Class war Corbynite Labour had a catastrophic conference

Jeremy Corbyn must have gone to bed this week saying his nightly prayers to Lady Hale for saving his bacon. The President of the Supreme Court’s sensational ruling gave him the perfect cover to call an early halt to Labour’s conference which had been eclipsed by bitter divisions over his own future. For until the court’s ruling, the Brighton conference had been dominated by the failed coup to strip Tom Watson, deputy leader, of his role by Momentum’s, Jon Lansman.

The Economist’s Bagehot column summed up the squabble rather well: “The fact that the balance of power is so delicate means that the struggle can only become more bitter in the months to come. Mr Corbyn’s rise divided the party like nothing since the second world war. His eventual departure will divide it even further.”

Quite. And if and when that battle – between Labour’s moderates led by Sir Keir Starmer, Watson, Yvette Cooper, Hillary Benn and Jess Philips, against John McDonnell and the Momentum crew – breaks out, it will make Tory leadership battles look like a tea party at the Ritz.

Behind the scenes, there have been talks for months about a break-away new Labour block of up to 100 MPs who disagree with Corbyn and McDonnell’s Marxist policies. There has been non-stop chatter about a new left party – to be led by Jess Philips or Watson – but these plans appear to have died down. For now anyway. The proximity of a forthcoming election is ensuring that the moderates stay quiet.

But there is amore compelling – and worrying – reason why Corbyn could be saying a few Hail Mary’s to Lady Hale and her exquisite timing.

The parliamentary chaos triggered by the Supreme Court’s ruling diverted public attention – and media scrutiny –  from some of the more extraordinary Labour party policies which were served up in Brighton.

The mess the government found itself after being told it had acted unlawfully over prorogation meant that Conservative MPs have not taken up the challenge to criticise – or indeed explain – the full impact of some of the more outlandish policies.

With an election maybe only weeks away, and the likelihood of Corbyn making it to No 10 as interim PM if Labour can pull off a pact with the SNP, this looks seriously careless. And potentially dangerous for the Conservatives.

So here they are. And they should be studied closely because it may not be long before Tory MPs and their advisors have to fight them on the stump.

There was a rainbow collection of proposals including loosening immigration controls, a new 32-hour four day week, abolishing private schools, a radical plan to set up a new NHS generic drugs company, free prescriptions for England and new social care commitments for the elderly.

These proposals have not been costed but they will cost billions and billions to the taxpayer. What’s more, they come on top of Labour’s existing plans to nationalise all the power and utility companies, the railways and the Royal Mail, to order companies of a certain size to give shares to employees in new separate funds and forcing landlords to sell their buy-to-let houses to tenants. Such plans would involve costs running into trillions if Labour were to pay the current market prices.

That’s the rub: the shadow chancellor has a rabbit in his hat to pay for these hare-brained schemes and that’s to not pay the market price. That is illegal.

Only the lawyers will be laughing as any one of these policies will keep them in fees for a decade as the Labour government’s theft is challenged by their shareholders.

To be fair, there are some policies that have merit: there should reforms to NHS drug policy but not these ones. Other policies  – like abolishing private schools – involve outright theft and are against the law. Most are bad business and could lead to shortages rather than a fairer distribution of income or indeed, education.

First, immigration. Labour has made a complete about turn from its 2017 manifesto on free movement of EU citizens which it had promised to end.

The new policy – which has yet to be formulated in detail as a manifesto promise –  pledges to “maintain and extend free movement rights”, “close all detention centres”  and to “reject any immigration system based on incomes, migrants’ utility to business, and number caps/targets.” See more details here.

There may be more to come. Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott, has been quoted saying: “Be assured, our plans for government include these provisions and a lot more.”

This is an about-turn but it is not – as some have claimed – the removal of all controls on immigration. With some exceptions, EU citizens already have the right to live and work in the UK and Labour’s motion wants to keep this right. Where policy is undecided is over non-EU citizens, who are subject to more controls.

The motion went further: it wants the party to extend voting rights to all foreign nationals who are resident in the UK. At present, British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens are allowed to vote in general elections and referendums.

Other foreign nationals and EU citizens can only vote in local and European elections.

Drugs are Corbyn’s big fix. The shadow leader promised that a future Labour government would set up a publicly owned generic drugs manufacturer to supply cheaper medicines to the NHS to stop big pharma from making its “outrageous” profits.

In a second proposal, he came up with Medicines for Many, a policy aimed at forcing drug companies to sell their wares at lower prices.

Superficially, attacking the drug companies is an attractive idea as the “nasty” pharma industry is easy prey. His first idea of setting up a centrally designed manufacturer is not such a bad idea for drugs that have outlived their patent, and which continue to put up their prices.

But the second prong of his policy could backfire spectacularly because big pharma companies such as GSK, which spend billions and decades on coming up with new inventions, will simply stop their research. If there is no profit to be made, why would they or other investors stump up the money ?

Government would have to take over the research. Is that what we want?

There are too many cases where drugs which are no longer on patent are too expensive. But solving that is a different problem to stopping all drug companies from inventing new medicines, that more often than not are the result of spin-outs from the big research companies such as GSK or AstraZeneca.

The industry has been quick to respond, warning that specialist drugs and those for rare diseases would dry up. As Dr Richard Torbett, director at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, said: “However, ‘compulsory licensing’ – the seizure of new research – is not the answer. It would completely undermine the system for developing new medicines. It would send a hugely negative signal to British scientists and would discourage research in a country that wants to be a leader in innovation.”

Back to the drawing board Mr Corbyn, and back to school. But the privately-educated Mr Corbyn and his grammar school-educated shadow chancellor would this time round be educated in the state-sector. Yes, by law.

That would be a new Labour law, one that goes against all the basic principles of freedom of the individual as we know them,  and against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) Article 26 (3), or the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) Protocol 2 Article 2 and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU Article 14. (I am indebted to Michael C Fowler of Breaston who wrote a letter to the Independent setting out all these laws which all enshrine the rights of parents to choose the education for their children in accordance with religious and other views.)

Labour proposes to strip private schools of all their privileges: charitable status, business rate exemptions, add VAT to fees and threatens to redistribute their endowments, investments and properties to the state sector.

Yet more sensational is the idea that Labour wants to restrict access of their pupils – 7% of the school population – to university with set quotas. Which is ridiculous too since 15% of all school pupils move to the private sector for sixth form.

As well as breaching the most fundamental of human freedoms, this policy will cost billions and billions as the private sector saves the state about £5bn a year in expenditure. Thanks to Mr Breaston again, I learn that 20% of all pupils in the UK’s private schools come from overseas, bringing with them revenue but also a richness of diversity.

What’s more, the UK’s top schools such as Harrow and Wellington College now have outposts in countries around the world. They are in communist China, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. There are spreading fast – around 60 new British schools are operating overseas. Talk about soft power.

What Corbyn should be saying instead is that he wants state schools to be better than Britain’s private schools, that Labour would increase spending per pupil to make our schools the finest in the world. That every child in the country has the freedom and the right to be educated to the best and highest of their ability. Now I would call that radical.

But he is not interested in practical improvement. His party is now committed to a policy of class war.