Labour party

What could Jeremy Corbyn attack Theresa May with this week at Prime Minister’s Questions? The Labour leader has already had a go at the crisis in social care funding, which the government is trying to patch up this week by raising the council tax precept from 2 per cent to 4 per cent. He could have another go, given what has long been a serious issue is starting to become a political row too. The problem is that the Labour leader so often retreats to social care and the NHS as a comfort blanket that his attacks are a little blunter than they could be. One row that really hasn’t had as much attention as it deserves is the one over Boris Johnson’s remarks about Saudi Arabia.

Since Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, the party has struggled when it comes to forging a positive relationship with the MSM (mainstream media). Right wing press aside, Corbyn has taken issue with coverage from the BBC, New Statesman, The Guardian, the Mirror and Channel Four. However, are times a-changin'? Last night journalists were welcomed into the Leader's Office for Corbyn's Christmas drinks. True to form, Corbyn stayed on brand -- using a box Chilcot Reports as a handy door stopper. However, in a sign that he is willing to compromise in order to appeal to the masses, the vegetarian lay on a spread of chicken legs and pork pies for hungry hacks.

Labour’s dire performance in the Sleaford by-election is just the latest sign of a party in terminal decline. To cap it off, a YouGov poll out this week puts them 17 points behind the Tories – their worse showing since the gloomy days of Gordon Brown. Jeremy Corbyn is taking his share of the blame for the miserable state of the Labour party. But for me, the beginning of the end for Labour can be traced back to well before Corbyn. The third of March, 2011, to be precise. It was on this day the Barnsley Central by-election brought rising Labour star Dan Jarvis into Parliament. As a rookie reporter for the Barnsley Chronicle, I had a front row seat for this political event which, on the face of it, might not have looked particularly unusual.

Last night's Sleaford and North Hykeham by-election played out in a predictable fashion overall. After Stephen Phillips resigned in anguish over 'irreconcilable policy differences' regarding the government's Brexit stance, the Tories comfortably clung onto the seat -- with their candidate Caroline Johnson winning over 50 pc of the vote. It was a good result, too, for Ukip -- in an area where over 62 pc of voters backed Brexit in the referendum. After coming third there in the general election they won second place this time around. However, it will be encouraging to May that, despite this, Ukip's vote share did actually decrease marginally -- falling from 15.7 pc to 13.5 pc.

There are three misconceptions about the far left. Not one of them is true. And all of them hide the crisis in the opposition, which is giving a dangerously incompetent Government unparalleled and unwarranted freedom of manoeuvre. The first is that its obsession with doctrinal disputes makes far leftists Pythonesque figures of ridicule, rather than a malicious force with malign political consequences. We are then told that the young pass through a ‘left wing phase,’ as if it were a rite of passage like drinking cider or puberty. They believe extreme ideas and shout angry slogans, but when they realise the true nature of the far left they grow up and move on.

One of the crueller caricatures in the 2004 satirical film ‘Team America: World Police’ is a little puppet of Matt Damon who is only able to say ‘Matt Damon’ in a rather feeble and pointless fashion. The actor himself felt he was being cruelly parodied because of his opposition to the Iraq War, and was ‘bewildered’ by the suggestion that he was barely able to say his own name when he was able to learn entire scripts. But the point from the screenwriters seemed to be that beyond his own name, Damon wasn’t really offering anything to the debate about the war. Labour has a Matt Damon problem on immigration at the moment.

After being made Ukip leader yesterday, Paul Nuttall wasted no time in making it clear who he had in his sights: the Labour party. Nuttall said he wanted Ukip to ‘replace Labour’ within five years. And in its editorial, the Times says this threat spells a ‘nightmare’ scenario for Labour. The paper says that while ‘healing’ Ukip’s own ‘wounds’ won’t be easy following a fractious and divisive few months, ‘the rewards could be historic’; it says that a two per cent swing towards Ukip would lose Labour 13 seats, while Labour 'would lose 19 more’ seats if one in five Labour voters sided with Nuttall's party. But can Ukip pull it off?

Today Paul Nuttall has been appointed Ukip leader, winning over 62 pc of the vote. His election marks a new chapter for the party, after months of in-fighting and confusion since the Brexit vote. A popular figure in the party, many had hoped he would run in the first leadership election, that Diane James went on to win -- before quitting after just 18 days. Better late than never, Nuttall now has a good chance of uniting the party behind him. In his acceptance speech, Nuttall wasted no time in setting out his vision for Ukip post-Brexit. He said he hoped 'to replace the Labour party and make Ukip the patriotic voice of working people'. Behind closed doors, the Tories are breathing a collective sigh of relief. As one said to me, 'that speech was entirely aimed at Labour.

Just when you thought the story of the Labour Party in the 21st century couldn’t get any more tragic, Jeremy Corbyn decided to issue a statement celebrating the life of a totalitarian leader who tortured and murdered his opponents. I wonder how many people will be ripping up their membership cards after Corbyn's comments on Fidel Castro. Perhaps not many, because Castro’s Cuba acted for so long as a lodestar for those who still see the United States as the greater evil in the region: a predatory colonial force holding the poor of Central and South America as hostages to neo-liberalism. A country without adverts, but with a functioning health service, 99 per cent literacy, the Buena Vista Social Club and Carlos Acosta: now that, they say, is surely something to admire.

On Thursday night, John McDonnell had to pull out of an appearance on Question Time -- alongside David Gauke, Tim Farron, Mariana Mazzucato and John Timpson -- after coming down with the flu. Happily, his Labour comrade Chris Leslie -- a former shadow chancellor -- was on hand to step up to the plate at the last minute and take the vacant spot. https://twitter.com/bbcquestiontime/status/801481735712210944 So, surely John McDonnell and his team were just delighted that Labour was still represented on the primetime show? Well, perhaps not. Mr S was intrigued to spy the social media activity of the shadow chancellor's head of communications James Mills -- who was previously linked to the leaking of a list of Labour MPs accused of abusing Corbyn.

Let’s try a thought experiment, shall we? If a senior adviser to my old boss, Boris Johnson, had celebrated John Smith’s heart attack, mocked Gordon Brown for talking about his dead son and referred to senior members of the Labour party as ‘scum’, how long do you think that person would have kept their job? Thankfully, however, this particular mini-Trump, the former reality TV star Amy Lamé, was appointed (as London’s ‘night czar’) by a Labour mayor, and her -targets were all Tories, so it’s fine. As, apparently, are Lamé’s years of virtue-signalling on social media for higher spending and taxes while arranging to receive her own City Hall salary through a personal company so she can pay as little tax as possible.

No-one envies the person whose job it is to respond for the Opposition to an economic statement that has just been made to the House of Commons. But perhaps John McDonnell’s job today was rather less terrifying given few people were seriously worrying about what he had to say.  The House of Commons was rather quiet as the shadow chancellor spoke. There was no obvious organised heckling of McDonnell from the Tory benches. Previously George Osborne’s Treasury Support Group of dozens of backbenchers would arm themselves with special insults to fling at Labour to wrong-foot the frontbencher responding to an autumn statement or budget.

What is Labour's position on triggering Article 50? Four days on from the High Court's ruling that Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU and confusion reigns. First, Corbyn suggested Labour could oppose Theresa May's attempts to trigger Article 50. He said the party would block Article 50 if key demands were not met. Given that these demands included access to the single market, it seemed unlikely the government would be able to meet them -- and instead an early election could be on the cards. However, Tom Watson -- Labour's deputy leader -- then appeared on the radio where he contradicted Corbyn.