Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has pulled out of a planned campaign appearance as the party dealt with the fallout from the sensational leak of its draft General Election manifesto.
The 4
3-page document, which sets out plans to nationalise key industries and reverse years of austerity, was denounced by Tories as a recipe for taxes and borrowing which would put the UK on the road to ruin.
But Labour’s joint election co-ordinator Andrew Gwynne played down the significance of the leak, which he said had put the party’s transformational policies at the top of the news agenda.
Stressing that the document was only a draft which could be amended by a meeting of senior party and trade union figures in London on Thursday, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: It’s not ideal, but on the plus side we are all talking about the Labour Party this morning, we are all talking about some of the visions of how this country can be better.
According to the document obtained by the Daily Mirror and Telegraph, a Corbyn government would:
• Renationalise railways as each private franchise expires, with fares frozen and guards put back on driver-only trains
• Establish publicly-owned bus companies.
• Return Royal Mail to public ownership following the coalition government’s historic mistake of selling it off.
• Take energy “back into public ownership” by setting up a rival to the existing Big Six private firms.
To pay for the policy pledges, Labour has already announced plans to hike corporation tax to 26% by 2022, bringing in an extra £20 billion for the Exchequer, and indicated that people earning more than £80,000 will face tax rises.
But the manifesto indicates a further levy on firms with high numbers of staff on very high pay.
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Labour has insisted its manifesto will be fully costed, and the document vows to eliminate the deficit and balance the budget by the end of the next parliament, the Mirror reported.
In an effort to bridge party divides over Trident, the manifesto commits Labour to the nuclear deterrent, but in a nod to Mr Corbyn’s opposition to the weapons it says any prime minister should be extremely cautious about ordering the use of weapons of mass destruction which would result in the indiscriminate killing of millions of innocent civilians.
Comparing the Corbyn agenda with the vision set out in 1945 by Clement Attlee for the creation of the welfare state and NHS, Mr Gwynne said: We think we’ve got here a package of policies that are genuinely transformational.
But Conservative Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said the manifesto contained lots of promises to spend lots more money on lots of different things.
What they have not made clear is how that is going to be financed, how much more borrowing there’s going to be and what the implications are for the economy if you go on a massive borrowing spree like the last Labour government did, he told ITV1’s Good Morning Britain.
Joint elections co-ordinator Ian Lavery told reporters that Mr Corbyn did not attend a poster launch as planned because he was dealing with internal matters.
Mr Corbyn is doing the preparation for a very important meeting this afternoon, said Mr Lavery.
He was meant to be here but this thing’s happened and Mr Corbyn is dealing with internal matters within the party and he’s dealing with preparation work for what is a fantastic manifesto.
Mr Corbyn’s effort to win support from voters who backed Brexit may be hampered by the manifesto’s measures on the EU and immigration.
The Telegraph said the document ruled out setting a target for cutting net migration something Theresa May has committed to despite so far failing to hit the Conservatives’ tens of thousands ambition.
The manifesto says Labour believes in fair rules and reasonable management of migration, but rules out making false promises on immigration numbers.