The next PM?
Corbyn’s pitch for power
Jeremy Corbyn didn’t have high hopes when he ran for leader of the Labour Party in 2015, said The Economist. After he won, few thought he would survive long. Now, with a weak Theresa May struggling to unite her party behind one vision of Brexit, “the unthinkable image of a left-wing firebrand in No. 10 Downing Street is increasingly plausible”. In his speech to Labour’s conference in Brighton on Wednesday, Corbyn cast his party as the “government in waiting”, and bookies have him as the favourite to be the next PM. Meanwhile, shadow chancellor John Mcdonnell “set out a Marxist programme of exorbitant spending and state confiscation guaranteed to bankrupt Britain in weeks”, said the Daily Mail. Not content with renationalising the railways, utilities and Royal Mail, he said he would bring Private Finance Initiative schemes worth tens of billions of pounds back under government control. Mcdonnell let slip that the party had been “war-gaming” economic scenarios likely to follow a Labour victory, including investor panic and a run on sterling. “Are voters seriously prepared to trust these people with their livelihoods?”
Yes, they are, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian. Corbyn and Mcdonnell have “redrawn the Left boundary of what an opposition party in Britain can pledge and still be considered a plausible prospect for government”. May’s hopes of a landslide were built on “the idea that Corbyn was a ridiculous, sinister candidate for prime minister, and she lost her majority”. It was ineffective partly because “crying socialist wolf” doesn’t work when much of the electorate has forgotten about the 1970s and Communism. But the real change is that, with Brexit, the Tories “have normalised all forms of radicalism. By hurling themselves at a plan in defiance of sober economic counsel, the Conservatives have raised the bar for what counts as a dangerous gamble with the nation’s prosperity; they may have removed it altogether.” Today, “revolution is the only item on the menu”.
Even so, Labour is a long way from power, said Matthew Sowemimo in the New Statesman. Its leaders seem unduly complacent. A “one more heave” approach – hoping to turn out the same voters who supported Labour on 8 June, plus a few more – is risky: the Tories will likely have a new leader at the next election, and won’t “fight such an inept campaign” again. There are already deep splits in Corbyn’s coalition, between its youthful idealists and its hard-left veterans, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times. Hence, the party’s refusal to hold a conference debate on Brexit, which would have split members down the middle; and the contrast between the “sunny optimism” on show in Brighton and the more bullying side of Corbynism. The BBC felt the need to hire a security guard to protect its political editor Laura Kuenssberg there, and the party was once again accused of tolerating anti-semitism. Those searching for a new politics are likely to be disappointed in the end.