Corbyn lays down marker for Labour as party of fairness

UPDATE: Corbyn has also proposed that businesses be banned from paying out dividends unless they pay their workers the living wage, suggesting that Labour “bar or restrict companies from distributing dividends until they pay all their workers the living wage. Only profitable employers will be paying dividends, if they depend on cheap labour for those profits then I think there is a question over whether that is a business model to which we should be turning a blind eye.”

Labour is the only party that has delivered fairness, Jeremy Corbyn will claim today. Speaking at the Fabian Society’s New Year conference, he will accuse the Conservatives of wanting “to shrink fairness”.

It is Corbyn’s first big speech since he addressed the Scottish Labour conference in October, and he will use the opportunity to set out a direction of travel for the party, including a series of policies intended to “institutionalise fairness in Britain again”.

He will announce that Labour supports nationalising the railways, integrating health and social care, democratising control of energy, expanding education into a lifelong service, introducing universal childcare and embarking on a large scale housebuilding programme. He will also stress that the way to achieve fairness in society is through “investment in new infrastructure, industries and jobs”.

“Fairness isn’t just an abstract morality that we claim, it is something we together – as Labour – have delivered over decades in Britain,” he is expected to say.

“Labour governments only became possible when everyone had the vote, men and women, working class as well as the propertied classes. It was the labour movement, the trade unions, the Suffragettes and our Party that campaigned for that to happen. Universal suffrage is inherently fair. And we used its electoral force to create a fairer Britain.”

Corbyn will also reflect on the achievements of Labour governments over the past hundred years, and the party’s ties to the trade unions:

“We are the party that created the institutions that built a fairer and more equal Britain: we founded the NHS, established the safety net of social security, we implemented comprehensive education, we built council housing, we created the Open University, we instituted the Human Rights Act and the Equalities Act and the minimum wage. And we are the party founded by trade unions – the organisations that deliver fairness in the workplace.”

The Labour leader will use the idea of fairness as an ideological dividing line that separates the party from the Tories, arguing that “Anyone can wrap their policies in the language of ‘fairness’, it is only Labour that has delivered fairness through institutions and laws.”

He will say that the Tories’ “concept of fairness is of a very different order to ours. Fairness for only a few is not fairness, but privilege. Hidden among the fake concern for ‘balancing the books’, is the same hoary old Tory ideology – to shrink the state, to shrink fairness.”

Corbyn will even accuse the Tories of wanting to limit fairness.

“Just because the Tories are running the state into the ground, don’t think it’s our public services that are the problem,” he plans to say.

“This is the same Tory strategy – they did it with the railways – underfund it, make cuts, run the service down, then offer up privatisation as the solution. Cynical, dishonest and unfair.

“It’s not just public services though, they see only a limited role for the state because they want fairness limited too.”