Corbyn Rallies Hastings – Again
KENT BARKER
Jeremy Corbyn seems to like Hastings. Last week (18 October) he chose the drab-looking Horntye Sports Centre off Bohemia Road to launch – or perhaps re-launch – the new left party – that’s ‘Your Party’.
The last time he held a major rally in the town was in 2019 as leader of the Labour Party when he filled St Mary in The Castle with enthusiastic supporters. That was less than a year before, under his leadership, Labour was trounced at the general election by Boris Johnson, losing 60 seats and letting the Conservatives back in with a massive majority of 80.
It’s a fair bet that many of those supporters at the 2019 rally were at Horntye now, six years later, having become disillusioned with the Labour government under Sir Kier Starmer. Mr Corbyn certainly had nothing good to say about his successor or the current administration.
He castigated the government for cutting disability payments “in order to pay for increased defence spending”. The levels of poverty, he told supporters, were played out on streets, in railway stations and bus shelters “every day, every night, all across this country”.
“What is wrong with society?” he asked rhetorically, “that we tolerate this growing level of homelessness and semi-homelessness with people sofa-surfing from one flat to another?” Touching on another area certain to find a resonance with a Hastings audience, Mr Corbyn criticised the high rents charged by private landlords. Housing Allowance levels far below commercial rents meant, he said, people were subsidising their landlords from their benefits.
Other issues like water quality and raw sewage in the sea also played well to the packed hall. But the nearest he got to announcing actual policies for Your Party came with a commitment to bolstering the NHS not just by using the ‘spare capacity’ in the private health system, but by ‘taking it over’ and bringing the sector into public ownership.
He was scathing about some of Labour’s front bench pronouncements and government ministers. “Nothing convinces me more than the need for a real political alternative, community strength, community based, community accountable, than listening to their ‘nonsense’ he concluded. There was an almost token dig at the ‘racist, Nigel Farage and Reform, but he provided little analysis of how any party on the left in Britain might be able to stem their tide nationally and, as we report on page 2, locally.
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