LEADERLESS Labour continued to implode yesterday as the SNP challenged Kezia Dugdale, the favourite for the Scottish leadership, to explain why she had launched an attack on the UK’s party’s only anti-austerity candidate.
Dugdale slammed Jeremy Corbyn on Sunday, claiming that he lacked the credentials to become Prime Minister and would leave Labour “carping from the sidelines”. It followed reports that eight members of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet, including Shadow Chancellor Chris Leslie, had said they would not serve under Corbyn.
The SNP have asked Labour frontbenchers to explain why they were happy to work alongside the Tories during the referendum campaign, but could not contemplate working with someone from their own party who had been chosen by the membership.
SNP MSP Linda Fabiani said: “People in Scotland will be puzzled as to why Labour front-benchers who were happy to work hand-in-glove with the Tories during the referendum campaign are now saying they would refuse to work with one of their own MPs – even if he had been democratically chosen as leader by the Labour rank-and-file.
“The fact that they seem more comfortable with the politics of the Tories than those of Mr Corbyn totally sums up the gulf between those at the top of the Labour hierarchy and ordinary working people."
“Rather than focussing on fighting the Tories, Labour are content to fight amongst themselves while meekly acquiescing to the Tory’s cuts agenda at Westminster.”
Meanwhile, the author of the economic plan set out by Corbyn has defended “Corbynomics” following an attack by Leslie.
Richard Murphy, the fair tax expert recruited by Corbyn to draft his economic policy, deepened divisions on the left by saying “Leslie has got this completely wrong”.
In a Radio 4 interview, Leslie singled out Corbyn’s plans for a people’s quantitative easing, which he derided as printing money to “magically deal with all the public service and public investment needs that we have”.
He said: “The difficulty is that if that then provokes higher inflation, if that then means that interest rates go up, who will pay the price for that? It is the poorest and those on the lowest incomes who already find the cost of living very difficult.”
Murphy, author of The Courageous State – an acclaimed critique of neoliberal economics – responded by attacking the Labour government’s bailout of the banks.
Speaking on Radio 4’s World at One, he said: “[Leslie] should remember that it was a Labour government that in 2009 created a programme of QE that eventually printed £375 billion to bail out the banks. It didn’t work. It simply boosted bank bonuses and bank profits and ordinary people didn’t benefit.
“People’s QE is fundamentally different. [It] does have the Bank of England print new money, which is identical to the process that is used by ordinary banks when they lend to business, but it gives that money to people like housing authorities, to local councils, to a green investment bank to build houses, to schools to build hospitals – the very things Chris Leslie says would not be possible if this programme was put into place.”
Challenged on Leslie’s point about high inflation, Murphy said: “Any system of people’s QE would be turned off if we got to a situation of high wages and full employment, but we are so far from that at the moment that we have to tackle the low-wage economy and the lack of productivity by creating new investment, which is the foundation for new prosperity.”
He added: “This programme is about creating jobs in every single constituency in the UK. It is not costless, there will be a small rise in inflation, but we need it..”
“Given the economic situation we face where hundreds of thousands of people are underpaid and aren’t paying tax because they don’t earn enough to do so … The real question for Chris Leslie is why did you support £375bn for the banks when actually very much less would create jobs in every constituency throughout the UK, which is precisely what Jeremy Corbyn is offering by adopting this programme.”
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