Corbyn: Britain can learn a lot from Marx

JEREMY Corbyn has pledged to spend billions renationalising industries – and claims Britain can ‘learn a great deal’ from Karl Marx.

The hard-Left Labour leadership contender said the founder of Communism was ‘ brilliant’ and his views were ‘fascinating’.

He said he would like to see the renationalisation of the rail network, the nuclear industry, Roy a l Mai l and energy providers.

Mr Corbyn is determined to overturn Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation revolution and the battle by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to kill off Clause IV in Labour’s constitution, which committed it to a key tenet of Marxism – the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

His comments indicate that, as leader, he would emulate Lenin by seizing the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy.

Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show, he also called for a return to the 50p top rate of income tax, an increase in corporation tax and a possible windfall tax on vast wealth.

Mr Corbyn, would not confirm whether he was a Marxist – but he praised the German philoso- pher whose writings led to the rise of Bolshevism, adding: ‘Marx analysed what was happening in a brilliant way. The philosophy around Marx is fascinating.

‘The role of the state or government, of the community, is surely to provide people with some security in their lives, to provide them with a decent health service free at the point of use, a welfare state that stops people falling into destitution. We are not doing that – we are making it worse.

‘ Where t here are natural monopolies like Royal Mail, like the railways, it seems counter- intuitive that we spend a great deal of money investing in railway infrastructure, billions, and then we hand it over to trainoperating companies to run it.

‘The idea that you can run a fair market in the energy system is a bit odd. There is no competition – there is a false market.

‘Call it renationalisation, call it public ownership, but there is a great deal of money being made out of all of us by gas and electricity companies who are benefiting from the infrastructure investment that taxpayers have put in over the past 50 years.’