Jeremy Corbyn has given a further indication of the more leftist economic agenda he would pursue if he were elected Labour leader, indicating that he would seek to renationalise and then break up the ‘big six’ energy firms that dominate the energy market.

The Financial Times quotes an interview Corbyn gave to the charity Greenpeace, in which he said he wished “that the big six were under public control, or public ownership in some form”.

He said this could mean buying up shares on the stock market to build a controlling interest, and suggested the policy could be extended to include the National Grid.

Speaking directly to the FT, Corbyn said he did not want national government to control the entire British power supply, but said energy “should be publicly owned, whether that’s at community, municipal or national level”.

In an environmental policy document published yesterday, Corbyn set out ten pledges to bring about an end to fossil fuel reliance and a greener economy, including “socialising” energy supply. It did not overtly vow to renationalise the big six, but cited the model in which “180 German towns and cities [are] taking over their local electricity grids, selling themselves cleaner (and cheaper) electricity they increasingly produce for themselves”.

He also refers to repeated criticism of the big six energy companies – British Gas, SSE, Eon, RWE, Npower, Scottish Power and EDF – which have been accused of banking “record profits while energy bills have been driven sky high”.

The Daily Telegraph cites Peter Atherton, analyst at Jefferies investment bank, as saying the proposed renationalisation could cost £185bn. This would be the cost to buy all six firms outright, as under takeover rules any investor acquiring a stake of 30 per cent or more in any listed company must make a full buyout offer, so “we assume that all of the equity would be acquired”.

As the FT notes, four of the suppliers – EDF, Npower, Eon and Scottish Power – are actually owned by larger overseas conglomerates, so a more formal buyout would be required to bring them under the auspices of the UK government.

 

Labour leader: Yvette Cooper hits out at PM’s ‘broken promises’

7 August

Yvette Cooper has stepped up her campaign to win the Labour leadership election by accusing David Cameron of tearing up nine election promises.

“We may have our own leadership election going on,” said the shadow home secretary, “but Labour can’t allow David Cameron to get away with this and carry on like nothing has happened – he is taking the British public for fools.

“We have to confront him directly on every lie and broken promise – that’s exactly what I plan to do in parliament and across the country.”

Cooper’s decision to take the fight to the Tories is seen by The Guardian as her response to the “Corbyn surge”: meanwhile the Islington North MP’s campaign shows no sign of slowing, says the paper.

Cooper’s attack on Cameron

Yvette Cooper listed nine election promises she believes Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, have broken. They include:

Child benefits:

The PM denied during the general election campaign that he would cut child tax credits: yet George Osborne announced £4.5bn in cuts in the Budget.

Childcare:

Cameron promised in April to introduce a programme of tax-free childcare this September that would help up to 1.9m working families: it’s been delayed to January 2017 at the earliest.

Days off:

Whatever happened to Cameron’s pledge to give public officials and employees in big private companies three days off work every year to take part in volunteering? It was another pledge made on the election trail in April: it’s now been shelved, says Cooper.

In response, Conservative Leader of the Commons Chris Grayling denied that child benefits were being cut, describing the changes as a “freeze”, and insisted that commitments to tax-free childcare and volunteering days would be enacted.

Corbyn’s latest comments

On nuclear disarmament:

At a CND rally yesterday, Corbyn said he hoped to lead Labour MPs into voting against the renewal of Trident in next year’s Commons vote. It offered an historic opportunity, he said, to consider “what is real security in the world? The ability of society to provide housing, healthcare, education and hope for its entire population” – or the chance to spend “a phenomenal amount of money” on “weapons of mass destruction that can only bring danger and threat to the rest of the world”?

On the Tube strikes:

Asked on Channel 4 News whether he would condemn the unions – “many of whom fund his campaign,” the Daily Mail reports – Corbyn said the strikers were making a “sacrifice” to defend their conditions and had “every right to do that”.

On the IRA:

Interviewed by BBC Radio Ulster, Corbyn repeatedly refused to condemn the IRA for carrying out terrorist atrocities, the Daily Telegraph reports, “instead highlighting Bloody Sunday and the role of the British Army during the conflict”. Asked a final time if he condemned the IRA, Corbyn, who was speaking on a mobile phone during a train journey, said: “I feel we will have to take this up later you know”. Then his phone cut out.

On taxing the rich:

Writing in The Independent, Corbyn, who wants to reintroduce the 50p top tax rate, said: 

“Many well-off people I speak to, in Islington and around the country, would be quite happy to pay more tax to fund better public services or to pay down our debts… Opinion polls bear this out: better off people are no less likely to support higher taxes.”

 

Labour leader: Corbyn wants ‘right to buy’ for private tenants

6 August

Jeremy Corbyn is exploring the idea of halting council tenants’ “right to buy” and giving it instead to tenants renting from large-scale landlords.

The radical proposal was one of several floated yesterday as the left-wing Labour leadership candidate used an interview with the Evening Standard to unveil “a housing revolution to deal with the homes crisis in London and other areas”.

The latest examples of ‘Corbynomics’ were unveiled on the day it was revealed that a senior Conservative politician, Tim Loughton, had been “caught” trying to sign up as a registered Labour supporter so he could vote for Corbyn, who many Tories believe will prove unelectable.

Corbyn’s housing revolution in brief

• Seek to bring down house prices by building more homes – 240,000 a year minimum, half of them council houses – and restricting subsidies to buy-to-let landlords.
• Introduce a new ‘land value tax’ on land with planning permission that is not being developed: this would help pay for the new builds.
• Scrap “right to buy” for council tenants, drop the Tory plan to extend it to housing association properties, and look at introducing it for private tenants. (The Times says this would apply to tenants of “large-scale landlords”.)
• Give housing association tenants a collective right to “co-operativise” their housing association.
• Introduce rents caps, linking them with average local earnings.
• Let local council impose higher council tax on empty properties to discourage foreign investors – and consider banning the ownership of property by non-UK-based entities altogether.

A warning from the FT

The new land value tax might help towards the cost of building 240,000 new homes a year, but higher borrowing would be an option too, the Financial Times reports.

The paper goes to warn that while some of Corbyn’s big economic plans, such as the scrapping of student tuition fees, have been “carefully costed”, others, including a wave of nationalisations and the reversal of Conservative cuts, have not.

An FT analysis “shows these proposals could lead to taxation rising by hundreds of billions of pounds” in the next parliament if Corbyn were to win the leadership race and take Labour to victory in the 2020 general election.

Tory caught in the act

Tim Loughton, a former Conservative children’s minister, set out to show that the system that allows members of the public to pay the Labour party £3 and sign up as registered supporters – giving them the right to vote in the leadership election – is “a complete farce”.

Instead, The Guardian reports, his application was picked up by Labour’s vetting procedures and he was denied the opportunity.

It wasn’t difficult: Loughton used his parliamentary email address and filled in the box “What are your reasons for wanting to become a supporter of the Labour party?” with the response: “To vote for Jeremy Corbyn and consign Labour to oblivion for a generation”.

Loughton said: “If I’d got a voting paper I was going to tweet myself ripping it up, just to make a point about how ridiculous the whole open exercise is.”

A Labour spokesperson said: “We would like to thank him for his generous donation [£3] to the Labour party – which we are keeping. If he wants to donate more money he is very welcome to do so via our website.”

Labour leader: Corbyn ‘madness’ must stop, says Alan Johnson

5 August

Alan Johnson, one of Labour’s most respected figures, has urged his party to “stop the madness” and make sure Yvette Cooper, not Jeremy Corbyn, is elected leader.

Cooper, he says, has “the intellect, the experience and the inner steel” to take on the leadership and help get Labour back into power.

Corbyn, on the other hand, has been “cheerfully disloyal to every Labour leader he’s ever served under,” Johnson writes in The Guardian. 

“That’s fine so long as members understand that it’s the loyalty and discipline of the rest of us that created the NHS, the Open University” and all the century-old party’s “other achievements”.

Johnson, who was home secretary under Gordon Brown, made his intervention as Corbyn used a series of speeches and interviews to flesh out his vision for Britain…

Back to the 1970s: In a speech in Leeds, he praised James Callaghan’s government of 1976-79 – not because it presided over the winter of discontent, when, as The Times reminds us, “rubbish piled up in the streets and the dead went unburied”, but because the Callaghan administration “was investing in high technology, growing industries, computing and many other fields”.

State ownership: At a rally in south London, he attacked George Osborne for selling shares in RBS at two-thirds of the price the taxpayer paid when the government rescued the bank. “I don’t condemn him for selling those shares at a loss,” Corbyn said. “I condemn him for selling those shares at all.”

Blair’s ‘war crimes’: Interviewed on Newsnight, Corbyn said the consequences of Tony Blair’s “illegal” and “catastrophic” decision to go into the Iraq war with the US “are still played out with migrant deaths in the Mediterranean and refugees all over the region.” Asked if Blair should be charged with war crimes, he said: “If he’s committed a war crime, yes. Everyone who’s committed a war crime should be.”

Future foreign policy: In an interview with Pink News, Corbyn suggested that countries with a poor record of gay rights should face “economic consequences”. He said: “In the case of the most extreme countries, such as Uganda, I think we’ve got to be far tougher with them. Indeed, I’ve had meetings with Ugandan delegations and ministers that have been quite difficult, to say the least.”