HAPLESS CORBYN’S DAY OF DISASTER
JEREMY Corbyn suffered his most chaotic day of the General Election campaign yesterday as Labour was plunged into furious infighting over the leak of its hard-Left manifesto.
His policy ideas were torn to shreds by business leaders and economists, with warnings that his socialist plans for sweeping nationalisation and punitive tax rises would cause economic catastrophe.
One financial expert warned that the plans were a dangerous throwback to the state control of the economy last seen in the Seventies.
The draft manifesto was condemned as “delusional” as it would send government spending rocketing by more than £80billion a year.
Mr Corbyn had to rip up his schedule for the day after a 43-page draft of the manifesto, due to be published next week, was leaked overnight.
It emerged that a copy had been left on a desk in the party’s London HQ by a senior policy aide. The Labour leader’s team blamed his opponents within the party for the leak, claiming it was an attempt to destabilise the campaign.
Julian Jessop, chief economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said: “The Labour Party’s manifesto includes delusional and incoherent economics that would result in economic disaster for this country.
“Proposals for various renationalisations also suggest that history has taught the Labour Party nothing.”
The draft manifesto was also condemned for failing to promise any curbs on mass migration.
Shambolic
Lord Green of Deddington, chairman of the pressure group MigrationWatch UK, said: “For anyone who is worried about immigration, this is the worst possible manifesto. There are no effective measures proposed to reduce the numbers.
“Indeed, they have no intention of doing so. This reflects an arrogant disregard of many people’s genuine concerns.”
But the Labour leader ducked out of the unveiling of his party’s first campaign poster as recriminations over who was to blame for the leak engulfed the party.
Theresa May seized on the bungled launch of Labour’s programme for government as proof that Mr Corbyn was totally unfit for office.
The Prime Minister said: “I think what we see from the issue around the Labour Party’s manifesto is, first of all, it is pretty shambolic the way the manifesto has come out.
“I think that shows the sort of chaos that we would see from a Labour government. But, crucially, if you look at what they are suggesting, if you take their manifesto overall, actually, what they are suggesting is taking us back to the past. What I’m interested in is dealing with the challenges that we face today but making a better future for this country.”
Embarrassingly, Mr Corbyn’s car also ran over a BBC cameraman’s foot as he headed for a crunch meeting of union barons and party bosses to discuss the document.
The Labour leader was filmed grinning immediately after the incident then his face fell when he realised what had happened. The cameraman was later treated for a minor injury.
To add to the calamity, Unite union leader Len McCluskey slipped down some steps when leaving the building but was unhurt.
Mr Corbyn later emerged to confirm the party shadow cabinet and National Executive committee had “unanimously agreed” to officially adopt the document as Labour’s offer to the electorate. He said: “We believe the policies in it are very popular. We amended a document that was put forward in the most informed, interesting, sensible discussion and debate in our party and we’ll present this manifesto to the British people in the next few days.”
But the programme was compared with the party’s disastrous 1983 manifesto under Michael Foot, ahead of one of Labour’s worst-ever election drubbings and famously dubbed “the longest suicide note in history” by Labour MP Gerald Kaufman.
Paul Johnson, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank, said: “This is about the state getting deeply involved in much more of the private sector than it has been, certainly since the 1970s, and perhaps since the 1940s.”
Wobbled
Today Mr Corbyn will say that the “bomb first, talk later” approach to British foreign policy makes the country less safe as he accuses Theresa May of “pandering” to US President Donald Trump.
The Labour leader is a lifelong nuclear disarmament campaigner, has wobbled over Nato membership and refuses categorically to back the idea of RAF strikes against IS.
In a speech in London he will say: “I am not a pacifist. I accept that military action, under international law and as a genuine last resort, is in some circumstances necessary. But that is very far from the kind of unilateral wars and interventions that have almost become routine in recent times.”
IF Theresa May took us back to the 1980s with her successful Thatcher-like wooing of Essex Man in the local elections, it looks as if Labour wants to relive the chaotic 1970s when unions dominated failing nationalised industries. In its leaked election manifesto, Corbyn’s Labour betrays a nostalgia for the days when Britain was a union stitch-up and we shivered by candlelight thanks to power cuts and industrial unrest.
I remember my dad brushing his teeth with salt because a strike had prevented stocks of toothpaste reaching our shops. He’d been a life-long Labour voter but come 1979, he voted for Thatcher. It looks like many traditional Labour voters may well be facing that same decision this time round.
It’s no surprise that Corbyn and his hard-Left cronies should look back on that decade as a golden age. It was when he first got turned on to politics. Getting his first job for a union in 1971, he became a councillor in Haringey shortly afterwards at the age of 24. In 1983 he was elected MP for Islington North and his political views have remained locked in deep-freeze ever since.
Labour’s leaked manifesto promises to renationalise the railways and energy producers – I better get those candles in now. He pledges to create a Ministry of Labour and hand back enormous powers to his backers in the trade unions. He will repeal Tory trade union reforms, reintroduce national pay-bargaining and expand union membership in the workplace. As a result, Britain will cease to function as a modern, efficient economy.
DURING the 1970s we were ridiculed as the “sick man of Europe”. It took Thatcher and her battle with the unions to transform our economic prospects. Corbyn’s manifesto wants to undo all that. To be fair, there are some popular elements to Corbyn’s leaked agenda. The abolition of tuition fees for students will bring a big smile to many middle-class voters but on the most important populist issues of our times Corbyn has a deaf ear.
Despite the wake-up call of last year’s Brexit revolution, he refuses to guarantee that Britain will leave the EU if it fails to get what he considers a good deal and he will not set a migration target. He weakens our negotiating hand by signalling his desperation to stay in the EU’s single market and customs union.
He has a passion for maintaining the “nomadic way of life” of the Roma and gypsy communities and is happy to see many more refugees flood across our borders. He’s not particularly keen on sending criminals to prison, viewing jail as a “place of last resort”.
I can’t see any of that going down well in Labour’s northern strongholds. The hundreds of thousands of patriotic workingclass voters who turned away from Labour during the referendum will see no reason to come back.
Apparently the starting point for the drafting of this manifesto was Ed Miliband’s 2015 pledges but with more old-style socialism ladled on top. A real vote winner then…
Stuck in the CND-marching, Greenham Common camping era of the 1970s and 1980s, Corbyn is happy to weaken our national defences in pursuit of his peacenik idealism. He wants a “nuclear free world” and ludicrously pledges to be “extremely cautious about ordering the use of weapons of mass destruction which would result in the indiscriminate killing of millions of innocent civilians”. Well, I should hope so! Corbyn’s leaked manifesto pledges to spend a lot of money. He wants to build 100,000 council homes every year, reduce class sizes, expand free school meals, end the publicsector pay cap, end benefit sanctions, buy back privatised industries, pour billions more into the NHS, and on and on.
The manifesto claims all its spending commitments are “fully costed” but is this not the same party with shadow cabinet members who pluck figures out of thin air when questioned about the practicality of their policies?
LAST week we had shadow home secretary Diane Abbott’s hilariously costed plan to recruit 10,000 new policemen by paying them £30 a year. This week shadow education secretary Angela Rayner failed to know the number of pupils who would be helped by their classnumber reduction promise. It would be a “sizeable chunk”, she guessed.
It is unbelievable that people who have little idea of the facts and figures needed to implement their policies are still hoping to run our country.
What we can all make a pretty good stab at is that this would all be paid for by a hike in taxes and a lot more government borrowing.
Paradoxically Corbyn wants to ensure that 60 per cent of our future energy comes from renewable sources – the most expensive form of customer-subsidised energy there is – and yet somehow he wants to cap our annual fuel bills at £1,000 a year. Good luck with that one!
As for fracking, he takes the knee-jerk public response and wants to ban it – a future source of cheaper power that is making the US rich and is set to make it a net exporter of energy.
To be honest the only thing I really liked about the 1970s was the pop music. David Bowie was my hero and inspiration. Now sadly he’s gone and all we’re left with is an antiquated fantasy Labour manifesto that will take us back to a decade notorious for trade union strife and economic decline.
Corbyn’s no Starman, more like Major Tom “strung out in the heavens high, hitting an all-time low”.
‘He views the decade as a golden age’