Labour conference: McDonnell says Labour “planning to fail” with its economic policies

John McDonnell has accused the Labour Party of heading into power “almost destined and planning to fail” because of its refusal to commit to a greater variety of strategies to fund public spending.

The former Shadow Chancellor argued that the party’s focus on growth to fund spending and its current tax commitments will be insufficient to meet the challenges facing public services, arguing: “Growth requires a large amount of investment and it takes time.” He said that he thought there would “almost certainly” be a Labour government elected next year.

He argued that Britain was “broken” and that Labour “will destroy all sectors of our public services if we cannot spend the money that is needed. We will impoverish people almost permanently. We will scar people’s lives”.

McDonnell also repeated comments he made in June, when he argued that the left of the party needed to “save” an incoming Labour government “from itself”.

McDonnell was speaking at The World Transformed festival, which is running alongside Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool this week, at an event titled “Strategies for a Starmer government”. Other speakers included academic Jeremy Gilbert, director of centre-left think tank Compass Neal Lawson, and Labour peer and former Shadow Attorney General Shami Chakrabarti.

Lawson, who was investigated by the Labour Party in June allegedly over social media posts endorsing Green council candidates, was critical of Labour.

He described the Labour leadership as “not a really talented team” with “no kind of programme”, who if they come into government will be doing so “in the most malign circumstances”, facing “crisis after crisis”.

He alleged that an incoming Labour government would be the “least well prepared Labour government that we have ever, ever seen”.

Chakrabarti commented that “the Sunak-Braverman leadership is not anything I have seen before in the British Tory Party”, commenting further that she did “not say that lightly”.

She accused the Tory politicians of trading in “the nastiest kind of far right populism”, asking the audience with reference to the Prime Minister and Home Secretary: “When is it OK to start using the F-word?”

Commenting on the Labour Party, Chakrabarti asserted that she was “not into internecine nonsense at this conference”, stating: “Democratic mass movement politics is a team, team game, and I will never be accused of sabotaging the possibility of getting this populist far right government out of power”.

Read more from LabourList’s conference coverage: 

GUIDES:

• What, when and where are the best events today?
• The unmissable full LabourList events programme
• ‘Labour conference 2023: How to make the most of it – for veterans and first-timers’

NEWS:

• Conference policy tracker: What has been announced so far?
• Labour conference 2023: Full list of 12 topics party will vote on
• The 49 issues supporters wanted the party to debate
• Green activists protest over policy rowbacks
• McDonnell says Labour “planning to fail” with its economic policies
• Labour must put health and wellbeing at the “core of its schools policy”

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