Wilson’s press chief quits party with attack on Corbyn
LABOUR veteran Joe Haines launched a ferocious assault on Jeremy Corbyn’s party yesterday for fighting a phoney war on poverty and being ‘antisemitic, anti-American and anti-business’.
Mr Haines, the former press secretary to Harold Wilson, also revealed he was quitting the party and made clear he would not be voting Labour on December 12.
He said: ‘The thought that I might be complicit in putting him [Corbyn] in Downing Street is repulsive, which is why I have not renewed my membership of the party.’
The Labour leader last week made clear that he would put fighting inequality at the heart of his campaign, saying the ‘scale of poverty and deprivation… across our country shames this Tory Government’.
But in a letter to The Times yesterday, Mr Haines – who worked for Harold Wilson from 1969 to 1976 – tore into the notion that ‘real poverty’ existed in Britain today.
He said: ‘ Some of Corbyn’s supporters romanticise about fighting a new class war and prattle about poverty. They don’t know what they are talking about.
‘I grew up in a gas-lit, bug-ridden slum with a widowed mother receiving 18 shillings [90p] a week to bring up three young children and pay the rent.
‘ That was real poverty and it doesn’t exist today.’
Mr Haines, who said he would not vote Tory or Liberal Democrat next month either, wrote that he was disenfranchised by the ‘real poverty’ today – ‘the poverty of thought and ability of our politicians’.
The former press aide, who joined Labour as a teenager when Clement Attlee was Prime Minister, lambasted the modern party under Mr Corbyn as ‘antisemitic, antiAmerican, anti-business, and anti all I ever worked for’.
But he added that ‘there is also a meanspirited nastiness about its leadership that is spreading’.
Mr Haines has been a savage critic of Mr Corbyn, saying earlier this year that he was not intellectually up to being Opposition leader or Prime Minister.
He claimed: ‘There is simply an empty space where his political brain should be.’
Labour shrugged off his latest criticism last night.
A party source said: ‘We may have lost one persistent political opponent but we’ve gained hundreds of thousands of members who were out in force today campaigning for the real change Labour is bringing.’
Separately yesterday, former Tory MP Matthew Parris said he was quitting his party after 50 years and called for Tories who o ppose Brexit to support the Liberal Democrats in next month’s poll.
The newspaper columnist said he would vote for the Remain-backing party on December 12 ‘to defeat Tory zealotry over Europe’.