JEREMY Corbyn used his first speech since crushing Owen Smith’s leadership challenge to promise a socialism fit for the 21st century.

But for supporters north of the Border there was little reference to Scotland in the recently re-elected Labour leader’s policy-heavy conference speech.

At one point Corbyn told his audience in Liverpool’s conference centre that Glasgow was one of the Labour councils across the country fighting back against Tory cuts.

He paid tribute to the authority for creating “flexible workspaces for startup, high-growth companies in dynamic new sectors.”

Awkwardly, this was a reference to a project in the Glasgow City Region Deal agreed between the Tory UK Government, the SNP Scottish government and seven other local authorities.

In a speech lasting 45 minutes, that Tory-SNP-Labour deal was all Corbyn could really find to say about Scottish Labour.

Corbyn gave a thank you to “Labour Scotland”, fleetingly telling delegates about the three council by-elections won by the party over the summer. There was no mention of the 14 MSPs lost in the Holyrood election or the nine per cent drop in vote.

The speech was well received in the hall with the party faithful often interrupting their leader with applause. The biggest cheer came when Corbyn defended his decision to apologise for Labour’s role in the war in Iraq.

As delegates jumped to their feet John McTernan, Tony Blair and Jim Murphy’s former right hand man now turned anti-Corbyn commentator, stormed out of the conference hall shaking his head.

He later tweeted saying he had walked out “in disgust”.

Corbyn pleaded with his critics to respect the views of the 62 per cent of members who backed him in the second leadership poll, and end the “trench warfare” that has caused the party to sink in the polls.

There was also a staunch defence of immigration, with Corbyn calling the rise in attacks on migrants since the divisive campaigns of the EU referendum “shameful”.

“It isn’t migrants that drive down wages, it’s exploitative employers and the politicians who deregulate the labour market and rip up trade union rights,” he said.

“It isn’t migrants who put a strain on our NHS, it only keeps going because of the migrant nurses and doctors who come here filling the gaps left by politicians who have failed to invest in training.”

He promised to re-establish Gordon Brown’s migrant impact fund, scrapped by the Tories, to help “tackle the real issues of immigration”.

There was a promise to modernise taxes and social security, and a plan to establish a National Investment Bank to “rebuild and transform Britain”.

This bank would “borrow to invest at historically low interest rates” to invest £500 billion in broadband, railways, housing and energy infrastructure.

A Corbyn-led Labour government would clamp down on those not paying taxes, he said, calling those who dodge their taxes “unpatriotic”

“It is an act of vandalism, damaging our NHS, damaging older people’s social care, damaging younger people’s education. So a Labour government will make shabby tax avoidance a thing of the past.”

On Europe, he said “access to” the single market would be a red-line issue for Labour.

Corbynism, the leader argued, was a not a throwback to the 80s but about providing “education and housing for all with local services run by and for people, not outsourced to faceless corporations.

“That’s not backward-looking, it’s the very opposite. It’s the socialism of the 21st century.”

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie argued that the speech was proof Labour had abandoned moderate and progressive voters.

“Liberal Democrats will give these people a voice,” Rennie claimed.


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