SO FAR LEFT EVEN RED KEN SACKED HIM
AS the new Shadow Chancellor, IRA sympathiser John McDonnell has been defending himself against his many detractors in the Labour Party.
He insists he is well equipped for his high-profile role on the economy. ‘I was Chancellor of the Exchequer for London when I was 29,’ he says.
But it’s a hollow boast. In three disastrous years as chairman of the finance committee of the Greater London Council (GLC), McDonnell managed to take the capital to the brink of ruin – before being sacked unceremoniously by the GLC leader Ken Livingstone.
McDonnell had been given the crucial finance portfolio by Livingstone in 1982. The appointment had nothing to do with his financial acumen. The plain fact was that Livingstone and McDonnell were political soulmates. They both loathed Margaret Thatcher and regarded the IRA hunger strikers – convicted paramilitaries protesting in jails in Northern Ireland – as engaged in a ‘legitimate struggle’ against British military occupation.
McDonnell was the GLC’s finance committee chairman when the Thatcher government had imposed caps on town hall spending.
A Trotskyite whose politics are more hardline than either Jeremy Corbyn’s or Livingstone, he was determined to oppose these ‘spending caps’ whatever the cost.
He rallied his supporters to oppose the caps and carry on spending regardless, even though this would mean breaking the law and result in government funding being withdrawn from the GLC.
If McDonnell and other rate- cap rebels had been successful, the GLC’s money would have run out and old people’s homes and schools would have been the first to close.
Livingstone only averted financial catastrophe by sacking McDonnell in 1985. The former London Mayor revealed in his 1988 autobiography that McDonnell had ‘exaggerated’ spending figures to support his case that the GLC had to ignore the rates cap. For his part, McDonnell never forgave him. ‘Ken [Livingstone] and I may remain friends but I will never trust him again...,’ he said. ‘We are selling the people out because those like Ken feared disqualification from office and are clinging to power no matter what.’
Many are now asking how voters could possibly trust this man with the country’s finances.
‘He’s not just out of his depth – who’s to say he won’t manipulate the figures again to suit his political agenda,’ said one senior Labour MP. John Martin McDonnell, 64, was born in Liverpool – the son of Elsie and Robert, a docker.
The family moved to Norfolk where his father became a bus driver. After grammar school his employment – four years in a factory, research for the National Union of Mineworkers, a job at the TUC – proved his socialist credentials. In the meantime, he found time to study A-Levels at evening classes and gain a master’s degree in politics and sociology at London’s Birkbeck College.
Twice married, he became a fulltime political agitator after election to the GLC in 1981.
At a TUC rally on Sunday night, McDonnell reminisced about the early 1980s when he was arrested and charged – wrongly – with GBH along with Greenham Common women campaigning against US missiles being stationed in Britain. He also admitted he had diverted rates to pay for sleeping bags for the Left-wing campaigners to sleep at the RAF base in Berkshire
His conversion to the hard Left was complete when he became editor of the Trotskyite Labour Herald newspaper, which was allegedly part-financed by Colonel Gaddafi’s Libyan regime. He stood for Parliament in 1992 in Hayes and Harlington and not only lost but had to pay his Tory MP opponent Terry Dicks £70,000 in damages and costs after alleging he was sympathetic to Saddam Hussein. Needless to say, McDonnell’s supporters in the unions and shadowy Leftwing causes raised the funds to clear his debts. He won the seat in 1997 and became chairman of the hard- Left Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs.
HISmanifesto includes nationalising the banks, the railways and the utilities, and a 60 per cent income tax rate for anyone earning £100,000. His Who’s Who entry talks about ‘fermenting (sic) the overthrow of capitalism’.
He made a name for himself as a serial rebel against his own side. Only two MPs rebelled more. Corbyn and Tony Benn. A pugnacious and highly ambitious figure, McDonnell has none of the new Labour leader’s easy-going charm. While Corbyn made the leadership ballot paper at his first attempt, McDonnell failed twice – in 2007 and 2010. He could never muster support because he is one of the most unpopular MPs at Westminster, especially among his own party.
It’s why he ran Corbyn’s campaign this time – along with the Labour leader’s son Seb, who happens to be a paid researcher in McDonnell’s Westminster office.
For a frontline politician, he has committed a worrying number of gaffes. There was revulsion over remarks he made about the Northern Ireland peace process in 2003, saying: ‘It’s time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle.
‘It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of [hunger striker] Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA.’
Colin Parry, whose son Tim, 13, was killed in the Warrington bomb in 1993, said at the time: ‘His comments are incredible. For him to think my son’s death was justified in political terms is about the greatest disservice he could do to my son and family.’
In 2009, McDonnell was suspended from the Commons for five days after he picked up the ceremonial mace, which represents the Royal authority of Parliament, during a heated debate on a third runway at Heathrow. In 2010, he remarked in a warm-up question for Radio 4’s Any Questions that if he could return to the 1980s he would ‘assassinate Thatcher’.
Then, on Remembrance Sunday last year – when Britain was marking the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War – he was a guest at an alternative ‘Poppy’ comedy night in London where the Royal Family were branded ‘parasites’.
McDonnell talked about a visit he had made to Liverpool, where Esther McVey, the employment minister, was a Tory MP over the river on the Wirral.
He said: ‘I was in Liverpool where one of our [union] organisers launched the Sack Esther McVey Day on her birthday. I spoke at a packed public meeting... a group in the audience completely kicked off, quite critical of the whole concept, because they were arguing, “Why are we sacking her? Why aren’t we lynching the b****?”’ One of the people clapping in the audience was Jeremy Corbyn.
In 2013 he supported a petition to overturn a conviction handed to Royle Family star Ricky Tomlinson in 1972 – who was jailed for ‘intimidation’ after picketing building workers’ dispute in Shrewsbury.
Two years ago, he suffered a heart attack but he insists he is now fighting fit – and he certainly has lost none of his ability to offend. In a speech this year McDonnell, who has never held a frontbench job, said he would ‘swim through vomit’ to oppose Tory benefit cuts.
The truth is, however, it is his appointment to Shadow Chancellor, one of the highest offices in the land, which has caused so many in the Commons to feel queasy.