Labour party

Sunday

Sebastian Payne

Twelve disagreements Charlie Falconer has with his party leadership

Charlie Falconer is one of the few figures closely associated with Blairism serving in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, which isn’t surprising given the new leader’s mandate. In an extraordinary interview on the Sunday Politics, the shadow justice secretary said he was serving under Corbyn because ‘I want to make the opposition as effective as possible in holding the government to account’ — while outlining a long list of policy areas he is at odds with the leadership on. As well as saying he would quit if Labour campaigns for a Brexit, Falconer has revealed no fewer than twelve other areas where he differs with Corbyn and John McDonnell. 1. Leaving Nato Corbyn has previously

Friday

Sebastian Payne

Jeremy Corbyn’s first week as Labour leader: a series of gaffes, u-turns and general chaos

Harold Wilson’s remark that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ has never been more apt than at the beginning of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The hopey-changey rhetoric that lead him to victory last Saturday has inevitably given way to a more traditional form of compromise politics. While Corbyn’s debut at the Dispatch Box was the high point of his first week as Labour leader, the rest of his time has been devoted to fighting fires — literally in one incident. Women in the shadow cabinet: Sky News’ Darren McCaffrey revealed how the first Corbyn shadow cabinet was put together last Sunday and how the Labour leader attempted to deal with a lack of

Fraser Nelson

Jeremy Corbyn appoints convicted arsonist Mike Watson as his education spokesman

Given that Jeremy Corbyn is a Hamas sympathiser with an IRA sympathiser as his Shadow Chancellor, I imagine he didn’t think too much about promoting a little-known Scot named Mike Watson. He is a Labour peer, who now takes a place in Corbyn’s frontbench as education spokesman. He is also a convicted arsonist, who quit the Scottish Parliament in disgrace after being caught drunkenly setting fire to a set of curtains during the Scottish Politician of the Year ceremony 2004. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison, which he served in HMP Edinburgh. Watson’s undeserved rehabilitation says much about how Corbyn is having to scrape the very bottom of the barrel for people willing to serve

Freddy Gray

John McDonnell's slick performance on Question Time was worthy of Tony Blair

Hats off to John McDonnell. We’ve all been fretting about how the Corbyn gang would cope against the media slick Tories. We all think that, despite the appeal of conviction politics, a shadow chancellor such as McDonnell will be eaten alive by the Tory front bench. John McDonnell’s performance on BBC Question Time last night suggested otherwise. Question Time is a good test for politicians: they have to look and sound passionate while saying nothing much at all. McDonnell did exactly that, and with gusto. He masterfully shrugged off his ‘joke’ about killing Margaret Thatcher. When asked about his support for the IRA, he managed almost simultaneously to apologise and to

Sebastian Payne

Alistair Darling: there's no ‘silver lining’ to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership

Today marks one year since the Scottish independence referendum and many of the key figures are reflecting on how politics has changed. Alistair Darling, the former Labour Chancellor and leader of the Better Together campaign, spoke on the Today programme about Scotland, but it was the remarks on his own party that were the most striking. He said Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader thanks to the ‘disillusionment’ of people who are ‘fed up with the established order’. But Darling said ‘I honestly don’t know’ whether John McDonnell will ever become Chancellor: ‘Just at the moment, it seems to me to be difficult [to judge] but I’m willing to be surprised. I’m sure all clouds have a silver lining but I haven’t quite

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 17 September 2015

It’s their party Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership contest with 60% of the vote among four candidates in the first round. Which leader has the largest mandate from their party? — David Cameron was elected in 2005 with 28% of the vote out of four candidates in the first round (held among MPs only). He won 68% of the party vote in the run-off with David Davis. — Tim Farron won 57% of the Lib Dem vote this year. Only two candidates stood. — Nicola Sturgeon was appointed as SNP leader unopposed last November. — Nigel Farage was elected Ukip leader in 2006 with 45% of the vote (among

Chris Mullin

Diary - 17 September 2015

With four days to go until the result of Labour’s leadership election, a call from the Sunday Times. Would I like to write a piece, along the lines of the opening chapter of my 1980s novel A Very British Coup, about the first 100 days of a Corbyn government? Anything up to 3,000 words, he says. I am sceptical that the sense of humour of the censors at Murdoch HQ will stretch to the prospect of a Corbyn government, however fanciful. Especially since any such government is likely to be interested in breaking up the concentration of media ownership. What they are really looking for, I suspect, is tale of

Dot Wordsworth

Twitter speak

‘Tweeting’s like text messaging, isn’t it?’ said my husband confidently, though not, as usual, from any knowledge of the matter. I find the register of language in tweets interesting. The tweeter in his own right must assume an easy tone, quite different from that of the niggling troll. As far as style goes, I was impressed by Jamie Reed, the Labour MP who made public his resignation from the shadow cabinet when Jeremy Corbyn had hardly finished his acceptance speech. Mr Reed is fond of tweeting, and quite good at it. The little picture (tweeters it call an avatar) with his account shows Larry Sanders, the fictional chatshow host. Having

Charles Moore

The Spectator's notes | 17 September 2015

When the Labour party began, its purpose was the representation of labour (i.e. workers) in the House of Commons. Indeed, its name was the Labour Representation Committee. Its goal was gradually achieved, and then, from the 1980s, gradually annihilated. With the victory of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader is supported by only 10 per cent of the party’s MPs, and yet it is imagined, at least by his backers, that he will eventually be able to get into government with them. It is an impossible situation. What is needed today is the opposite of how it all started — a Parliamentary Representation Committee in the Labour party. When the history of

The Spectator-Leader

The right answer

David Cameron might not be remembered as the best prime minister in modern British history but he will probably be remembered as the luckiest. Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour party is proving worse — or, for the Tories, better — than anyone could have imagined. His wrecking ball is busy destroying everything that was built by Labour’s modernisers. He does not lack authenticity, belief and passion — but his beliefs are ones which would be more at home in a 1920s plenary meeting of the Moscow Soviet than in contemporary British living rooms. The Chancellor sees Corbyn’s leadership as a chance to further blacken Labour’s name. The

Peter Jones

The relative experience of consuls and Corbyn

One of the justifications of the House of Lords is that it embodies ‘collective experience’. That is not a quality which the eternal rebel Jeremy Corbyn can cite on his CV. Over many years, Romans developed a political system such that anyone who wanted to reach the top of the greasy pole and become consul had to have under his belt a considerable experience of government. The cursus honorum (‘race for honours’) consisted of a series of age-related hurdles that, at least in theory, had to be leapt before the winning of the ultimate prize. To start with, it was taken for granted that a candidate would have serious military

Isabel Hardman

LISTEN: John McDonnell apologises for IRA comments

Appointing John McDonnell as his Shadow Chancellor made Jeremy Corbyn’s first few days as Labour leader much harder than they needed to be. This was mainly because the Hayes and Harlington MP made some deeply distasteful comments about the ‘bravery’ of the IRA. In 2003, McDonnell told a gathering to commemorate IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands: ‘It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. ‘It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table.’ The most serious part of this week’s PMQs was when the DUP’s Nigel Dodds raised the comments, and David Cameron branded

Isabel Hardman

Jon Cruddas sets up new group to save Labour

How does Labour solve the greatest crisis in its history? In this week’s Spectator, I interview party thinker and former Miliband policy chief Jon Cruddas about where his party goes next. Cruddas doesn’t think Jeremy Corbyn is Labour’s problem: he’s just the symptom of an identity crisis that the party would have suffered from whoever got elected leader. The Dagenham MP’s response to this crisis is not, like some of his colleagues, to join the frontbench, but to set up a new group that he hopes will be the crucible for a new Labour ideas that win it the 2020 election, in the same way as Labour recovered from the 1992

Steerpike

Jess Phillips: Why I told Diane Abbott to f--- off

Jeremy Corbyn’s first PLP meeting as the leader of the Labour party got off to a shaky start as MPs failed to applaud him. Happily, the attention was soon taken away from him, as a row erupted between his shadow international development minister and a Labour backbencher. Diane Abbott attempted to scold the newbie Labour MP Jess Phillips for asking a ‘sanctimonious’ question about why all the top four shadow cabinet jobs had gone to men. With Phillips telling Abbott to ‘f— off’, Corbyn has since been criticised for not stepping in to stop the argument. Today’s Times suggests that Corbyn’s romantic fling with Abbott back in the 70s could have played a factor in

Isabel Hardman

What holds Jeremy Corbyn's frontbench team together

Jeremy Corbyn surfaced last night to do his first round of broadcast interviews since becoming Labour leader. The two key lines were on Europe and Trident, and though the interviewers were interested in these issues, Corbyn also had an interest in being as clear as he possibly could be on them as they play a large part in holding his Shadow Cabinet together. Labour MPs spent a lot of time chatting with one another and debating whether it was the right thing to join the Corbyn frontbench as he assembled it on Sunday night. They reached different conclusions, with some fearing they would be tainted by a hopeless administration that

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the death of the left and Jeremy Corbyn's first few days as leader

What has happened to the left-wing of British politics? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Nick Cohen discusses his Spectator cover feature with Fraser Nelson on why he is resigning from the left, following the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Why have some activists become intolerable of views that differ slightly from their hard-left perspective? Should those who have had enough of the Labour party join the Conservatives? And is Labour’s shift to the left a temporary blip or a longer trend? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also discuss Corbyn’s first week as Labour leader and whether his new take on PMQs is something that will stick. Has Corbyn’s

Nick Cohen

Why I left

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3″ title=”Nick Cohen and Fraser Nelson discuss the death of the left” startat=32] Listen [/audioplayer]‘Tory, Tory, Tory. You’re a Tory.’ The level of hatred directed by the Corbyn left at Labour people who have fought Tories all their lives is as menacing as it is ridiculous. If you are a woman, you face misogyny. Kate Godfrey, the centrist Labour candidate in Stafford, told the Times she had received death threats and pornographic hate mail after challenging her local left. If you are a man, you are condemned in language not heard since the fall of Marxist Leninism. ‘This pathetic small-minded jealousy of the anti-democratic bourgeois shows them up for

Harry Mount

Bad winners

‘Jeremy Corbyn night’ at the Forum in Kentish Town on Monday should have been a scene of orgiastic pleasure for socialist Labour. Corbyn’s victory was the triumph the grand old reactionaries of north London have been waiting a generation for. But they weren’t happy; they were as angry and full of bile as ever. The scene took me right back to my childhood in Islington in the 1970s. My neighbours in the queue outside the Forum had posher voices than you hear at Annabel’s. The smart greybeards from the £2 million villas of Kentish Town and Islington were joined by a new generation of under-thirties: white, university-educated, also with upmarket voices.

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s lost thinker

Shortly before the last election a group of Labour MPs approached Ed Miliband to ask him what he would do if he lost. They suggested he could provide stability by staying on as leader for a while, as Michael Howard had done, and that his last duty should be to oversee an inquiry into what went wrong at the general election. Miliband, still convinced he would win, did not entertain the idea, to the dismay of his policy chief, Jon Cruddas. After the election, Cruddas decided to go ahead and do an inquiry anyway. The results will infuriate the Labour left. The inquiry found that Labour’s anti-austerity message put voters

Wednesday

James Forsyth

What Cameron said to Osborne at the end of PMQs

At the end of PMQs today, David Cameron turned to George Osborne and said, ‘Well, that was a lot less stressful.’ I think this conclusively answers the question of whether or not Cameron is worried by Jeremy Corbyn’s PMQs technique of reading out questions that the public have sent in. Although, to be fair, I hear that Cameron was impressed by how calm Corbyn was today, especially considering that it was not only his PMQs debut but his  first ever appearance at the despatch box. The Prime Minister remarked afterwards that the Labour leader’s hands weren’t even shaking as he asked his questions.