Peddling the politics of a banana republic
NATIONALISE the banks, print lorryloads of extra money to pay for a massive state spending binge and fleece the middle classes with a string of punitive new taxes.
No, not the hare-brained policies of some mad despot in charge of a banana republic but the centrepiece of Labour’s brave new economic programme. Day Three of the Jeremy Corbyn ‘revolution’ and the party is careering ever further into the realms of Marxist fantasy. By appointing John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor, Mr Corbyn consigned the last vestiges of New Labour to the scrapheap and served notice that any future government of his would launch a ferocious assault on middle and high earners.
Class warrior McDonnell would increase National Insurance by seven per cent for 40p income taxpayers and bring in a rate of 60p for those on over £100,000. He also wants additional wealth and land taxes. Mr McDonnell has a reputation as a crass and vulgar bully-boy. He once said of Tory minister Esther McVey that someone should ‘lynch the bitch’, wished he could go back in time to assassinate Mrs Thatcher and praised IRA terrorists for bringing peace to Northern Ireland.
And this man aspires to be Chancellor of the Exchequer – guardian of the nation’s finances and the second most powerful politician in Britain. The rest of Mr Corbyn’s new shadow cabinet ranged from the mediocre and the hypocritical to the utterly unknown.
Kerry McCarthy, a militant vegan who wants to end livestock farming, was given the food and rural affairs brief; Hilary Benn, at odds with his leader over EU membership, remains Shadow Foreign Secretary; and, by taking home affairs, Andy Burnham proved he’d work with anyone to stay on the front bench.
Having initially been criticised for selecting too many middle-aged white men, Mr Corbyn made a point of handing the key portfolios of health, energy, education and the Treasury to women. Ludicrously they are so inexperienced that they have served fewer than 20 years in Parliament between them. But perhaps t he most farcical appointment was Lord Falconer remaining shadow Justice Secretary. Given Mr Corbyn’s sheer loathing for New Labour, the hypocrisy of Tony Blair’s old flatmate and comrade accepting a job from him is simply breathtaking. Meanwhile lifelong republican Mr Corbyn – whose victory was warmly welcomed by Moscow yesterday – agreed to take his place on the Queen’s Privy Council. Worryingly, this will entitle him to see classified security briefings, despite his sympathy for terrorist groups from Beirut to Belfast and admiration of President Putin.
Today however, Mr Corbyn will be in more familiar company as he addresses the brothers at the TUC.
More than any modern Labour leader, he is a creature of the unions. They put him in, they pay his bills and they will now demand his support in their planned campaign of civil disobedience against Tory union reforms.
They have said they’re prepared to break the law in a concerted bid to topple the Government elected just four months ago. If Mr Corbyn backs this affront to democracy, he’ll prove once and for all that – far from being a serious politician – he’s nothing more than a rabble-rouser.
THREE weeks after saying it would welcome asylum seekers from Syria, Germany has been so overwhelmed that it has closed its borders for the first time since 1995 – along with Austria, Hungary and Slovakia. So Europe’s most enthusiastic champion of free movement across the Continent has finally learned what we in Britain have known for years. Relinquish control over your national borders and you invite chaos.