Stand up for democracy

AS CAMPAIGNING RESUMES, JEREMY CORBYN SPEAKS ABOUT THE NEED TO LEARN FROM THE APPALLING EVENT IN MANCHESTER:

"Our nation has been united in shock and grief. But as I watched thousands of people coming together in Albert Square in Manchester, I saw unwavering defiance too.

"This attack sought to divide us, and instead we sent a powerful message of solidarity and of love. We saw so much evidence of our humanity: from the people we ask to protect us in the emergency services; from those who rushed towards the carnage to comfort the dying or offered lifts home and places to stay; from those gathered the following day in Albert Square.

"So for the rest of this election campaign all of us need to stand together and we need to stand up for democracy.

"Because when we talk about British values, including tolerance and mutual support, democracy is at the very heart of them."

Millions of pensioners betrayed by Theresa May

Jeremy Corbyn reacts to Theresa May's attack on older people in today's Tory manifesto.:

Millions of pensioners are betrayed by Theresa May's manifesto. She is hitting older people with a classic Nasty Party triple whammy. Scrapping the triple lock on pensions, removing the Winter Fuel Allowance and forcing those who need social care to pay for it with their homes.

To be fair though, Jeremy, at least these are policies she didn't steal from us.

Jeremy Corbyn launches Labour's Campaign

Labour commits to free school meals for all primary school children

Today, Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party, and Angela Rayner, Shadow Secretary of State for Education, committed the next Labour Government to providing free school meals for all primary school children.

Labour will fund the policy by introducing VAT on private school fees. Labour’s policy will benefit the educational attainment and health of all children while ending a subsidy to the privileged few.
Research confirmed by the National Centre for Social Research and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown offering universal access to free school meals improves educational attainment through improvements in pupils’ productivity, enabling primary school pupils to advance by around two months on average.


The provision of free school meals also has been proven to improve the health of pupils through better nutrition - with over 90 percent of pupils eating a school lunch consuming food or drink containing vegetables or fruit (including fruit juice) compared with only 58 percent of pupils who eat packed lunches.

At the launch event in Lancashire, Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party, said:
“No child in the UK should go hungry at school. By charging VAT on private schools fees, Labour will make sure all primary school children, no matter what their background, get a healthy meal at school.


“The next Labour Government will provide all primary school children with a free school meal, invest in our schools, and make sure no child is held back because of their background.”

Angela Rayner, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, said:
“The Government’s cuts to the school budget are making school meals worse and limiting the number of children that can be fed. This decision affects the educational attainment and health of pupils.

“While the Conservatives offer tax giveaways to their billionaire friends, they are cutting the schools budget and threatening the health and futures of all our children by denying children the basic right of a healthy lunch at school. By investing in our education system and providing free school meals for every primary school child, we will remove the stigma attached to free school meals, and improve health and attainment for all children.“

Labour's plan for a better railway

Jeremy Corbyn's New Year Message

I think it’s fair to say, that 2016 is a year that will live long in all our memories.

It saw twelve months of enormous change not just in Britain but the world.

But the New Year gives all the opportunity to start afresh.

One of the best things about my job as Leader of the Labour Party is meeting some fantastic people all over the country. But every day I see the political system letting down the people of this country; how decisions made in Westminster are making people’s lives harder. Whether that’s elderly people not receiving the care at home they deserve, putting huge strain on them and their family, or whether it’s the people waiting longer in A&E or on trolleys because our National Health Service and social care system is at breaking point, despite the best efforts of the wonderful and dedicated staff.  Whether it’s the homeless families who are being priced out of a housing market that only works for the few. This Christmas, 120,000 children didn’t have a home to call their own. That’s scandalous. And it’s damaging those young people’s formative years. Our children also need a first class education for everyone, not just for a privileged few.

 As well as insecure housing there is massive insecurity at work too. Millions of people can’t plan their lives because whether on temporary or zero hours contracts they don’t know what job or what hours they’ll have from day to day, week to week or month to month. And for many, pay is so low that it doesn’t make ends meet.

2016 will be defined in history by the referendum on our EU membership. People didn’t trust politicians and they didn’t trust the European Union. I understand that. I’ve spent over 40 years in politics campaigning for a better way of doing things, standing up for people, taking on the establishment, and opposing decisions that would make us worse off.

We now have the chance to do things differently. To build an economy that invests and works for everyone across all our nations and regions.

Labour accepts and respects the result of the referendum. We won’t be blocking our leaving the European Union, but we won’t stand by. Those in charge today have put the jobs market, housing, the NHS and social care in crisis. We can’t let them mess this up. It’s about everyone’s future. A Brexit that protects the bankers in the City and continues to give corporate handouts to the biggest companies is not good enough.

Labour was founded to stand up for people, and we founded the institutions that do that day in, and day out, like our NHS. We are the party that listens to you and makes Britain better. Let’s do that, together, in 2017.

Jeremy Corbyn's speech to our South East Regional Conference (2) The Solution

Housing:


"Labour will allow councils to borrow to build council housing again and we will suspend right to buy so that when that housing is built it stays. We will invest in building genuinely affordable homes to buy, rent or for shared ownership. We have put forward a plan to invest in building housing and to create skilled jobs in the construction sector, and to meet higher standards of energy efficiency benefiting the occupants and the environment.


"We will toughen regulation on the private rented sector to ensure homes are fit for human habitation and rents are controlled."


Environment:

"We’re not going to use public money to subsidise dirty, groundwater-polluting, landscape-scarring industries like fracking.


"We will invest in the transition to a low carbon economy, not clinging on to polluting technologies that we can consign to history by harnessing technological advances with public investment.
And that investment delivers a return; a stronger economy, better jobs with higher incomes that produce more tax revenue to better fund public services.
We have huge natural resources in the UK, a world-beating history of scientific research and technological development including in many of our institutions of academic and scientific excellence [but] as a country we lag behind the rest of the world’s major economies in generating energy from renewable sources. We lag behind on the speed of our broadband and we lag behind on our transport infrastructure too.


"Nowhere is that more true that on our railways."


Rail:
"The next Labour Government will take back control from the privateers and put control in the hands of passengers, commuters and elected politicians. We will invest in rail, invest in on-board broadband and cut fares."


NHS:


"The NHS is Labour’s proudest creation and as someone who once represented NHS workers, I know the dedication of NHS staff. But, under the Tories, the NHS is in crisis like never before.


"We know that flu epidemic or the norovirus can lead to a winter crisis but the Tories have put the NHS in crisis in spring, summer, autumn and winter. NHS waiting lists have never been longer. NHS deficits have never been larger and they are growing. More people are waiting longer in pain for an operation. More people are waiting longer, often in severe pain, in A&E.


"Over £4 billion of cuts to adult social care inflicted under the Tories has left hundreds of thousands of people without a care package. Thousands more with minimal 15 minute visits and more elderly people turning up at A&E due to neglect and not safe to be discharged home because the support is no longer there.

"Faced with this unprecedented crisis in A&Es, this unprecedented pressure on the NHS, what is the Tory solution? They wasted £3 billion on a top-down reorganisation of the NHS, they have privatised services, like ambulances in Sussex, and that privatisation has failed. Our great friend Ken Loach has quite rightly lead the protests against a £700 million privatisation of NHS services in Bath. Our excellent Shadow Health Secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, has already condemned this. They are threatening a new round of A&E closures and downgrades.


"This is why we are determined to bring all NHS Services back into the family of NHS provision.
That’s why we are focusing our National Campaign Day on Saturday 26 November on defending our NHS. So I want every CLP in the country out in their community campaigning to defend our NHS and to highlight the damage that the Tories have done. Our National Health Service - free at the point of use - with parity of esteem for mental health services and integrated with social care. That is at the very core of our vision for the kind of society we should be."


Strength in Numbers:


"Because our party doesn’t have the benevolence of the press barons, it doesn’t have the donations of oligarchs. What we have is each other. Over half a million of us. More members than every other political party in Britain, along with the millions in our affiliated trade unions.


"Our Labour Party now has over 550,000 individual members. That membership is our most valuable resource. If we organise it, then our ability to speak to voters, stand candidates, and lead campaigns in our communities, that ability is second to none. And working together, we can expose their failures on the economy, their failures on housing, their shambolic Brexit, their failed privatisation of our railways.


"By working together we can get more Labour councillors next year and a Labour Government to rebuild and transform our country so that no one and no community is left behind."

Jeremy Corbyn's speech to our South East Regional Conference (1) The Problem

"We meet after the global wake-up call of Tuesdays US presidential election...

      Whether in the US or the UK people feel left behind. Marginalised by an economic system that makes them work harder for less, while hoovering up ever greater rewards for a small elite.
People are right to be angry with our failed economic system, falling living standards and rising inequality.
     Young people today find it ever harder to get a home of their own. Harder to find good secure jobs. Landed in lifelong debt simply for trying to get an education.  Older people see their children and grandchildren struggling. Their libraries and community services cut. Their friends’ social care worsen. They’ve seen politicians privatise what once belonged to everybody and paid the higher bills and higher fares as a result.
     And if we don’t step forward and offer real solutions that meet the needs of our time then into the vacuum step the merchants of hate and blame. They see the problem, but instead of offering solutions to make people’s lives better, they offer someone to blame. Nigel Farage blames immigrants yet offers not a single practical proposal to put a penny more into the NHS. He actually wants to privatise our NHS, a service that now relies on hard-working migrants to keep going. The Tories bandied around terms like ‘scrounger’ and ‘skiver’, whipping up division against the unemployed and people with disabilities. And in the US we’ve had the shocking spectacle of Donald Trump’s election campaign, which found an unending list of people to blame: women, black people,
Mexicans, Muslims, military veterans. Everyone except the billionaire class of tax dodgers to which he himself belongs.
     However, we should remember that Donald Trump tapped into real problems: stagnating or falling wages, underfunded public services, insecure work and housing, years of being left behind and neglected, frustration that your children’s prospects look bleaker and anger at a political elite that doesn’t listen. But instead of offering real solutions, or the resources to make them work, he offered only someone to blame. Everyone, that is, apart from those actually responsible for a broken economy and a failed political system.
     The Tories do the same. They have opened the door to UKIP and fanned the flames of fear.
     Theresa May, as Home Secretary, fed the idea that immigration was the real problem; made promises she knew they couldn’t deliver about slashing numbers and whipped up hate with ‘Go Home’ vans. No wonder she didn’t even temper her welcome to Donald Trump. She has used the same strategy herself; if delivered with more refinement.
     We have no idea how Donald Trump proposes, as he has said, to “make America great again”, and Theresa May’s Tories offer slogans, but not solutions, for most people in Britain. We won’t tackle the damage done by elite globalisation just by leaving the EU. We won’t ‘take back control’ unless we take on the corporate vested interests that control our energy, our transport and have infiltrated our public services.
     One thing is for sure, neither billionaire Donald Trump nor the billionaire-backed Tories have any interest in giving people back control or reining in the predatory excess of a globalized free-for-all.

But Labour is in the business of real solutions to the problems and failures that Trump and the Tories are unable to address."

Jeremy Corbyn's reponse to Jeremy Hunt

Labour's new members

Interesting post by Aaron Bastani on the London Review of Books blog.  Click on the link to read it: Labour's new members.

Straight talking, honest politics

The Leadership Contest

As we finally stagger towards the two-thirds mark in an internal election that has taken twice as long as the national one, David Fish has drawn my attention to several interesting recent articles in the New Statesman.

First, Peter Wilby's column from July 30 has a bit of a pop at Harriet and a non-knee-jerk response to rise of Jeremy Corbyn.

Next, Helen Lewis on the dangers of over-reliance on social media.  And finally Mary Creagh MP (who, if I can remember that far back, was once briefly a candidate) on the sudden 'toxicity' of the middle ground.

Many thanks, David.