Momentum kick out councillor for being ‘too working class’
He bases his economics on Marx, lists his hobby as ‘overthrowing capitalism’, has called for insurrection and was sacked by Red Ken for being too Left-wing. No wonder the City and Bank of England have suddenly woken up to the fact that Labour’s Shadow Cha
THE son of a miner and late Labour MP has been deselected as a councillor because he is ‘too working class’.
Kieran Harpham’s electoral ward in Sheffield has been taken over by hard-Left activists who have kicked him out.
Many are members of Momentum while others are students, Trotskyite academics from the city’s universities or middle-class professionals.
Labour insiders say the 27-year-old was seen as ‘too authentically working class’ and ‘not Left-wing enough’.
Mr Harpham’s father, Harry, won David Blunkett’s former Sheffield seat for Labour in 2015 but died from cancer nine months later.
Jeremy Corbyn, who attended the funeral, described the 61-year-old as a ‘decent man dedicated to justice for working people’.
Last week his son found himself unexpectedly facing reselection for the Broomhill ward against five other candidates.
Members voted to replace him with Janet Ridler, a 58-year- old historian who only recently joined the party and who lives in Sheffield’s wealthiest suburb, Dore.
When approached for comment, Lord Blunkett said: ‘Kieran’s dad, who was a former miner and never a Blairite, was my agent and successor as MP for Brightside and Hillsborough.
‘I’m extremely distressed that his son Kieran should have experienced the backlash of the Momentum drive for deselections – not least as Jeremy Corbyn attended his dad’s funeral.
‘I hope people will examine their consciences.’
Sheffield Labour moderates say the situation is even more ‘mad’ because Harry Harpham’s parliamentary seat was taken by his wife Gill Furniss, who is Kieran’s stepmother.
A former council member, who would not be named, said: ‘Kieran’s deselection is absolutely bonkers. What kind of situation is it when a shadow minister’s stepson isn’t Left-wing enough?’
A veteran Sheffield councillor and Corbyn supporter said: ‘Broomhill is in its own world. It’s full of arty-farty people who think they know better than anyone else.
‘Kieran’s problem is that he’s too authentically working class and not enough of a Left-wing intellectual for them.’
A former senior Labour councillor added: ‘Kieran is a really good guy, really dedicated and hard-working, who did well to win in a marginal ward in 2016.
‘But as soon as you are not automatically re-selected, you’re in real trouble. Broomhill has always been a difficult seat and it does lend itself to a kind of intellectual snobbery.
‘It’s an area where people are interested in theoretical views of socialism rather than practicalities and in many ways a northern replica of what you get in Islington. Being a Labour member there is no longer about working-class people and who represents them.’
He added: ‘What’s happened is a worry for the future of the party in Sheffield.’
Mr Harpham’s deselection follows aggressive purges of Labour moderates in London, including ten Haringey councillors who are understood to have resigned or been deselected.
In Leeds, the Labour council leader Judith Blake is understood to be facing a battle against Leftwing candidates after she was not automatically reselected.
Mr Harpham, who has overcome two kidney transplants and a brain tumour, said: ‘The problem is the influence of the people who have become members over the
‘Examine their consciences’
last two years. Before the rise of Corbyn and Momentum, Labour members were happy to disagree but would get along with one another. I don’t think it’s constructive for getting work done within the party.’
He added: ‘I have to say that I’m unhappy to have been deselected but that’s life and I’ll try to stand again elsewhere.’
Mr Harpham, who will keep his seat until elections in May, has been labelled a Blairite for signing a letter on a vote of no confidence against Mr Corbyn.
He said: ‘I wouldn’t say I was a Blairite or a fan of Tony Blair, although I can see the positives of that administration, such as in education.’ He accused his detractors of not ‘knowing the history of the Harpham family’.
A politics and history graduate from Sheffield Hallam University, Mr Harpham joined the Labour Party at the age of 14 and campaigned for his father and other Sheffield MPs. His father was such a staunch socialist that when Margaret Thatcher died he tweeted a picture of him toasting her death with a pint of beer.
He was a member of the National Union of Mineworkers and took part in the 1984-5 strike. He later became deputy leader of Sheffield City Council.
Mrs Ridler was unavailable for comment.
JUST imagine you are the leader of the Labour Party, buoyant in the polls and hoping to replace Theresa May as Prime Minister.
Now imagine reading that one of the world’s biggest financial institutions, with more than £600 billion in assets and some 55,000 employees in 42 countries, had warned investors that you were a ‘threat’ to the British economy, whose policies would send profits tumbling and drive business abroad.
Wouldn’t you want to reassure people — to persuade them there was no need to fear a Labour government?
Well, that’s what I would do. But I’m not Jeremy Corbyn, who this week reacted to the banking giant Morgan Stanley’s warnings with a virulent, demagogic attack on Britain’s financial powerhouse, the City.
In his words, the Square Mile is full of ‘speculators and gamblers’, who can expect punitive taxes should he win power.
‘When they say we’re a threat,’ said Mr Corbyn in a video released on Thursday evening, his eyes popping with Messianic fervour, ‘they’re right.’
For once, I absolutely agree with him. Mr Corbyn and his fellow cultists are indeed a threat. Not to firms like Morgan Stanley, which will simply move abroad if he gets his hands on the keys to 10 Downing Street, but to millions of British families, who would see their living standards fall through the floor.
The real danger, though, lies not with Mr Corbyn, who is basically a glorified frontman. The greater threat comes from his puppet master and Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, who strikes me as the most malignant presence in British politics for generations.
In public, Mr McDonnell cultivates an appearance of avuncular vagueness. After the Budget, Mishal Husain on Radio Four’s Today programme asked him eight times to tell us what his massive spending would cost in extra debt interest. Eight times he refused to answer.
But in politics, as in so much else, the devil is in the detail. In Mr McDonnell’s case, the metaphor could hardly be more apt.
For a clue to his priorities as a Labour Chancellor, this week I read a book he published exactly ten years ago, when he made an unsuccessful attempt to succeed Tony Blair. THE
title is Another World Is Possible: A Manifesto For 21st Century Socialism. Copies are oddly hard to get hold of, but there is one in the British Library. It makes fascinating reading, though not for the reasons you might think. Some of Mr McDonnell’s chief enthusiasms — Marxism, the IRA, ‘mass insurrection’ — are kept under wraps.
There is a lot of stuff about building a better world through the State taking over the economy, but virtually no specifics. No spending figures, no projected tax revenues, nothing.
No surprise, then, that ten days ago the man who wrote that book was unable to answer a simple question about how Britain would pay for his multibillion-pound spending spree.
A responsible Chancellor would have the facts at his fingertips. But responsibility means compromising with financial reality, and that is something Mr McDonnell is completely unprepared to do.
For careful readers, though, there are clues to Mr McDonnell’s values in his book. Every now and again, amid all the pious flannel, his language lurches into the fire and brimstone of the hard Left.
The foreign country he mentions most enthusiastically is Venezuela. Mr McDonnell thinks it is a disgrace that the Blair government failed to back the ‘democratically elected government of [Hugo] Chavez’, and he has warm words for the Marxist bully’s ‘ real world economics’, which have apparently created ‘alternatives to the market economy’.
Ten years on, of course, we know where Chavez’s policies have led: political repression, appalling violence and an inflation rate that currently stands at almost 800 per cent. If this is the ‘ alternative’ that Mr McDonnell wants for Britain, no wonder almost all copies of his book have strangely vanished.
But that is not all. Comically, he calls for the establishment of a ‘Ministry for Peace at the heart of government’, while simultaneously demanding that Britain scrap all its nuclear weapons. And this is the man who wants to control our defences at a time when North Korea has developed a missile capable of hitting London.
What else? Nationalisation of the railways, obviously, though there is nothing about how and why Whitehall would run them more efficiently.
He wants a ‘citizen’s income, that allows everyone to enjoy a reasonable standard of living’, whether they work or not. I wonder who would pay for that? And he wants to scrap the union reforms of the Eighties so that ‘workers can challenge decisions on jobs and production’, which would mean anarchy on the factory floor and paralysis in the boardroom.
Anything else? Well, how about ‘redistributing wealth from rich to poor’ in Britain? And I almost forgot: he calls for a ‘massive redistribution of resources and technology from richer to poor countries’, too, which implies a ‘ massive’ increase in our foreign aid budget, to use his own term, if Labour won power.
Back in 2007, this, unsurprisingly, fell on deaf ears. But how times have changed! Today, Mr McDonnell’s book looks less like the mad fantasy of a superannuated student-union
socialist, and more like a chillingly plausible formula for disaster.
For behind the pious waffle, the fundamental fact about Labour’s Shadow Chancellor is that he is far, far to the Left of every single one of his predecessors.
Nine men have served as Labour chancellor since the party entered government in the 1920s, starting with Philip Snowden and moving through the likes of Jim Callaghan and Roy Jenkins in the Sixties to Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. In policy, temperament and ideological background, none was remotely close to Mr McDonnell.
This is a man who told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that he gets his economic ideas from Karl Marx’s book Das Kapital. First published in 1867, this was the book that inspired Communist revolutionaries such as Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, who were responsible for the deaths of millions.
Indeed, in Who’s Who, McDonnell listed ‘fermenting [sic] the overthrow of capitalism’ among his hobbies. And after the financial crisis of 2007-8, which caused so much misery and anxiety, he bragged that he had been ‘waiting for [it] for a generation’. Mr McDonnell certainly likes his politics with a violent edge — just like his friends in the IRA, whose ‘ bombs and bullets and sacrifice’, he said in 2003, should be publicly honoured.
Just look, for example, at what he said before the 2015 election, when he called for ‘ direct action’ and ‘insurrection to instil fear in the rich elite’. And read his words in the anarchist journal Strike! — a publication that none of his Labour predecessors would ever have had in the house — where he called himself ‘ the last Communist in Parliament’.
He ended with a chilling war cry. ‘Words are not enough,’ he wrote. ‘The elite who still dine at the Ritz, shop at Fortnum & Mason and populate the company boards in the City . . . will only be fearful when our talk moves on to action.’
Remember, this was not something Mr McDonnell wrote as a teenager or even as a student. He wrote those words in 2014, as a man of 62. They were not a joke. He meant every word.
Even as Shadow Chancellor, Mr McDonnell has not been able to hide his ugly side. After the Grenfell Tower fire, he infamously claimed that the residents had been ‘murdered’ by the Conservative Government — a statement that could hardly have been more likely to incite public anger.
I have heard Labour supporters claim that the responsibilities of office would temper Mr McDonnell’s extremism. Well, they failed to restrain his great hero Hugo Chavez, who silenced dissent, ruled by decree and turned his oil-rich country into an economic basket case.
In any case, we know how Mr McDonnell would behave in office. In the mid-Eighties he served as deputy leader and finance chairman of the Greater London Council (GLC). His record makes for grisly reading.
Mr McDonnell was so extreme, so uncompromising, so determined to stoke confrontation with the Thatcher government, that even his Left-wing allies disowned him. As one fellow GLC member put it: ‘ He was so far to the Left that I couldn’t see him without a pair of binoculars.’
Eventually his boss, Ken Livingstone, had to sack him. Imagine having that on your CV — ‘I was the one man in Britain too Left-wing for Ken Livingstone!’
It sounds comical. But now imagine John McDonnell walking into 11 Downing Street as the master of the nation’s finances: the self-described heir of Marx and Lenin playing politics with the lives of millions. Few of us would be laughing then.
It is fashionable, I know, to complain about bankers and businesspeople. Yet if Corbyn and McDonnell began by launching an offensive against the City of London, as they promise, the consequences for millions of British families would be devastating.
For all the infantile rhetoric of the hard Left, the plain fact is that in the last tax year, the City and its allied financial services handed over tax receipts worth about £72 billion. Just think what losing all that revenue would mean for schools, hospitals, roads and pensions. For
the past two years, Britain’s banks and businesses have largely ignored Mr Corbyn, assuming that he would never win power and concentrating on the challenges of Brexit instead. But in the past few weeks, the City has woken up to the genuine possibility of a Corbyn government. Indeed, Morgan Stanley’s warnings are merely a symptom of a growing panic.
In private, I have learned, senior bankers — including the chief executive of one of the world’s largest banks — admit that their firms are contemplating moving assets out of this country, in order to protect investors, including millions of British pension-holders, from the impact of a far-Left government. Indeed, some senior bankers think a Corbyn government would be more damaging to Britain’s economy than a no-deal Brexit, since it would have a devastating impact on our reputation as a place to do business.
on Thursday night, Richard Sharp, a stalwart of the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee, warned that allowing Britain’s debt to spiral out of control would endanger the nation’s economic stability and prosperity.
Many City figures believe that Sharp was issuing a thinly veiled warning about a free- spending Corbyn government. As he argued, more borrowing could put Britain at risk of a collapse similar to that of Venezuela, the economy so admired by Labour’s leadership.
If Corbyn and McDonnell did come to power, I suspect three things would happen almost immediately. First, the pound would collapse as foreign investors lost confidence — a scenario Mr McDonnell himself expects, since he told the Labour conference that he was preparing for a ‘run on the pound’. Second, there would be an immediate flight of companies, personnel and capital from the City of London, as major banks moved abroad to avoid the massive taxes and regulations imposed by a Corbyn government. So we could wave goodbye to a lot of those tax receipts straight away.
And third, there would probably be what financial insiders call a ‘gilts strike’, with investors refusing to buy government bonds. That would make it impossible for a Corbyn government to cover our existing spending — let alone the gigantic new commitments they promise if they win power.
All this, at a time when Britain is beginning to carve out a new role outside the EU, would be catastrophic, worse than the financial crisis of 2007-8, worse than the IMF bailout of Britain in 1976, and worse even, I think, than the onset of the Great Depression in 1931.
How would Mr McDonnell react? Would he step back from the brink?
We know the answer. Based on his form at the GLC, as well as the record of his parliamentary career, he would press on. Every setback would be blamed on a conspiracy; every reverse attributed to traitors and plotters.
No doubt there would be more talk of direct action and insurrection. And it would end precisely where Mr McDonnell wants it to end, with violence in the streets.
Mr Corbyn is quite right, then. He and his friend are indeed a threat — not just to our short-term living standards, but to our trading reputation, our economic future, our national security and the very fabric of our society.
Does Mr Corbyn understand what he is doing? I am not sure. I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to assume that he is a fundamentally well-meaning man, albeit an unusually stupid, incurious, deluded and vain one.
But Mr McDonnell is different. I think he knows precisely what he is doing. And if this cold, hard, dangerous man ever gets his hands on our national finances, I genuinely fear for the future of our country.