LABOUR’S MANIFESTO TO DRAG US BACK TO THE 1970s

New suicide note’ vows to renationalise rail, energy and post 6bn tax raid, help for strikers – and Brexit at risk

LABOUR is vowing to nationalise the railways and Royal Mail in the party’s most left-wing manifesto in decades.

A leaked draft of the document reveals Jeremy Corbyn wants to take Britain back to the 1970s by also scrapping anti-strike laws brought in by the Conservatives.

Workers on more than £80,000 a year would be hit by a £6billion tax raid. The 43-page manifesto is the most radical since Michael Foot’s in 1983, which was dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’. The measures include:

A refusal to commit to cutting immigration levels;

Ruling out leaving the European Union without a deal, weakening

Britain’s negotiating hand and suggesting Brexit might never happen;

Scrapping moves to push the state pension age beyond 66; University tuition fees to be axed; Councils ordered to build 100,000 homes a year for social rent, massively extending state involvement in the housing sector;

Rent caps for the first time since the 1970s, with rises pegged at inflation;

A £ 250billion spending splurge on infrastructure;

Salary caps to stop bosses earning more than 20 times the lowest wages of workers at their firm;

A commitment to a ‘nuclear free world’ and ‘extreme caution’ about ever using the nuclear deterrent.

Senior officials will meet with Mr Corbyn today to hammer out details of the manifesto ahead of the launch next week.

But Labour insiders believe moderates will bow to his demands for a socialist manifesto that is red in tooth and claw and dripping with class envy.

One source warned it was ‘Ed Miliband’s manifesto with hard-Left hundreds and thousands sprinkled on top’.

Another source told the Daily Mirror: ‘Is that it? For 40 years the Hard Left wanted

‘Take energy back into public hands’

to control the Labour manifesto, and all it amounts to is a load of freebies for every special interest group.’ Labour sources insisted the final manifesto would be ‘fully costed’.

But, with new spending pledges running into hundreds of billions of pounds, it will raise concerns that Labour would embark on a gigantic borrowing spree, as well as levying swingeing taxes on business and the middle classes.

The extent of the pledges suggests Mr Corbyn’s team believes it has nothing to lose in next month’s election and can make a series of populist promises with little prospect of ever having to deliver them.

The document reveals the extent to which the Labour leadership has been lent on by the union barons who are bankrolling the party’s election campaign.

A new Ministry of Labour would oversee the biggest boost to workers’ rights in decades. Collective bargaining would be extended and laws designed to prevent damaging strikes would be rolled back.

Around £20billion a year would be raised by reversing the cuts to corporation tax introduced by the Tories since 2010. There would be further taxes on firms ‘ with high numbers of staff on very high pay’ and a previously-announced tax on private health firms. And new income taxes would be levied on workers earning more than £80,000 a year.

The £6billion raised by the tax hike would be ploughed directly into the NHS.

Other eye- catching measures include a promise to ‘take energy back into public hands’.

While the existing power companies would be allowed to continue, a new publicly-owned competitor firm would be established in every region of the UK.

It suggests a Labour government would also take full control over the National Grid.

The draft manifesto pledges to bring the Royal Mail back into public ownership following the ‘historic mistake’ of the coalition government selling it off.

Publicly- owned bus companies would be established, and railways renationalised as each private franchise expires with a pledge ‘to repeal the Railways Act 1993 under which the Conservatives privatised the railways’. Labour would then freeze rail fares and bring back conductors on driver-only trains – another key union demand.

The leak emerged as Britain’s leading economic think- tank warned Labour’s plans to ramp up corporation tax would hit jobs,

wages and economic growth. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the party’s election pledge to hike corporation tax from 19 per cent to 26 amounted to ‘one of the biggest tax increases in the last 30 years’ – and warned it risked causing ‘substantial’ damage to Brit- ain’s economy. In a separate report, the organisation issued a warning on Labour’s plans to increase the minimum wage to £10 an hour, saying it could cost jobs.

Labour was under fire from small businesses after breaking a pledge to exempt them from the corpora- tion tax hike. A Labour spokesman dismissed reports of the manifesto, saying: ‘We do not comment on leaks.’

The draft manifesto also said that criminals would be sent to jail only as a last resort.