Labour’s ‘Stalinist’ economics

SHADOW Chancellor John McDonnell’s economic plans have been compared by Philip Hammond to Stalin’s policies which led to a grain famine which killed four million in the Soviet Union.

A Corbyn-led government could also lead to a return to the ‘squalor’ of the 1970s Labour government when streets were piled with rubbish in a wave of strikes, said the Chancellor.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, he said ‘ruinous’ policies unveiled last week were a wake-up call to the Tories on ‘how dangerous Labour would be in government’. Their plan to force firms to hand over up to 10 per cent of shares

to boost workers’ rights would have a ‘chilling’ effect on industry and turn the UK into a ‘pariah’ for investment.

It amounted to the ‘confiscation of wealth’, he said, and warned that ‘Marxist’ Mr McDonnell posed a more sinister threat than Mr Corbyn.

Mr Hammond said: ‘As Stalin found out, [if] you take the grain from the peasant that they intended to plant for next year’s crop, next year you haven’t got a crop because they didn’t plant.

‘If you undermine people’s confidence in the economy … investment will stop. And if that happens we go backwards.’