EVEN LABOUR ADMIT THEY WOULD CAUSE FINANCIAL MELTDOWN
A LABOUR government could plunge Britain into financial chaos overnight, the party’s shadow chancellor admitted yesterday.
John McDonnell said his team were studying emergency measures, including how to tackle a run on the pound, in case the party wins the next general election.
His remarks at a Labour conference fringe meeting were seized upon by Tories as a signal of the chaos that could hit the country if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister.
Mr McDonnell told delegates at the meeting in Brighton that Labour wanted to “hit the deck running” if the party wins power.
He said his aides were looking at possible scenarios, including the impact on money markets.
Acknowledging the possibility of capital flight, he said: “What happens if there a run on the pound? I don’t think there will be, but you never know, so we’ve got to scenario-plan for that.
“People want to know we are ready and we have got a response to everything that could happen. Because if we can demonstrate that, it will calm things down.”
He said Labour’s plans if they had won the June 8 election would have included a Budget by the end of July legislating for a financial transaction tax and measures to crack down on tax avoidance.
At the meeting, Unite union boss Len McCluskey had a less ambitious aim for Labour’s first 100 days in office. “I suspect I will be drunk for 100 days,” he said.
Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond said: “After giving his conference speech, the shadow chancellor privately conceded the disastrous effects that Labour’s plans would have on Britain’s economy – a collapse in business investment and a crash in the value of the pound, causing a shock wave of inflation.
“Labour’s plans would go too far, and ordinary working people will end up footing the bill.”
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told Sky News: “He is saying we look at all scenarios that may affect a Labour government. Surely that’s what an opposition serious about getting into government wants to do?”
He told the BBC: “Today, in the Treasury, there is a team of brilliant people looking at speculation against the pound and runs on the pound that might affect our economy. John is making the point that we have to look at all these scenarios.”
Asked whether the scenario of a run on the pound was realistic, Mr Corbyn said: “There’s been a run on the pound for the past two years.”
Mr Corbyn will today claim that Labour is ready to form the first government in British history that will hand power to the people.
In a conference speech laden with hard-Left rhetoric, the Labour leader will declare his desire to transform Britain into a socialist society where decision-making is “devolved to the community, not monopolised in Westminster and Whitehall”.
AFTER two years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, I really thought there were no further depths to which the party could sink. I was wrong. This year’s Labour Party conference has been simply extraordinary. Back in June, naive young voters were clearly captivated by the party’s radical manifesto – and many also fell for the idea of Jeremy Corbyn as a break from “politicsas-usual”. He’s certainly that.
In our democracy, “politicsas-usual” does not require journalists to have bodyguards to protect them from threats to their safety from members of the official opposition party. And in “politics-as-usual”, members of a religious minority are not deliberately intimidated from the floor of a party conference.
But Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party does not do “politics-asusual”. As this week’s party conference in Brighton has shown, Labour is now the party of bigots and thugs, where Jew haters are cheered and the BBC’s political editor has to have her own personal security protection simply to attend.
Yesterday morning I watched perhaps the most disgusting political event I have seen in a mainstream party in more than three decades of covering British politics. Labour’s debate over a proposed constitutional amendment to make anti-Semitism an expellable offence was simply shocking.
ONE delegate issued a sinister warning that anyone supporting tougher action on antiSemitism should “be careful”. Another attacked the party’s National Executive Committee for having worked with Jewish activists over the amendment.
Literally: the argument made was that it was wrong to work with Jewish activists over antiSemitism. A cheer went up from the conference floor every time action against antiSemitism was attacked.
The previous day, at a series of fringe meetings there had been demands that the Jewish Labour Movement – affiliated to the Labour Party for 97 years – should be expelled. Because it is the Jewish Labour Movement.
Leaflets have been circulated comparing Israelis and Jews with Nazis. Even the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party, John Cryer, felt ashamed, remarking on Monday night that some Labour members were making arguments about Jews that were “redolent of the 1930s”. As he went on: “I have seen some of the tweets from paid-up Labour Party members and I am not kidding you, it makes your hair stand up.”
Just in case the scenes on the conference floor didn’t send a clear enough message about Labour’s problem with antiSemitism, Ken Livingstone took to the airwaves again yesterday to make sure no one could be in any doubt that there is such a problem – by denying it: “Just because you make offensive comments about Jews doesn’t mean you’re anti-Semitic”.
And film director Ken Loach, Jeremy Corbyn’s other bosom buddy, informed us that history should be “discussed”, when he was asked about dealing with Holocaust denial.
Labour is now over as a moderate party. It is in the grip of hard-Left extremists for whom this kind of hatred is bread and butter. This is how they do politics and this is the new normal for Labour.
The previous norms of mainstream politics – civilised debate, free of bigotry – have simply been flushed aside by Labour’s new cadre.
Take the reaction to the news that the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, needs a bodyguard at Labour conference. Instead of unambiguously deploring it and vowing to root out those responsible for threats to her safety, Labour MP Chris Williamson – a close ally of Mr Corbyn – repeatedly refused in interviews to say that anyone who intimidates a journalist, or anyone else, should be expelled from the Labour Party or from Momentum, the organisation set up to support Mr Corbyn.
This is all, you see, a fuss made up by those who have an anti-Labour agenda: “It is a convenient thing to say, to try to demonise people on the Left.”
But the hard-Left that now runs Labour has a history of thuggery, so none of this is in the least bit surprising. In 2010, for example, John McDonnell, now the shadow chancellor, described students who rioted as “the best of our movement”.
The following year he attacked the jail sentence handed to a student who had thrown a fire extinguisher from a roof during those riots, almost hitting a police officer: “Actually he’s not the criminal… We’ve got to encourage direct action in any form it can possibly take.”
MR McDonnell does not believe in parliamentary democracy. He believes in mob rule as a tool of revolution. This is the man who said on Monday that, should he become chancellor, he would nationalise the railways, water and energy – but would not pay proper compensation at the market rate to the current shareholders. Compensation would be set by the government and rubber-stamped by MPs. In other words, he would copy his hero, former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
Don’t say we haven’t been warned. We’ve been warned repeatedly about all of this. And yet for all that some 40 per cent of the country still say they would vote Labour if there was an election tomorrow.
They still buy into the myth of a refreshing change.
Unless they wake up and see Labour for what it now is, trouble lies ahead. To put it mildly.
‘Leaflets compare Jews with Nazis’