Nick Cohen is right to say that "yesterday`s BNP manifesto is today`s Conservative party platform", but it is not only politics in the UK which has moved to the right (Brexiters` adoption of war language will stop Britain from finding peace, 13.10.19). Is it really only the far right`s journalists who, as Cohen states, see "sinister forces conspiring against their own country"? Was Harold Wilson, who introduced Capital Gains tax, raised income tax to 83% for top earners and added an extra 15% on unearned income, renationalised the steel industry and increased the spread of comprehensive schools, described as "hard left" and pilloried by the mainstream press in the way that Corbyn has been? Of course not. Sadly, the press appears to have moved in the same direction as the Tory party!
Andrew Rawnsley rightly criticised the Tories for extravagantly promising "the largest annual increase in public spending in 15 years and tax cuts on top", but he could not resist having a go at Labour as well (Labour and the Tories promise to lavish us with gifts, but who will foot the bill? 13.10.19). By all means question how both parties are going to pay for their pledges, but at least acknowledge that, unlike the Tories, Corbyn and McDonnell have already committed to increased income tax for the well off, a rise in corporation tax to a level more compatible with the rest of the world, and various increases in VAT as in private school fees. There`s also another Rawnsley omission, tax avoidance, which costs the country at least £30+bn a year, and about which next to nothing has been done by Tory governments, except cutting by thousands staff at HMRC working to prevent it! Labour at least is keen to reduce it, something that the Tories have never really believed in.
Criticism of Labour backed by evidence is fine; criticism which ignores the evidence is biased!
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