Election reports
Party leader plans to remain in top role, whatever the election result, even as key allies ‘airbrush’ him out
JEREMY CORBYN has said he intends to stay on as Labour leader even if he suffers a landslide defeat in the general election.
The recent council elections suggested Labour is heading for a historic defeat to the Conservatives next month, but Mr Corbyn last night said would be “carrying on” whatever the result.
“I was elected leader of this party and I’ll stay leader of this party,” he told the website Buzzfeed.
Speaking as he visited Leamington Spa he insisted he was “serious about winning the election”.
has also learnt that Mr Corbyn’s union allies have pledged to fight for him to remain as leader regardless of the result because they are determined not to hand his “scalp” to moderates in the party.
A senior figure at Unite, Labour’s biggest single financial supporter, said it will not allow Labour moderates and Tories to have the satisfaction of seeing Mr Corbyn quit. Meanwhile, Mr Corbyn’s advisers have reportedly argued that Neil Kinnock carried on as Labour leader for another five years after he lost the 1987 general election to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party.
Mr Corbyn will today tell his supporters they have “four weeks to take our wealth back” after he joined his shadow chancellor in praising the teachings of Karl Marx.
The Labour leader, who wants to raise income tax for people earning more than £80,000 per year, will warn of “a reckoning” if his party wins the election for “those who thought they could get away with asset stripping our industry, crashing our economy through their greed and ripping off workers and consumers”.
Mr Corbyn will launch the party’s election campaign in Manchester, where he will claim a “rigged system” has been “holding us back”.
But some of his closest allies, including shadow ministers, clearly believe it is the leader himself who is holding them back and have airbrushed him out of their campaign literature.
Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, has failed to mention Mr Corbyn once in a two-page leaflet.
Richard Burgon, the shadow justice secretary, and Barry Gardiner, the shadow secretary of state for international trade, both key allies, have also made no reference to him in leaflets.
It follows complaints from Labour’s local election candidates that they lost council seats because Mr Corbyn was “radioactive” on the doorstop.
Labour surrendered 320 council seats last week, a margin which, if replicated at next month’s general election, will result in a landslide victory for the Conservatives. Mr Burgon, who nominated Mr Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership election, has failed to reference Mr Corbyn once in his fourpage campaign leaflet, instead using a photograph of himself alongside Rebecca Long-bailey, the shadow business secretary. His constituency of Leeds East, where he has a 12,533 majority, is one of Theresa May’s key target seats. Cat Smith, who has worked for Mr Corbyn as a policy adviser, has also omitted her former boss from her leaflet. She is defending a majority of 1,265 in the seat of Lancaster and Fleetwood. Other candidates, including Paula Sherriff, the shadow women and equalities minister, and Jack Dromey, the shadow business minister, have done the same.
Andrew Percy, the Government’s northern powerhouse minister, said: “Jeremy Corbyn’s closest allies are trying to take voters for fools by airbrushing their nonsensical and embarrassing leader out of election leaflets. It is a simple fact that any vote for any Labour candidate anywhere in Britain will be claimed by Jeremy Corbyn as a vote for him and his failed, disastrous and dangerous ideas.”
Mr Corbyn yesterday described Marx as a “great economist” and defended his shadow chancellor, John Mcdonnell, who said on Sunday that there was “a lot to learn” from Marx’s tract Das Kapital. Asked if he was influenced by the ideas of Marx, Mr Corbyn said: “All great economists influence all of our thinking. “Yes, I have read some of Adam Smith, I have read some of Karl Marx, I have looked at the words of [David] Ricardo, I have looked at many, many others.”
Mr Corbyn was also criticised for planning a new tax on millions of people who pay for private health insurance, to fund free parking at hospitals in England.
The Association of British Insurers said his plan to increase insurance premium tax on health products from 12 per cent to 20 per cent would discourage people from taking out private health cover.
Last weekend, John Mcdonnell told Andrew Marr that he thought there was a “lot to learn” from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Jeremy Corbyn leapt to the Labour shadow chancellor’s defence, praising Marx as a “great economist”. Statements like these – and there are many more of them – are the reason why the British people are going to strike a blow to the Labour Party on June 8.
When Communists openly stand they are massively rejected by the electorate: one was elected in 1924, one in 1935, two in 1945 and not a single one since. But now that Marxist-leninists have effectively taken over the leadership of the Labour Party, the British people will have the sublime opportunity to show what they think of an ideology estimated to have killed 100 million people in the 20th century alone.
When Fidel Castro died, Corbyn described him as a “huge figure in our lives” and “a champion of social justice”, overlooking that the Cuban dictator had trade unionists and homosexuals imprisoned. Political executions were excused as “flaws”.
Less than a fortnight ago, Mcdonnell appeared on a platform in Trafalgar Square below the flags of the Stalinist faction of the Communist Party and President Assad’s Ba’ath party. Asked a few years back who had been most significant in developing his political thinking, he replied: “The fundamental Marxist writers of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky,” because they had taught him how “you can’t change the world through the parliamentary system”. He also stated at the height of the Troubles that the “ballot, the bullet and the bomb” would unite Ireland.
Now, at long last, the British will be able to express their view of statements like these, in an election in which the Communist Party itself is – significantly – not standing, in order not to dilute the votes for the entryists who have already taken over Labour.
How the shades of Clement Attlee, Ernie Bevin, Hugh Gaitskell, Jim Callaghan and the other Labour giants who fought Communist entryism from the 1920s onwards must be hoping for a Tory victory on June 8. Such an outcome will allow their once-great party to be recaptured by democrats, people who believe that you can change the world through the parliamentary system. Indeed, that any other way just leads to the chaos, misery and poverty seen after all the Communist putsches in history.
Of course many of the most sinister members of the Corbyn groupuscle that took over the Labour Party, owing to the stupidity of giving entryists an electronic vote for £3 in 2015, are not standing in this election. These include Jayne Fisher, a former manager of Sinn Fein’s London office, who is Corbyn’s “stakeholder engagement manager”; Seumas Milne, his press advisor, who has argued that “For all its brutalities and failures, Communism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality”; and James Schneider of Momentum, who has boasted of enjoying seeing policemen routed by ultra-left demonstrators.
These are not the hapless activists of the Citizen Smith sitcom; they are unpleasant and dangerous people who applauded Corbyn’s invitation of the IRA leadership to tea at the House of Commons only weeks after it had nearly assassinated Margaret Thatcher.
On June 8 the British people’s verdict on Corbyn will be one on his entourage, too.
Harold Wilson famously said that the Labour Party “owed more to Methodism than to Marx”, which was true when he led it in the Sixties and Seventies, but clearly isn’t true today. The views of the genuine revolutionaries who surround Corbyn are profoundly un-british, and the British people – who have an excellent nose for this kind of thing – have already shown in the local elections what they think of it all.
This election is about much more than simply Corbyn’s refusal to permit a drone strike on the Isis leader, or his failure to sing the National Anthem at the Battle of Britain memorial service. This is about the foul Marxist-leninist ideology in which he implicitly believes, despite its lamentable record.
follow Andrew Roberts on Twitter @aroberts_ andrew; read more at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion
Andrew Roberts is a visiting professor in the War Studies Department of King’s College, London