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Tag: jeremy corbyn
Danziger: Raise A Glass To Freedom

Danziger: Raise A Glass To Freedom

Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. Represented by the Washington Post Writers Group, he is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army as a linguist and intelligence officer in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. He was born in New York City, and now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.

Under Pressure To Quit After Election Loss, May Will Try To Form Coalition

Under Pressure To Quit After Election Loss, May Will Try To Form Coalition

 

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Theresa May will ask Queen Elizabeth for permission to form a government on Friday after an election debacle that saw her Conservative Party lose its parliamentary majority days before talks on Britain’s EU departure are due to begin.

Confident of securing a sweeping victory, May had called the snap election to strengthen her hand in the European Union divorce talks. But in one of the most sensational nights in British electoral history, a resurgent Labour Party denied her an outright win, throwing the country into political turmoil as no clear winner emerged.

May’s Labour rival Jeremy Corbyn, once written off by his opponents as a no-hoper, said May should step down and he wanted to form a minority government.

But May, facing scorn for running a lackluster campaign, was determined to hang on. A spokesman for her office said she would go to Buckingham Palace to ask Queen Elizabeth for permission to form a government – a formality under the British system.

Sky News reported that Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) would back her, allowing the Conservatives to reach the 326 seats needed for a parliamentary majority. The DUP declined to comment.

With 649 of 650 seats declared, the Conservatives had won 318 seats and Labour 261.

The DUP, which took 10 seats, was considering an arrangement which would involve it supporting a Conservative minority government on key votes in parliament but not forming a formal coalition, Sky said.

“If … the Conservative Party has won the most seats and probably the most votes then it will be incumbent on us to ensure that we have that period of stability and that is exactly what we will do,” a grim-faced May said after winning her own parliamentary seat of Maidenhead, near London.

But with complex talks on Britain’s divorce from the EU due to start in 10 days, it was unclear what their direction would now be and if the so-called “Hard Brexit” taking Britain out of a single market could still be pursued.

After winning his own seat in north London, Corbyn said May’s attempt to win a bigger mandate had backfired.

“The mandate she’s got is lost Conservative seats, lost votes, lost support and lost confidence,” he said.

“I would have thought that’s enough to go, actually, and make way for a government that will be truly representative of all of the people of this country.”

Asked whether Brexit negotiations should be delayed, Corbyn told Sky News: “They’re going to have to go ahead because Article 50 has been invoked.”

“Our position is very clear, we want a jobs-first Brexit, therefore the most important thing is the trade deal with Europe,” he said.

Corbyn said Labour was ready to lead a minority government. Chief among its potential allies would be the Scottish National Party (SNP), which suffered major setbacks but still won a majority of Scottish seats.

 

From the EU’s perspective, the upset meant a possible delay in the start of Brexit talks and an increased risk that negotiations would fail.

“We need a government that can act,” EU Budget Commissioner Guenther Oettinger told German broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. “With a weak negotiating partner, there’s a danger that the negotiations will turn out badly for both sides.”

The EU’s chief negotiator said the bloc’s stance on Brexit and the timetable for the talks were clear, but the divorce negotiations should only start when Britain is ready.

“Let’s put our minds together on striking a deal,” Michel Barnier said.

Sterling tumbled as much as 2.5 percent on the result while the FTSE share index opened higher. The pound hit an eight-week low against the dollar and its lowest levels in seven months versus the euro.

“A working government is needed as soon as possible to avoid a further drop in the pound.” said ING currency strategist Viraj Patel in London.

Craig Erlam, an analyst with brokerage Oanda in London, said a hung parliament was the worst outcome from a markets perspective.

“It creates another layer of uncertainty ahead of the Brexit negotiations and chips away at what is already a short timeline to secure a deal for Britain,” he said.

Conservative member of parliament Anna Soubry was the first in the party to disavow May in public, calling on the prime minister to “consider her position”.

“I’m afraid we ran a pretty dreadful campaign,” Soubry said.

May had unexpectedly called the snap election seven weeks ago, even though no vote was due until 2020. At that point, polls predicted she would massively increase the slim majority she had inherited from predecessor David Cameron.

May had spent the campaign denouncing Corbyn as the weak leader of a spendthrift party that would crash Britain’s economy and flounder in Brexit talks, while she would provide “strong and stable leadership” to clinch a good deal for Britain.

But her campaign unraveled after a policy u-turn on care for the elderly, while Corbyn’s old-school socialist platform and more impassioned campaigning style won wider support than anyone had foreseen.

In the late stages of the campaign, Britain was hit by two Islamist militant attacks that killed 30 people in Manchester and London, temporarily shifting the focus onto security issues.

That did not help May, who in her previous role as interior minister for six years had overseen cuts in the number of police officers. She sought to deflect pressure onto Corbyn, arguing he had a weak record on security matters.

With the smaller parties more closely aligned with Labour than with the Conservatives, the prospect of Corbyn becoming prime minister no longer seems fanciful.

That would make the course of Brexit even harder to predict. During his three decades on Labour’s leftist fringe, Corbyn consistently opposed European integration and denounced the EU as a corporate, capitalist body.

As party leader, Corbyn unenthusiastically campaigned for Britain to remain in the bloc, but has said Labour would deliver Brexit if in power, albeit with very different priorities from those stated by May.

“What tonight is about is the rejection of Theresa May’s version of extreme Brexit,” said Keir Starmer, Labour’s policy chief on Brexit, saying his party wanted to retain the benefits of the European single market and customs union.

Analysis suggested Labour had benefited from a strong turnout among young voters.

The campaign had played out differently in Scotland, the main faultline being the SNP’s drive for a second referendum on independence from Britain, having lost a plebiscite in 2014.

SNP leader and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it had been a disappointing night for her party, which lost seats to the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson said Sturgeon should take the prospect of a new independence referendum off the table.

(Additional reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Alistair Smout, David Milliken, Paul Sandle, William Schomberg, Andy Bruce, William James, Michael Urquhart and Paddy Graham in London, Padraic Halpin in Dublin, Writing by Estelle Shirbon, Editing by Angus MacSwan and Janet Lawrence)

IMAGE: Theresa May

Britain’s Labour Party Battles For Soul And Identity

Britain’s Labour Party Battles For Soul And Identity

By Elizabeth Piper

LONDON (Reuters) — In the 1970s, a trio of socialists joined a battle to steer Britain’s Labour Party to the left. Within a few years, two of them had seized control of the council that governed London, running the capital for half a decade.

Almost 40 years on, the same three men, led by new party chief Jeremy Corbyn, are closer than ever to their goal of pushing the opposition party to the hard left. But in doing so, they have set off an internal war which could end its chances of winning an election for years.

Two months after 66-year-old Corbyn was elected leader on a wave of enthusiasm for change, some Labour lawmakers closer to the center are rebelling openly over his stand on vexed questions such as how to tackle terrorism and whether Britain should bomb Syria.

With slurs and accusations flying on both sides, the battle for the soul of the Labour Party is turning nasty.

Alongside Corbyn stand two old friends and colleagues who form the rest of the trio: Labour’s finance spokesman in parliament, John McDonnell, and Ken Livingstone, who led the now-defunct Greater London Council (GLC) and later served as the capital’s mayor.

Livingstone says he has seen it all before, not least when he became GLC leader in 1981. “I am watching what is happening to Jeremy and it reminds me of what I went through in ’81. I was depicted as a pro-terrorist, an agent of the Soviet Union,” said the 70-year-old, nicknamed “Red Ken” at the time.

“But like me, Jeremy’s not giving in to this and he’s not changing his policies because of these lies,” he told Reuters at his terraced house in northwest London. “It is very nasty, but he’s got four-and-a-half years before the next election to turn this around and I think he will.”

Corbyn may not get that long – rumors of plots to oust him are rife – but Livingstone and McDonnell are battling to protect him.

The three have worked together since the early 1970s, “usually on the same side on virtually every issue”, said Livingstone. In the mid ’70s, he said, they set up campaigns to get more socialists onto local councils.

While Livingstone led the GLC, McDonnell was the council’s finance chief, although their rule ended in 1986 when the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher abolished the body. Corbyn, meanwhile, headed to parliament, campaigning from the left while voters consigned Labour to opposition for almost two decades.

In 1997, Tony Blair finally won a landslide election victory for “New Labour”, but only after steering the party away from its trade union roots. There was now little room for the three leftists.

Blair even expelled Livingstone from the party for running for mayor of London as an independent in 2000, an election he won. Blair deemed him too left wing to represent Labour, although he was eventually let back into the party.

Now the pendulum has swung again; Corbyn and his supporters have moved quickly to break what they call the top-down tyranny of New Labour to return “democracy” to the party. While no longer a lawmaker, Livingstone has been appointed by Corbyn as the joint head of a committee reviewing party policy on renewing the submarines which carry Britain’s nuclear weapons.

“OLD SCHOOL”

The trio are “old-school” campaigners; Livingstone describes finding a leaflet while “shuffling through papers” from 1980 when he and Corbyn were the speakers at a rally intended to help make the GLC socialist.

Livingstone admires what he calls Corbyn’s honesty, one of the reasons cited by many of the mainly young new Labour members and supporters who backed his leadership campaign. Many also saw him as the only alternative to the party “establishment”.

But others, including many of Corbyn’s own lawmakers, see his refusal to compromise on his socialist principles as a problem and do not trust his closest allies.

Corbyn was elected on Sept. 12 after former leader Ed Miliband’s attempt to fuse centrism with a more left-wing doctrine failed to convince voters in last May’s election. Many did not trust Labour to run the economy well, while the legacy of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, backed by Blair’s government, also weighed heavily.

The party was already split when some lawmakers reluctantly nominated Corbyn for the leadership after facing what one senior Labour member described as an awful selection of candidates.

Starting as a rank outsider, Corbyn not only won the votes of the leftist old guard but captured the mood of younger members with his opposition to the Conservative government’s austerity measures to eliminate a large budget deficit.

Some senior party members refused to work with Corbyn but others decided to give him a chance when he brought moderates as well as more natural allies into his shadow cabinet, whose members hold portfolios mirroring those of the government.

But Corbyn then moved to tighten his control over the party by bringing in new advisers, endorsing a campaign to get leftists onto local councils and sticking closely to his principles, including an anti-war stance. Some more mainstream Labour lawmakers, wary of public opinion, became increasingly critical.

“KINDLY GO”

Social media has become the forum for often vicious spats, and the Labour Party seems at war with itself.

Following the Paris bloodbath on Nov. 13 claimed by Islamic State, Corbyn questioned the “shoot-to-kill” policy of British police in tackling such attacks. One lawmaker who criticized his comments was told to “get behind the leader or kindly go”.

It is not an isolated case.

Several lawmakers said they have had to distance themselves from his stance on the “shoot-to-kill” policy, his opposition to joining air strikes against Islamic State in Syria and his statement that if prime minister he would never use nuclear weapons. This, they said, was to persuade voters that Labour would keep the country safe.

Some were branded Tories, or Conservatives. Others feared they would be hounded out of their jobs.

McDonnell, 64, has also ruffled feathers among centrists, notably when he brandished a copy of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book — a collection of the Chinese communist leader’s thoughts — in parliament.

Livingstone himself prompted outrage when he responded to a lawmaker’s criticism of his appointment to the defense review by suggesting he needed “psychiatric help”. The lawmaker had a history of depression and Livingstone was forced to apologize.

Richard Angell, director of Progress, a group of Labour “modernizers” which has been touring the country to gauge public feeling, says Corbyn has alienated centrist members by surrounding himself with leftists. “His controversial appointments are of individuals more enthusiastic about his leadership than even he might be,” Angell told Reuters.

TIME HAS COME

Livingstone points out that Corbyn has strong support among party members who now number more than 380,000, up from about 270,000 in August and close to the more than 400,000 figure when Blair was elected in 1997.

He condemns the attacks on Corbyn as disloyal and blames a hostile media owned by “corrupt, tax-dodging billionaires” for demonizing the Labour leader.

With control over much of the party’s apparatus, the leftists are also trying to boost their wider appeal through a group called Momentum.

Some Labour lawmakers say Momentum is “a party within the party” and portray it as little more than a lynch mob to get rid of moderate parliamentarians. Momentum denies this.

Its aim is “to open up the Labour Party to make it more like a social movement” developing what one organizer, 28-year-old James Schneider, calls “a more democratic and equal society”.

An opinion poll this month by YouGov research group for the Times newspaper showed 66 percent of Labour members believed Corbyn was doing well. However, a ComRes poll showed the general public was now more than twice as likely to say they have an unfavorable view of Corbyn as favorable.

For John Mills, a Labour donor and businessman, there needs to be “some sort of synthesis” of the idealism of Corbyn and “the pragmatism and experience” of the Labour right to take the party forward and end the Conservatives’ grip on power.

“In the end the Labour Party will reorganize itself,” he said. “No, I don’t think it’s dead.”

(Editing by David Stamp)

Photo: Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party addresses the Scottish Labour Party conference in Perth, Scotland October 30, 2015. REUTERS/Russell Cheyne