Labour party

Oh dear. Come June 8, Labour are hoping to take the marginal seat of Blackpool North and Cleveleys from the Tories. However, the party's local candidate Chris Webb might want to consider re-printing his campaign literature. Mr S was curious to come across Webb's campaign leaflet. He says that, as a local boy, he would put Blackpool and Cleveleys first. However, this claim is put into doubt by his second promise to... 'never stop fighting my home town': With Webb a Remain supporter in a Leave area, perhaps he is on to something after all... https://twitter.

Prime Minister, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that you have been denounced in the letters page of the Daily Telegraph. One correspondent huffs: 'I wonder if Theresa May and her small group of advisers closeted in Westminster are aware of the fact that each initiative they introduce in an attempt to win over traditional Labour voters risks having the opposite effect on traditional Conservative voters.’ Another damns your energy price cap as ‘wrong-headed’ and even accuses you of ‘play[ing] into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn’s muddle-headed electioneering economics’. Lord Tebbit echoes these fears: 'The further Labour goes Left, that would mean the further we go Left. We need to stick to sensible, Conservative economics.

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.

It’s that time of the year when politicians start posting pictures of groups of people smiling eerily while holding party placards and claiming that they’ve just had a ‘great response’ on the doorstep.  For the uninitiated, this sounds as though the people opening their doors in each street are just thrilled to see said eerily smiling groups of campaigners striding up their garden paths. For those of us who spend election campaigns following politicians of all hues around on doorsteps, we know that a ‘great response’ is more likely to mean that only three people in a very long street were both in and disposed to opening their front doors.