Setting The Line

Jeremy Corbyn was always free to attend the Labour Party Conference. But now that it has been confirmed that he will be doing so, then there is even more reason for the party's striking staff to set up a picket line outside it, a line that he and others could then be seen not to cross.

Corbyn should take the opportunity to speak, not only in support of the strikers, but also on how the care of refugees from Afghanistan ought to be funded by a windfall tax on the arms industry, and on how the long-written plans to diversify that industry while retaining jobs and skills ought to be implemented in this age of the new non-interventionism.

That would contrast starkly with a party that aspired merely to halve child poverty, and too bad for the other half of poor children, while having to be pushed and prodded into defending a Triple Lock that would still leave Britain with the lowest pension of any comparable country, even including the United States.