31st October 2015

In 1983 Neil Kinnock warned people against embracing Margaret Thatcher as the next Prime Minister with his warning, 'Not to be ordinary. Not to be young,. Not to fall ill. Not to be old.

Thirty two years after the electorate ignored his warning and despite the intervening years of New Labour ascendancy with Blair and Brown, his words ring truer that ever and apply to an ever wider cross section of the electorate.

There is certainly little reward today in being a steelworker, in being low-paid, in being an immigrant or asylum seeker, in being young, in falling ill or becoming elderly.

The current furore over tax credits, a constitutional crisis according to Cameron and Osborne more accurately described by Jeremy Corbyn as a crisis for three million families.

Despite repeating his question six times Cameron avoided answering six times, repeating instead the current mantra of the Tory Party:

A high-pay, low-tax, low-welfare economy.

This meaningless phrase sits alongside the other meaningless phrase repeated again and again by this Tory Government of a country:

Living within its means.

Apart from the sight and sound of two millionaires lecturing people on the need to live within their means, (and George Osborne and David Cameron are not the only millionaires on millionaire row, the net worth of the Tory front bench is estimated at 70 Million with 18 of the 29 members of the Cabinet also qualifying as Millionaires) it is the hollowness of the phrases that emerge in the debates about hard working families when all the evidence points clearly to the fact that most of those three million who rely on tax credits are the very same people who work hard to earn their poverty.

Over the five years of the Tory led coalition wages in fact stagnated or fell back so that it is only now that wages are approaching levels last seen at the end of the New Labour era. So far from actually delivering a high wage economy the pursuit of austerity has resulted in lower investment, lower wages, and lower productivity.

The rhetoric employed by Cameron and Osborne is empty and hollow, we do not have a high-pay economy and are unlikely to see one emerge any time soon. The proposed national living wage is nothing more than a trick with mirrors, legerdemain, sleight of hand and as our manufacturing capacity collapses (first we sell it to Asian Businessmen who finally, because they cannot make a profit and there is no Government support withdraw because it is their only realistic option, why go down with a sinking ship?) so we become increasingly reliant on service industries or as Cameron suggested, self-employment, neither of which sectors offer the possibility of transforming a families budget overnight.

Alongside death, taxation is one of the few things of which we can be certain in this life. For Daniel Defoe, in his 1726 book, The Political History of the Devil, only: things as certain as death and taxes can be more firmly believed unless of course you are someone who is considered to be outside the circle of those subject to a shared responsibility for contributing to the, common good, so the better connected you are, the better your lawyers are, dependent on where you base your head office or where you claim to be trading from and which country, you may or may not pay tax, HMRC will doubtless cut you a deal and the cabinet will look out for its own.

As Leona Helmsley was quoted during her trial, We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.

Low taxes for some then.

But welfare also needs, according to Cameron and Osborne to be lowered, because as a country we need to, live within our means. 

How is welfare to be lowered? What is welfare? How are our means determined?

Britain is in fact a rich country, determined by both our domestic product and spending power Britain is the second largest economy in Europe, and fifth and tenth respectively in the world.

Because our manufacturing base has eroded with jobs exported both to Europe and to Asia so our service economy has grown and in particular financial services. Alongside this re balancing of our economy, because money flows into the single largest financial services centre in the UK, London so London has become more prosperous and wealth has gravitated South. Alongside this process so inequality has grown, the rich have become richer (as have the poor) but the imbalance has grown larger and larger as the rich become richer still.

As a nation living within our means would be relatively easy if our means were distributed more fairly and concepts like the Common Good, were owned by those who through good fortune, inheritance, hard work or  simple luck had achieved a more financially secure position.

Welfare is often taken to mean benefits, it certainly appears to be the mission of Ian Duncan Smith to define welfare as benefits, and with each new measure he introduces so benefits are reduced whether by singling out those with a spare room, or those who, through disability find work difficult or impossible he focuses our attention on benefits. But welfare is more, far more than benefits.

In 1945 the rhetoric of the Labour Government was rich and challenged the nations conscience. homes for heroes, education for all, treatment free at the point of need. It was a vision for which people of this country had fought two bitter wars, it was the Kingdom of Bevan.

It was the earnest socially rooted vision of a society that was just and fair, and I benefited from it.

The nightmare (it is certainly not a vision) of Cameron and Osborne is of a society increasingly divided between rich and poor, a society at odds with itself, a society where the young bear the weight of student debt into their adult lives, a society where home ownership becomes a remote financial possibility, a society of uncertainty and insecurity, a society of mac job's, serving lattes to machismo bankers.

The key to understanding welfare is to define the word:

Welfare, as defined in the OED means: the health, happiness and fortunes of a person or group.

The question facing Cameron and Osborne is not Jeremy Corbyn's question it is Neil Kinnock's.

In what way will a high pay, low tax, low welfare economy bring health, happiness and fortune to children, to young people entering adult life, to families in work or out, to the sick, to the elderly?

7th October 2015

I cannot bear to watch the news this week.

The Tory Party parading its narrow minded mendacity in Manchester.

Even the Guardian Newspaper has no choice but to report what is being said from the platform which makes for difficult reading.

If it is possible to draw any comfort from this pantomime of the vanities which is being played out in Manchester it comes from Greece, not the Greece of anti-austerity Syriza and Yanis Varoufakis, but the Greece of Herodotus.

Herodotus, a Greek Historian, born in Turkey in 485 BC.

Herodotus was credited with inventing history as a form of critical study and in his writings drew attention to the two great Tectonic Plates of History.

Hubris and Nemesis.

So I take comfort from my Herodotus as I see the pictures and the read the reports of the drama being played out in Manchester: Ian Duncan Smith advising the disabled to work (whilst showing no understanding of the tragedy that disability can mean for the individual so affected and their families), or Theresa May vilifying the stranger and the refugee in our midst (and being criticised not only by charities but by the IoD!) or George Osborne, declaring that Jeremy Corbyn spoke at a fringe meeting (as he will continue to do for the next five years), or David Cameron announcing how house building will start happening once builders can build for sale and not for rent.

And all this rhetoric set against the realities of what is happening not only Globally with climate  change and conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan which is displacing people from the Middle East and Africa, but what is happening locally in the lives of those affected by the reductions in Tax Credits, the increase in food bank dependency, the closure of the steel works in Redcar.

I make no great claims at understanding what fundamental shifts are taking place in the economy either in the UK or in China, but what is clear as I read Piketty and Stiglitz is that as inequality grows so the future becomes more precarious and as automation and technological change advance relentlessly, so precariousness shifts its way up the social strata from blue to white collar workers and obscene wealth aggregates to what we now call the 1%.

Manchester was the scene for the Peterloo Massacre which happened on the 16th August 1819.

Poor economic conditions and a lack of suffrage in Northern England resulted in a demonstration held in St Peter's Fields in  Manchester.

Some 60 - 80, 000 people gathered to protest and listen to speeches. The Magistrates deployed the Military to disperse the crowd and a Cavalry Charge with drawn sabres killed 15 people and injured over 500.

The tragedy was christened Peterloo in an ironic reference to the Battle of Waterloo fours years earlier.

Clearly the Tory Party have chosen Manchester to emphasise their aim of stealing Labour's ideas and promoting the Northern Powerhouse under the Chairmanship of postman's son. Lord Adonis, who despite his name is not, as far as I know, Greek.

As neither was Herodotus, but his survey of Greek History serves to remind us that if there is one great truth to be drawn from history, and this should perhaps be a warning when the Tory Leadership is unable to treat the Labour Leadership with the courtesy that fellow MP's should offer one another, that Hubris is always followed  by Nemesis.

So, and it is a small comfort, but I take comfort from seeing and hearing Tory Hubris at its loudest and most grating in Manchester, because I know that it will end in tears.

10th September 2015

To start with a bit of biography.

I was born in 1945 in Ashton under Lyne.

My Father was still in the RAF and my Mother brought me home to the house that they had somehow managed to buy in Crossland Road, Droylsden, Manchester.

She was not a single mother but for two years until he was demobilised she saw little of my Father and relied on the support of her Mother who lived just round the corner in High Street.

At the end of Crossland Road was a Mill.

Saxon  Mill was built in 1906 for the Saxon Mill Company, it was a large four story building 18 bays long and 14 bays wide and was built of Accrington Brick with some Sandstone detailing.

Amongst my earliest memories was of the noise of the Mill Workers rushing down Crossland Road for the start of their shift, their clogs and heavy shoes drumming on the pavement disturbing  my sleep.

Our days were punctuated by the sound of the Mill's hooter declaring the start and end of the shifts each day.

By the time my family moved across Manchester to Gorton, the Mill was still working and employed fifty three people, it no longer wove Cotton as it had switched to Rayon in the 1950's.

My Father died in 2014 in Australia where he was living with his second wife.

After the funeral my sister and I repatriated his ashes and interred them in the family grave in Droylsden.

I took my family to see the house in Crossland Road and was astonished to see that there was no trace of the Mill which had dominated the view from our house and in its place stood a modern housing estate.

For me this is just one example of the changes that have transformed the world, the spinning and weaving of cotton was exported along with manufacturing generally, as part of a long transition in the process of what we now call, globalisation.

Recently I needed a new  part for my Motorcycle which is itself a 'grey' import from either Japan where it was manufactured or America, I bought the part on eBay (where I bought the bike) and it is being shipped, free, from China.

For my Father who swapped his RAF uniform for the uniform of a Manchester Corporation bus driver the changes which led him to swapping his home in Manchester for his new home in Perth, WA, were in 1947 when he was demobilised, unimaginable, yet they happened and the process continues and so it would seem to  me that the changes that I have experienced in my lifetime will also continue to influence the futures not only of my children but my grandchildren also.

It is clear also that the underlying engine of GDP which drives Capitalism forward will also continue to change and transform peoples lives unless Capitalism can be checked. As average wages decline the rewards claimed by those who Chair Boards and manage companies increase exponentially so inequality increases. As the present British Government continues to privatise the national assets which were introduced in 1945 offering opportunities to their supporters to maximise profits at the expense of the majority of individuals,  so the risk of deepening inequality continues with all the attendant socio-economic risks, as we move from a manufacturing economy to an economy predicated on increasing personal indebtedness.

Essentially the swapping of public debt for personal debt is the essential project which underpins austerity it is a 'political' choice.

I am essentially disenfranchised because I choose to live in a constituency where with the best will in the world my vote counts for nothing because the local MP who represents my constituency will always be re-elected if the other parties persist in standing in opposition, not to the Conservative candidate, but to each other.

With the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party I begin to see an opportunity for a new kind of politics, a politics of hope.

We need a progressive, anti-austerity alliance to emerge in order that in 2020 we can look toward the real possibility of a Government governing in the interests of the 99% rather than the 1%, a government that can occupy the public square in the interests of people offering peace, security and equality.

To demonstrate how this might happen in my constituency of Penrith and the Borders I started with the figures:

This safe seat has been held by the Conservatives since the 1920's

In 2015 Rory Stewart polled 26202 votes or 59.7% of votes cast..

Labour came second with 6308 or 14.4% of the vote, so far so bad.

Given the general collapse of the Liberal vote nationally, only a few years ago they came second in this constituency, it is wiser to count the votes of all the main parties including UKIP who whilst not a progressive party may to some extent include an anti austerity impulse and there were 'other' candidates who secured another 5% of the vote or 2303.

The results in total then, were Conservative 26202, others 20202, still not a progressive victory in fact Mr Stewart could well be seen to be both safe and secure in 2012.

But that is not the whole of the story.

In 2011 the Boundary Commission estimated the Electorate Figures for the Constituency as 65234 suggesting that some 21313 of the electorate either chose not to vote, were unable to vote or felt that voting was simply a waste of time.

If those who chose not to vote voted in the same percentage proportion as those who did vote then again Mr Stewart would be home and dry. But it is not unreasonable to imagine that would not be the case, because like me those who chose not to vote might have felt disenfranchised.

If the 21313 could be persuaded to vote or if indeed 7000 could, and if they voted for a progressive anti austerity party then Penrith and the Borders my not be such a safe Conservative seat and Mr Stewart might be looking for new employment in 2020.

27th August 2015

It was Margaret Thatcher who thought that her greatest legacy was New Labour.

If this is true, and it certainly sounds as though it could be, then it is a sad reflection on what happened during the three terms that Blair won for Labour.

New Labour was never a Tory Administration, not even as some would now say, Tory Lite.

But in its determination to hold the centre ground, despite some progressive policies, it allowed the centre ground to shift to the right politically and economically.

Relaxed about the super rich, happy to allow the wealthy to buy their way into Education Provision or Health Provision, happy to allow public services to be privatised.

In the end, when the banks failed and the wealthy fled taking their money with them, their debt was socialised and now increasingly we are seeing welfare privatised.

And now the Labour Party is riven by ideological divisions with Charles Clarke referring to Jeremy Corbyn as a 'continuity Benn/nutter' candidate.

Well, how true is this?

Continuity Benn?

Benn saw clearly how the Civil Service can frustrate policies and decisions of popularly elected governments.

He identified the centralised nature of the Labour Party which resulted in it becoming the personal fiefdom of its leader.

He drew attention to the power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by the use of crude economic pressure on Government.

And warned against a media which was always on the side of those who enjoy economic privilege.

Well it seems to me that if this is an accurate reflection of Benn's political views and it was, he reflected, these four points that made him move to the left of politics, then there is little here with which anyone can disagree.

These four principles are pretty key to understanding British political life, the Civil Service continues to exercise disproportionate influence, with the Treasury standing as the key arbiter of what can and cannot be 'afforded'.

The Labour Party has introduced one member one vote leading to an almighty row, a witch hunt, claims of hard left Trotsky style infiltration resulting in what? Corbyn 'the nutter'?

Economic Pressure? What happened during the Scottish Devolution Campaign? Banks and Businesses threatening to leave, which was 'crude economic pressure' if there ever was.

And, from Blair as Godfather to Murdoch's young daughter to the friendships between David Cameron and Rebecca Brooks and the famous 'fast, unpredictable ride' texts, who can deny the role of the press in raising up and bringing down individuals who can be famous one moment and infamous the next.

If Corbyn is elected, and if there is no coup and if he is able to form an opposition, then Trident, PFI and Women only Railway Carriages will be the least of his problems.

He will face a Civil Service committed to maintaining the Status as close to the Quo as possible.

He will face a Parliamentary Labour Party itching to take control back from the Trotskyites, which is it seems most of those who have voted Corbyn.

The more clearly it becomes, with China facing its economic meltdown, that capitalism is transforming itself into post capitalism, the economic pressure to stay with austerity until wages in the third world rise to meet wages in the west as they fall, as non-workers i.e. those who used to work in Blue Collar jobs, most of which have fallen out of the economy to be replaced with fewer high tech jobs and an increase in low paid service jobs, are blamed for claiming welfare the economic pressure to keep the billionaires in luxury so that they can continue to afford to buy the goods advertised in the FT's How To Spend It Magazine will continue and any attempt to resist will hailed as Class War.

And the Media will continue to exercise an influence.

I did on one occasion have supper at a table in Somerset House, our host on that occasion was Charles Clarke, he seemed to me to be a gracious host and committed to ensuring that the Government of which he was a part supported the working people who had elected it.

So his comments seemed a little to quote the title of his recent lectures 'The too difficult Box'

Clarke is of the view that politicians fail if they can't identify the problem, the solution, identify the implementation strategy needed, where the vested interests are, what the legal constraints are, how to bring in legislation and if they lack political energy.

So continuity Benn/Nutter? Not a good call!

I think Corbyn is strong on both analysis and prescription and is channelling the zeitgeist of those who have had enough of blaming the poor, austerity and socialising the indebtedness of failed banks.

11th August 2015

Last week I was invited to a meeting by Tom Watson.

The meeting, in Carlisle, was in the Ballroom of a City Centre Hotel.

The meeting was poorly attended. Most seats were empty and those attending appeared to be members of the Carlisle CLP.

The meeting was Chaired by the Candidate for Carlisle who was defeated in the last election by the sitting Conservative Candidate John Stevenson, during the meeting the person next to me played patience on their iPhone.

I live in Penrith and the Borders Constituency and there was no-one I recognised amongst those attending.

Tom's pitch was based around three topics:

Why did we lose the last election?

What are the issues of current concern?

What is the job description for a Deputy Leader?

During his opening presentation Tom Watson rehearsed much that was familiar to those who monitor the election, post-election and party political coverage in The Guardian.

Labour lost because it did badly in Scotland, because it lost the centre ground, because many traditional Labour voters voted for Ukip, and because it failed to answer the question about the deficit.

All of which is true, but is it the whole story?

I suspect that it lost the election long before May and it lost it because the public believed the Cameron/Osborne narrative rather than the Miliband/Balls narrative.

Certainly the discussion in the room reflected a general consensus around welfare cuts, immigration and the NHS.

One comment, that siding with the Tories over Scottish independence was a mistake and that in the debate about Europe it is crucial that Labour has a clear and distinctive story of its own to tell seemed to me to reflect much  more accurately the problem that Miliband had and that three of the current candidates for the leadership also reflect.

It is also clear that the centre ground has shifted to the right, so that rehearsing traditional Labour views about welfare, nationalisation and health sound dangerously left wing.

Which is of course why Jeremy Corbyn's success has engendered such panic amongst the former big beasts of the Labour Party.

Watson would not be drawn on who he supported for the leadership but he offered a 'job description' for the job of Deputy Leader that was essentially creating a bridge between strategy and delivery that ensured that the leadership could and would hear the concerns of party members and members would be in the loop as strategy was developed.

He made it clear that he could work with whoever was elected.

So what next?

Well the membership of the Labour Party has increased and it looks increasingly likely that Jeremy Corbyn could win in the first round.

Will this be the disaster that many predict?

My heart, and increasingly my head, tells me that this won't be the case.

As Yvette Cooper has said: 'the Tories lied to the electorate' and it is this fundamental dishonesty that places politics and election victories before policies that mean real and significant improvements in peoples lives, which needs challenging by the next leader of the Labour Party.

What is necessary, it seems to me, is for a programme to be developed that promotes a genuine living wage, rather than a renamed minimum wage, which will mean for businesses, customers who have more to spend and for the economy increased income tax revenue flowing into the Treasury.

Alongside this a home building programme that obviates the need for selling off social housing, that creates jobs and doesn't just mean huge bonuses for the bosses of building companies.

Again, the shift to a reliance on financial services which began under Thatcher needs to be re-balanced back towards manufacturing with emerging businesses supported by a public investment bank.

Add an investment in the public ownership of the railways and the country and the economy begins to appear balanced in favour of both poor and middle income families.

This it seems to me from the recent email I received from the Corbyn team is what we might expect if Corbyn wins.

His leadership of the Labour Party, anti austerity, anti Trident pro public ownership, pro higher education that doesn't result in graduating with debts of £50,000, seems to me to be offering more to the electorate than they have currently or are likely to get from the other candidates.

We will know in September and then the real debate will begin ...... imagine a new social movement transforming politics in Britain and resonating with similar anti austerity movements across Europe.

30th July 2015

One thing became clear when the financial crisis hit.

And that was exactly who got the pies!

Under Gordon Brown's premiership the losses incurred by the banks during the financial crisis were socialised whilst the bank's profits were privatised thereby allowing bonuses to continue to be paid whilst the necessary borrowing failed to happen.

So the bankers got the pies and businesses, who needed investment, were left with the crusts.

And still no-one has gone to jail, they just passed go and pocketed the money.

I find it amazing that during the life of the last parliament the Tory narrative continued to tell the same story, that Labour overspent, this narrative was so compelling that it featured dramatically in the Question Time debate where it was coupled with another false narrative that a national budget parallels a domestic budget, a false narrative that began with Margaret Thatcher and which continues to this day.

It is as though Keynes never lived.

In 1945 in the face of a financial crisis caused by the war effort, Keynes ensured that Government money was invested in rebuilding the necessary social and commercial infrastructures, from health, to  housing, to education to welfare, to investment in business.

Ensuring thereby that employment was created and that wealth was shared equitably.

The second great legacy of the war effort was that the war was won through the means of a planned effort and this led, through Harold Wilson in The Board of Trade that the peace was too important to be left to capitalism alone but that a planned economy would result in equity and justice.

It is seventy years ago since the Kings Speech introduced the first Labour Programme for Government.

It made news then and it is still pertinent seventy years later.

'My Government will take up with energy the tasks of reconverting industry from the purposes of war to those of peace'.

'... by the extension of of public ownership our industries and services shall make their maximum contribution to the national well-being'.

'... effective planning of investment ... (bringing) the bank of England into public ownership'.

' a bill will be brought before you to nationalise the coal-mining industry as part of a concerted plan for the co-ordination of the fuel and power industries'.

' ... the distribution at fair prices of essential supplies and services'.

'... organise the resources of the building and manufacturing industries ..... to meet the housing requirements .... of the nation'.

'... promote the best use of land in the national interest'.

'... a comprehensive scheme of insurance against industrial injuries, extend the existing scheme of social insurance and establish a national health service'.


This Kings Speech was given on August 15th 1945.

Its impact was to transform and improve the lives of working people, I was three months old at  the time and took a further three years of debate, argument, resistance from GP's and Tory MP's before the National Health Service was introduced.

As the long slow ebbing of the tide continues so the public good is eroded, great inequality is experienced, capital continues to demonstrate that the pursuit of private profit is incompatible with the national interest, nevertheless the present Government remains committed to the power of the market, whether in financial services, manufacturing or healthcare and the effects of privatisation can be seen in the growth of food banks, the dismantling of the welfare state and increases in both child and elder poverty.

This bias towards the privatisation of profit and socialisation of  losses beginning with the Thatcher government and continuing through the new labour years has seen 'an increase in the economic, financial, political power of the financial sector which have created enormous distortions, and that the financial sector has come to control and influence the political decisions in a manner that is alarming'.  

Paulo Nogueira Batista, Executive Director of the IMF for Brazil.

Which leaves us with the answer to the question about who got the pies!

23rd July 2015

So Blair has returned to UK politics.

If your heart tells you to vote left, get a heart transplant. Thanks Tony!

When he invited me to join him for breakfast at No 10 he failed to appear and sent a video instead.

A Hologram of his Right Horrible Cheesiness greeted us as we entered the breakfast room to feast on fruit kebabs.

The first thing I did after the police escorted me from the premises was to stop and buy a bacon sandwich, which I ate more decorously than Red Ed I might say and without getting brown sauce on my tie.

Tie? You ask, who wears a tie nowadays?

Blair didn't wear one on TV last night and neither does JC, well all I can say is we did in those days.

So talking of JC (Jeremy Corbyn) the politician not the prophet, Mr Blair wants us not to vote for Jeremy.

The existential question facing Labour is does it want power or does it want principles.

It held power for thirteen years but the price of power was the loss of principle, tough on the causes of crime? Yes! ending Child Poverty? Yes! introducing Tax Credits? Yes!

But at ease with the filthy rich? Yes!  introducing PFI? Yes! extending the reach of external consultants, Serco, G4S? Yes! joining forces with Bush to wage war on Iraq? Oh Yes! Yes!

Now we are offered the choice to vote for principles over power.

I have never been very clubbable.

I was briefly in the Scouts, I audited the local youth club.

But I have never really been a joiner of clubs, groups, meetings, or political parties.

I am a member of the Co-op Party but I haven't attended many meetings and even though the indoor critic is member of the MS Society we don't attend local meetings.

But last week I joined the Labour Party, and it didn't even cost me £3 because I took advantage of the pensioners special deal.

Why did I join? Obviously in order to vote for Jeremy Corbyn!

So if I vote with my existing heart and don't follow TB's advice and swap it for a heart of stone does it mean that I will have played my part in ensuring that the Labour Party spends long years in the wilderness?

Honestly I don't believe that will be the inevitable consequence of electing a leader from the left of the Party.

I watched the politics show on TV, admittedly with one eye closed because I have a detached retina, but it seemed to me that the only candidate who came across as possessing gravitas, who debated with courtesy, whose contributions were principled was Jeremy Corbyn.

My mind ran forward to the image of his appearing on PM's Question Time debating with David Cameron and I had the sense that Jeremy Corbyn, in that context, would have the effect of  Barium Meal in the body politic exposing the Tories sense of entitlement as falsely based.

Sadly the outcome of the last election was not the fiasco of Ed eating a bacon sandwich or the politics of envy or indeed the Ed Stone.

It was I believe a lack of gravitas, a failure to debate principles and some sense that the electorate believed Cameron and Osborne rather than Milliband and Balls.

The four candidates for the Labour leadership are all good people, I have no doubt about that, but in politics simply winning is not enough it is essential that the principles of the Labour Movement are seen to differentiate it from the Tories, otherwise the electorate will inevitably choose the devil they know.

The political programme for the next five years will constantly seek to expose the Labour Party and its response must be to challenge again and again the transparently threadbare rhetoric employed by Osborne and Cameron.

If the country wants to see a genuine Living Wage rather than a falsely described minimum wage it will not get it from Osborne, if the country wants a low tax economy then it will not get it from a policy of raising tax thresholds which always benefit higher tax payers rather than those who are not paying tax now, and if the country wants a low welfare economy then it will ultimately only come at the cost of education, health and support in old age, which are the essential pillars of the welfare economy as part of the post war settlement under the 1945 Labour Government.

So yes, I will vote for Jeremy Corbyn and will defer the heart transplant for another day!