory than Labour: it remains unclear to me why heading further left would appeal to them. At every leadership election since the demise of Tony Blair the party has chosen a more left-wing candidate, and while Neil Kinnock might have ‘got his party back’, the country got a Tory government back. What is also evident is the anger among party members who have spent years delivering leaflets and are being called ‘Tories’ for not supporting Corbyn by people who joined the party weeks ago.

Isabel Hardman

Labour moderates hold talks on dealing with leadership result

Anti-Corbynite planning for the aftermath of what looks like certain victory for the Islington socialist in the Labour leadership contest is still in disarray. Though Chuka Umunna’s intervention calling for ‘solidarity’ earlier this week was a bold move designed to take some of the poison out of the contest, it hasn’t gone down well in some quarters, with those involved in the other campaigns feeling rather frustrated that he is talking as though it’s a done deal (though his attitude on the result is understandable), and others irritated by the suggestion that Umunna could work with Jeremy Corbyn. But as I wrote earlier this week, Umunna’s speech was one of the first signs that the anti-Corbynites still have some political nous.

Thursday

Peter Jones

Corbyn and the plebs

Last week, guru Corbyn was invited to reflect on the 2,500-year-old Roman origins of the republicanism to which he is so devoted. This week, the ageing seer may care to ponder the plebeian fight for equality, a struggle Corbyn holds dear. The picture as the historian Livy (c. 60 BC–AD 17) paints it is that Romans were full of hopes in 509 BC that, with the king thrown out, all would be peace and love. But now it was the patricians — the hereditary advisers to the kings — who were doing the exploiting: holding a monopoly of power and running the show in their own interests, with serious consequences for the plebeians (the non-patrician families), especially the poor.

Tristram Hunt

Diary – 3 September 2015

‘Devon, Devon, Devon/ Where it rains six days out of seven.’ Nothing beats a British seaside holiday. And north Devon is especially blessed when it comes to vibrant weather patterns. We have watched in awe this summer as high-pressure systems from the Continent have collapsed in the face of sturdy Atlantic lows and extreme weather warnings punctuated the news. Our companion in all this has been the Met Office, whose forecasts are dashingly presented by the hunky Tomasz Schafernaker. So it was a shock to see the third-rate bureaucrats running the BBC replace it with some cheap and rather remote New Zealand outfit.

James Forsyth

What a Corbyn victory will mean for the Tories

A Jeremy Corbyn victory in the Labour leadership race now seems like a racing certainty. The consequences of this for Labour have been much discussed but in the magazine this week, I look at what it would mean for the Tories. The first, and most obvious, thing to say is that it would make 2020 the Tories’ election to lose — and they would have to make an epoch defining mistake to do so. But some Tories are worried about the prospect of a Corbyn victory. This isn’t just because they fear that bad opposition leads to bad government. But because they fret that Cameron and Osborne’s response to it will be to tack hard to the centre to try and pick up those voters disillusioned by Labour’s lurch to the left.

Steerpike

Tristram Hunt stands firm on Corbyn despite threat of ‘Labour purge’

Yesterday Channel 4's Michael Crick reported that a pro-Corbyn Unite official had told him 'careerist' MPs will be purged from Labour if Jeremy Corbyn gets in. Among those on the list of targets for de-selection was Tristram Hunt, who would 'make a wonderful scalp'. Yet despite all the noise, Hunt doesn't seem too bothered. Although his fellow New Labour comrade Chuka Umunna performed a reverse ferret earlier this week over whether he would support a Corbyn-led government, Hunt appears not to be backing down.

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: what Jeremy Corbyn’s Britain looks like

What will Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in the Labour leadership contest mean for Britain and the Labour party? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, James Forsyth, Dan Hodges and Ellie Mae O’Hagan discuss this week’s Spectator cover on the impact his leadership would have. Would it be a disaster for Labour if he wins? What would the impact be on the Conservatives? Might Corbyn soften his views and become more pragmatic as leader? And will Labour’s centrists find themselves in the wilderness for many years, or rally round their new leader?  Matthew Parris and Theo Hobson also discuss whether Christianity is offering enough moral guidance on the migrant crisis.

Dan Hodges

Surviving the purge

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremycorbynsbritain/media.mp3" title="Dan Hodges, James Forsyth and Ellie Mae O'Hagan discuss the impact of a Corbyn victory" startat=40] Listen [/audioplayer]How long does it take to rebuild a political machine? Twelve months? Two years? Three years? Maybe it can’t be done at all. Jeremy Corbyn has won. Everyone within Labour’s ranks acknowledges that now. The issue concentrating minds is how long it will take to remove him, how bloody the process of removing him will be and how much effort it will take to repair the damage once he has been removed — assuming the damage is reparable. This is why Labour MPs are thinking about the machine.

James Forsyth

The Corbyn enigma

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremycorbynsbritain/media.mp3" title="Dan Hodges, James Forsyth and Ellie Mae O'Hagan discuss the impact of a Corbyn victory" startat=40] Listen [/audioplayer]Just because something is absurd doesn’t mean it can’t happen. This is the lesson of Jeremy Corbyn’s seemingly inevitable victory in the Labour leadership contest. At first, the prospect of Corbyn leading Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was seen to be so ridiculous that bookmakers put the chances of it at 200 to 1. Labour MPs were prepared to nominate him to broaden the ‘debate’. Now, almost everyone in the Labour party thinks we are days away from Corbyn’s coronation, and some bookies are already paying out.

Rod Liddle

The green ink brigade is now running the show

Daily they drop into my email account — alongside the more obviously useful stuff about how I might elongate my penis or ensure it performs with greater fortitude than at present, and the charitable offers from women who live ‘nearby your house, Roderick’ and apparently wish to test whether or not those previous solicitations I mentioned have been acceded to with success. Alongside all that stuff are the fecund exhortations from a bunch of online campaigning organisations. Click democracy, a sort of spastic form of activism whereby you stick it to da man simply by pressing a button. They come, these missives, from the likes of Change.org and 38 Degrees. Sometimes shrill, sometimes cloying, almost always stupid.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn’s opponents are finally starting to show political nous

Chuka Umunna’s call for Labourites to unite around their new leader and show 'solidarity' does show a growing acceptance that Jeremy Corbyn is on the brink of being installed as the party’s new chief in just ten days’ time. But it also shows that the Blairites in the party are finally starting to come up with a plan for dealing with the rise of the hard left. Labour’s centrist modernisers have spent the summer scratching their heads at the Corbyn phenomenon, which they hadn’t predicted at all - indeed, I was initially briefed by one of their number that ‘we will get hundreds of thousands of new supporters. Social media has changed how we communicate in a way we can’t grasp and it has blown open this leadership contest too.

Nick Cohen

Labour’s centrists have held up the white flag of surrender

Smart political operators are often the stupidest people. In conventional Westminster terms, it was smart of Labour’s Chuka Umunna to say last night that everyone in Labour should work with Jeremy Corbyn. Received wisdom expects us to applaud Umunna as he bows his head to conventional pieties and says Labour should get down with the kids, 'celebrate' the Corbyn-supporting yoof, 'embrace' them and 'harness' their energy to revitalise Labour. We are expected to nod sagely as political journalists tell us that Umunna is calculating that 'if Corbyn, the clear frontrunner, is to fail, Umunna’s wing of the party must not have done anything to make it responsible'. Clever move, we are meant to mutter. This guy knows it is best to keep your head down, and not go looking for trouble.

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

Andy and Yvette — a tale of two ‘Anyone But Corbyn’ strategies

Who has the best chance of beating Jeremy Corbyn: Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper? The Burnham and Cooper camps are vying to be the clear ‘Anyone But Corbyn’ candidate, and trying to grab as much of the low-hanging ‘soft’ Corbyn vote as possible before the ballot closes on 10 September. Burnham is most blatant in his adoption of the ABC strategy. For example, in an op-ed for the Independent today, he says ‘I believe it has come down to a straight choice between Jeremy Corbyn and myself’ and outlined five policy areas he will pursue if elected leader to build a ‘bolder, more principled Labour party’. On housing, Burnham said he will oppose the extension of Right to Buy for housing associations.

Isabel Hardman

Yvette Cooper attacks ‘cowardly’ government and says Britain should take 10,000 refugees

Yvette Cooper has just given a rather fine, bold speech on the refugee crisis. Some reading will disagree with her plea for Britain to take 10,000 refugees, rather than 200. But that’s part of the point: the Labour leadership contender has decided to take a stand on something, even if it annoys some. To be fair, it is probably an issue that Labour members will applaud her taking a stand on, rather than something that makes the party feel uncomfortable with, but it is much less like the ‘on-the-one-hand-this-and-the-other-that’ style of campaigning that Cooper has been criticised for at times during this contest.

Monday

Alex Massie

Jeremy Corbyn is Britain’s Donald Trump (and vice versa)

The silly season is supposed to end tomorrow. September sidles in and normality replaces August's frivolity. The reality of winter will be with us soon enough, too. That, at any rate, is the theory but it seems, on both sides of the Atlantic, that sillyness is likely to last for some time yet. There's the twin risings of Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn, for instance. It might initially seem as though they have little in common but a more penetrating gaze at their improbable ascent to prominence discerns certain commonalities. Trump is the American Corbyn and Corbyn the British Trump. The difference, of course, is significant. Trump won't win the Republican nomination; it still looks as though Corbyn will be the next Labour leader.

Douglas Murray

Has Jeremy Corbyn ever bothered to speak to ‘the other side’?

I had a piece in the Sunday Times yesterday about Jeremy Corbyn and the dodgy excuse he and his spokespeople use whenever he is caught with another IRA terrorist, Holocaust-denier, Islamist or random anti-Semite. In general the claim is that he was only involved in the meeting as part of a 'peace process.' Occasionally he/they claim he was only there because of something he is even less qualified to speak about and that he only met the bigot in question because it was a meeting on 'inter-faith issues'. In reality Jeremy and his people are clearly just trying to cover his tracks for decades of supporting terrible people with a propensity for extreme sectarian violence. But I would genuinely like to open out as a competition one question I keep asking.

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Tony Blair has given up on Labour’s leadership election

It’s not entirely surprising that Tony Blair fancied one last chance to plead with his party not to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader. And it’s not particularly surprising that his piece in today’s Observer is attracting exactly the sort of reaction he expected. But what is surprising is not just the former Prime Minister’s rather sarcastic tone - he says that ‘someone else said to me: “If you’re writing something again, don’t blah on about winning elections; it really offends them.” It would actually be quite funny if it weren’t tragic.’ - but that he’s not really pleading with his party not to elect Jeremy Corbyn at all.

Friday

Steerpike

All hail Lord Livermore, king of Labour campaigning

It's fair to say that the appointment of Ed Miliband’s ex-campaign director Spencer Livermore to the House of Lords hasn't gone down well in Labour circles. Harriet Harman was said to be in a battle to get a similar honour for her own press chief Ayesha Hazarika if Livermore got one, but her name was absent from yesterday's Dissolution Peerages. Now word reaches Steerpike that party members are questioning what exactly Livermore -- who also worked on Gordon Brown’s election-that-never-was back in 2007 -- is being rewarded for. While Mr S is yet to learn the answer, it is fair to rule out his election judgment. On polling day, Livermore wrote a blog claiming the BBC's exit poll looked 'wrong'.

Gareth Evans

It is un-socialist to support Jeremy Corbyn

A quick disclaimer: I am a socialist and I share much of Jeremy Corbyn’s politics. I believe that austerity is unjustifiable ideological warfare; I believe in renationalising the railways, I believe in Clause IV, I believe in strong trade unions, and I believe in nuclear disarmament. I also believe that Corbyn should be commended for his unwavering parliamentary record, and that the media’s sniping attacks on the man are often facetious and usually motivated by clandestine political agendas. I clarify all of this to appease the claws of ‘Camp Corbyn’. In fact I am willing to admit that when this drawn-out election begun I initially supported the MP for Islington North.