Communists ‘full tilt’ for Corbyn
A SENIOR British Communist has said that her party’s members should be working “full tilt” to get Jeremy Corbyn into 10 Downing Street.
Susan Michie, a leading activist, insisted that they should use their “significant influence”.
She said: “We will be out on the doorstep, putting forward the socialist arguments...wherever possible in support of a Left-led Labour Party.”
Professor Michie, whose former husband Andrew Murray used to be an aide to Mr Corbyn, told a rally this week how the party decided it would have been “inappropriate” to stand against Labour candidates at the general election last year.
She boasted: “This electoral policy is a potential springboard for strengthening organic ties with Labour. We can also use our significant influence in trade unions and campaigning organisations to show that Labour Party policies will be closer to members’ interests than other electoral parties.
“We are in a really good situation to work much more closely than we have in the past. The Communist Party and the Labour Left have much in common and have a track record of impressive joint working in trade union campaigns and elections.”
She added: “Members should absolutely be involved in electoral work, and working full tilt to get Jeremy elected.”
The comments have heightened concerns over the hard-Left Labour leaderships links to the “insidious” Marxist ideology. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell is due to speak at a
200th anniversary celebration of Karl Marx’s birth. In the past Mr Corbyn has also backed brutal communist regimes in the Soviet Union, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba.
Tories said that the backing of British Communists had confirmed their worst fears about Mr Corbyn.
Romford MP Andrew Rosindell said: “This underlines the danger to Britain if Corbyn and his leftist allies ever win power. The links of the Labour leadership to communists and their insidious ideology should frighten everybody.”
Mo Metcalf-Fisher, of Conservative Progress, added: “Hard leftist factions are becoming increasingly comfortable with today’s Labour Party. This is a truly worrying development.”
HERE’S a challenge for you: come up with one good reason to vote Conservative at the next election. I don’t mean just “keeping Corbyn out”. I mean one serious, convincing and uplifting reason to vote Conservative. It’s tough, isn’t it?
That in a nutshell is the Tories’ key problem. It’s why, despite a huge poll lead going into last year’s election, the end result was a hung Parliament. And it’s why what would once have been a ludicrous fantasy – hard-Left Trotskyites and Stalinists on the edge of power – really could turn into a living nightmare.
Sometimes it seems as if the Tories are content to sleepwalk to electoral disaster, handing us over to Corbyn’s Labour without even bothering to respond to the challenge of providing convincing reasons to vote Conservative.
Take housing. On Monday Theresa May gave what was trailed as a ground-breaking speech. Last year she said she would “dedicate my premiership to fixing… our broken housing market”. And this was supposed to be the moment when she showed us the beef.
Certainly it was long and it was detailed. And she said all the right things about how “angry” the younger generations are that they have been so badly let down over housing.
BUT if you had set out to write a speech that was designed to caricature Mrs May’s worst characteristics and show just how little she grasped the scale of the bold action that is needed, this is what you’d have come up with. Some tweaks here and some changes there and that was it. New regulations on requirements for affordable home building, revising planning permission if land isn’t built on and reforms to planning law – except in green belt areas.
But where was the bold approach to one of the most pressing issues of our time? It was all tinkering at the edges.
The facts of the housing crisis are simple. For 40 years we haven’t built enough houses. The basic laws of supply and demand mean that the cost of the average home has soared, to eight times average earnings. In terms of hard cash, in the 1990s low and middle