EXCLUSIVE: Jeremy Corbyn speaks directly to Canary readers

Jeremy Corbyn has spoken exclusively to the Canary, setting out his own vision of the future ahead of the Your Party conference in Liverpool this weekend.

Corbyn spoke to us after chancellor Rachel Reeve’s budget fell flat. He told us that:

If anything proves the need for an alternative political voice in Britain, it’s this budget this morning. The only positive was that it’s ended the two-child benefit cap for those in receipt of Universal Credit. That is a result of lots of campaigning, but it’s driven lots of children into poverty ever since that cap was introduced some years ago.

Instead, he explained, there’s much more to worry about under Labour’s government:

But the negatives of the budget are that the lack of raising the tax threshold in line with inflation means that more people will be brought into taxation, particularly the very lowest earners. And over the next six years, that is going to matter to several hundred thousand people, who at the moment earn too little to pay tax, will be forced to pay more in taxation.

Corbyn calls out Labour’s deficiencies

Corbyn explained that, actually, Reeves had in fact snuck in a kind of tax increase:

There is a element there of a tax increase, which the chancellor very cleverly skated over during her speech. Nothing in there about investment in housing. Nothing about investment in council housing. Nothing about ending the scourge, because that’s what it is, of the private finance initiative dragging money out by the National Health Service. We can, should and must do things very differently. We have appalling levels of poverty in our society.

And, he made it clear that Labour are not addressing wealth inequality:

We have a massive gap between the richest and the poorest. It gets bigger every year. Nothing in this budget is going to close that gap, if anything it will increase.

For all those that want to be in Liverpool this weekend, but didn’t get through the sortition process. I’m really sorry. We brought in the Sortition process as something new and novel to ensure a genuinely broad representation of people who support your party.

And, once the conference is over, he told us he was eager to get going on Your Party’s future:

After we’ve got through this weekend – and I’m really looking forward to it and I’m very confident we’re going to come through it, establish our party, name our party and above all we’ll then have the branches and the structures and we’ll be out there doing the campaigning on housing, on poverty, on inequality, on environment and sustainability and compensating the WASPI women for the abominable way they’ve been treated over so many years.

There’s lots we’ve got to be doing as a party and you know what? We’re going to be doing it together. 

Corbyn’s words will undoubtedly spread hope amongst Your Party members and supporters. And, for everyone at the Canary, we can safely say that we’re hopeful and eager to see Your Party deliver the politics that we know we so desperately need.

Featured image via the Canary