The MARXIST MANIFESTO
Corbyn and his hard Left cronies meet in shadow of the Savoy to plot their revolution
JEREMY CORBYN gathered his closest hard-Left allies yesterday to sign off his radical ‘ Marxist manifesto’ that includes a deluge of new taxes and spending pledges.
The Labour leader was joined at plush offices behind the Savoy in London by key aides such as Seumas Milne and a slew of controversial senior party figures to hammer out the final details of his Election policies amid a bitter civil war over immigration. Last night Mr Corbyn hailed his manifesto as a blueprint for a ‘more egalitarian society’ adding: ‘I am very, very proud of the contents of it.’
Under Clause V of the party’s constitution, the leader must share his programme for government with his Shadow Cabinet, trade union bankrollers such as Len McCluskey and the powerful NEC before it can be published.
But trust among the various factions is so limited that mobile phones were confiscated and no one was allowed to keep a copy of the manifesto to avoid a repeat of the humiliating 2017 leak.
Labour’s conference mandated the party to stick to EU free movement rules but party strategists feared such a policy would see the party wiped out with Leavesupporting voters in their northern heartlands.
The Mail on Sunday was told the issue was ‘fudged’, with the manifesto planning to state simply that freedom of movement for EU citizens would continue if the UK stayed in the bloc but is ‘a matter for the negotiations’ if the country leaves. The manifesto is due to be published on Thursday but last night sources said it contains significantly more Left-wing policies than the 2017 version.
Insiders told this newspaper the radical blueprint for government agreed unanimously last night is set to include:
Scrapping of ‘opt-outs’ for the EU Working Time Directive, banning anyone from working for more than 48 hours a week and potentially risking NHS chaos;
A Right to Food Act that could be used to control some food prices;
A windfall tax on oil companies that risks pushing up petrol prices;
A widespread nationalisation programme of trains, energy firms and broadband providers;
The effective abolition of academies and free schools, with all educational institutions bought back under local council control;
A milkshake tax, with a massive expansion of the sugar levy;
Abolition of local NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups;
A new Cabinet Minister for Women and new laws to make misogyny a hate crime, which one critic claimed would amount to outlawing wolf-whistling.
The manifesto was written by Andrew Fisher, despite the key Corbyn aide saying in a private memo earlier this year that ‘I no longer have faith that we can succeed’. He also accused colleagues of a ‘lack of professionalism, competence and human decency’.
The radical Left- winger once boasted on camera that he had ‘very violent, bloody nightmares… fantasies’ about hitting former
Labour Cabinet Minister James Purnell because of hi s vi ews on welfare.
Among those present to sign off t he charter was controversial MEP Richard Corbett, one of Labour’s most ardent pro-Europeans. The leader of the party in Brussels sparked outrage last year for appearing to celebrate the death of Leave voters. Talking about the prospects for Remain in a second referendum, Corbett said: ‘As someone joked to me the other day, where there’s death, there’s hope.’ The remark was condemned for being ‘as tasteless as it is misguided’.
Also involved was key Corbyn backer Jon Lansman, who founded the powerful grassroots Momentum group, and who last year admitted possible economic chaos under a Corbyn government, saying: ‘ Other governments have faced challenges like runs on the pound. And we may face similar things.’
They were j oined by Claudia Webbe. She was such an ardent defender of Ken Livingstone that when the ex-London Mayor was suspended from the party in 2006 after likening a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, she said the decision ‘smacks in the face of true democracy’.
A member of Labour’s ruling NEC, the Islington councillor has been selected to replace scandalhit former MP Keith Vaz in Leices
‘Work time rules could cause chaos in the NHS’
LEN McCLUSKEY
Accused Jewish community of ‘intransigent hostility’ towards Jeremy Corbyn
CLAUDIA WEBBE
Railed against Ken Livingstone’s suspension after he compared Jewish reporter to concentration camp guard
ter East – a rock-solid Labour seat. Last night Labour refused to be drawn on the details of its manifesto but one source present branded plans to cap the number of hours people can work ‘a f****** mistake’.
If the EU Working Time Directive – which limits the working week to 48 hours and which most people can currently ignore – was extended to doctors and nurses, even some Labour MPs fear it would cause chaos in the NHS. Another source insisted the manifesto was nowhere near as radical as leaks suggest.
One MP said: ‘I think you’ll find there is a lot on the one hand this and the other hand that. There is plenty of wriggle room.’
Labour Party chairman Ian Lavery said: ‘This is the best manifesto you are likely to see.’
Asked if it was more radical than in 2017, Mr Lavery said that it was, adding: ‘We sorted all the problems and it was fantastic.
‘Everybody was up for it, very amicable, good discussions, good debate, very lengthy because we have got a great manifesto.’
Tory Trade Secretary Liz Truss branded it ‘a Marxist manifesto for Britain that will plunge this country into extortionate debt and deliver division and delay.’
ANDREW FISHER
Boasted he had ‘very violent, bloody fantasies’ about assaulting former Labour Minister for cutting benefits
RICHARD CORBETT
Sickeningly claimed Remain would win second referendum because elderly Brexit voters were dying off
SEUMAS MILNE
Defended brutal Communist dictator Joseph Stalin, suggesting number of purge victims had been exaggerated
MANY of us stay loyal to brands we love, long after we should have given them up. The quality of the material falls, the price rises, the workmanship declines, yet still we cling to what we know because human beings are like that. We want to continue to believe the best of things we are familiar with.
But in the end, the truth cannot be ignored any longer, and we look elsewhere. Surely it is time that millions of loyal, decent Labour voters realised that the party they still vote for bears almost no relation to what it once was, or to what it is supposed to be. It is abusing an honoured old name, and selling goods which are not just inferior to what went before, but utterly unlike them. They should look elsewhere.
The party of Clement Attlee, that did so much to win the war and which achieved the great peaceful r evoluti on of t he welfare state and the NHS – which even quite hardline Tories eventually came to accept as just –has gone.
The party of Hugh Gaitskell,
Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, which represented the patriotic, socially conservative working class and embodied the Methodist Christianity which helped to found Labour, has also disappeared. Even if you did not agree with them, you could respect them and assume their intentions were benevolent.
Into its place, but using its name, have come completely different f orces, i deas and movements. Various strands of Trotskyism, homeless communists left marooned by the fall of the USSR, wild egalitarians who hate success, terrorist sympathisers, crackpots, intolerant zealots of all kind – and now shameless antisemites and similar bigots as well – have streamed into the vacuum which remained when Old Labour died in the 1980s.
Just look at the team now signi ng off Labour’s manifesto, described in today’s Mail on Sunday, to see how the intellectual quality of the party has diminished and been transformed since the days of experienced heavyweights such as Denis Healey and Anthony Crosland. The success of Blairism kept the unlovely forces of the angry, resentment-driven militants in check for a while. But Blairism’s eventual defeat in 2010 triggered the revolution which put Jeremy Corbyn into the leadership. It did not stop there. It began a general process of takeover and transformation so that Labour’s governing bodies and its selection of parliamentary candidates have come increasingly under the control of the dedicated, concrete-hard left.
Such people are no doubt the source of the plan for nationalis ed broadband service, a scheme which – if implemented, –will swiftly demonstrate what state control can do to a formerly vibrant part of the economy. Alas, far too few can now remember t he creaky, obstructive slowness and inefficiency of the old nationalised industries. If Mr Corbyn can cobb le together a majority, millions unborn in the preThatcher era will find out in glum detail what they missed.
Only an outright Tory victory stands between us and t he Corbyn disaster. But the country is still barely awake to the danger. Boris Johnson and his team may feel reassured by polling figures which show them ahead, but there may be deeper currents the polls cannot see. It is not good enough merely to repeat slogans and rely on the slick methods of modern electioneering. Above all, this is no time for complacency. Mr Johnson must take the fight to the Corbynites and show them up for what they undoubtedly are – unfit to govern.