Let’s put Corbyn in the Shadow Cabinet!
THE two hard-Left candidates running to lead Labour say they want Jeremy Corbyn to stay in frontline politics – after he led the party to its worst election result since 1935.
Rebecca Long-Bailey, who is standing to be leader, said she would give Mr Corbyn a top job because she ‘loves’ him. And Richard Burgon, who wants to be her deputy, said he had a ‘valuable role’ to play – perhaps even as Shadow Foreign Secretary.
Miss Long-Bailey, who is trailing Sir Keir Starmer in Labour’s leadership race, has been labelled the ‘Continuity Corbyn’ candidate after she gave him ten out of ten for his leadership. It emerged at the weekend that she had told supporters in London that she would hand the failed leader a high-level brief if she were to succeed him.
Asked if she would give him a job if she got into No 10, the Labour business spokesman said: ‘I’d like to but I don’t know whether he wants to do it... It’s up to him. I love him so.’
Mr Burgon, who is standing as deputy leader, said he believed Mr Corbyn could play a ‘valuable role’ on the front bench. ‘If he was Shadow Foreign Secretary, that would be ideal,’ he said.
He called the Labour leader a ‘friend and a comrade’, adding: ‘I’ve never met a more principled, less egotistical person than Jeremy Corbyn. Plenty of his critics are not fit to lace his boots.’
Miss Long-Bailey has been publicly backed by hard-Left Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and Jon Lansman, the founder of the pro-Corbyn Momentum group.
But speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show yesterday, she said she found it insulting being called the ‘Continuity Corbyn’ candidate. ‘I’m very much my own person and to suggest
I’m a continuation of any individual is quite disrespectful, not least because I’m a woman,’ she said. But she backed Mr Corbyn’s policies, and added: ‘We’ve come so far and we’ve developed some of the most transformational policies that we’ve seen in a generation.’
She also said there was nothing ‘radical’ in Labour’s election promise to spend £82.9billion extra a year by 2024 – and called for that level of spending to be retained as party policy.
She added that if she wins, Labour would not campaign to rejoin the European Union at the next election. ‘I think it will be absolutely disastrous to go into the next general election advocating a position of re-joining the EU,’ she said.
‘Not fit to lace his boots’
THE abject political pygmies vying to become the new Labour leader gravely intone that they must be honest about the reason the party suffered electoral annihilation. Yet in the same breath they lie to themselves.
Terrified of infuriating the members, who fawningly regard Jeremy Corbyn as a messiah, the wannabes insist the Marxist terror sympathiser was NOT responsible for the crushing defeat. Despite a post-mortem examination, they have failed to learn any lessons from Labour’s obliteration.
This paper believes in a strong opposition holding Tory ministers to account. Judging by the woeful finalists, we might be waiting an eternity.