Team Corbyn: the cracks start to show

Budgets have a nasty habit of unravelling on chancellors, said Andrew Grice in The Independent. But after Philip Hammond’s speech last week, it was Labour that was left floundering as the party’s leaders sent “confusing and contradictory messages”. Jeremy Corbyn attacked Hammond’s plans to raise the threshold for personal tax allowances to £12,500, and the higher-rate level of income tax to £50,000, as “ideological tax cuts”. Yet the shadow chancellor, John Mcdonnell, voiced support for the changes, saying a future Labour government would stick to imposing tax rises on the top 5% of earners (i.e. those on £80,000 and more). The muddled response is a symptom of a growing rift between Corbyn and Mcdonnell. According to The Sunday Times, the demotion of Corbyn’s son Seb, who used to be Mcdonnell’s chief of staff, has added to tensions between the pair over strategy.

To represent this divide as a clash between Corbyn’s ideological “purism” and Mcdonnell’s “pragmatism” would be simplistic, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. But the shadow chancellor is certainly hungrier for power than Corbyn, and it was his approach that ultimately prevailed when it came to deciding how Labour would vote on the Budget. Twenty Labour backbenchers, including Yvette Cooper and Margaret Hodge, defied the instruction to abstain and voted against the tax cuts. Never before has Mcdonnell been “lambasted by other Labour MPS for not being left wing enough”. It was bizarre, said Ross Clark in The Spectator. Many of the rebels were “Labour’s heirs to Blair”. Yet these “moderates” opposed tax cuts for those on £50,000 a year, a group that “includes a huge swathe of senior teachers, nurses and other public sector workers who ought to form a bedrock of Labour support”.

People shouldn’t read too much into the Labour leadership’s mixed messages, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. They’re a symptom of tactical clumsiness rather than any great “ideological split”. Corbyn, never a “natural parliamentary performer”, didn’t intend to contradict Mcdonnell when he fell back on “rote lines” about Tory tax cuts. The “immediate political fallout” from this row for Labour is likely to be limited – voters don’t pay much attention to Budgets. But the episode holds troubling lessons for Labour about the inability of its leadership to clearly communicate policies. Theresa May’s promise to end austerity has moved the political debate onto “Labourfriendly territory”. Yet the party’s incoherent response to the Budget suggests it will struggle to exploit this advantage.