‘I AM ANGRY and fed up, and want a different sort of country,’ Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn declared yesterday morning.
Interviewed by the BBC’s Andrew Marr, he said he was ‘fed up’ with inequality in Britain, and that he would scrap grammars and seek to end all private contracting in the NHS. Repeating a pledge to scrap zero-hours contracts, he said: ‘Six million people earn less than the minimum wage. One million people don’t know what their wage is going to be from one week to another.’
He was ‘fed up’ with a world with ‘increasing numbers of homeless people’ and where young people can’t get on the housing or career ladder because they are saddled with student debt. Asked whether he could win the June 8th vote, he simply said ‘watch this space’.
When Marr asked him if he would authorise a drone strike on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, Corbyn said he would review the information given to him by the intelligence operatives. He said: ‘What I would tell them is give me the information you have got, tell me how accurate that is and tell me what you think can be achieved.
‘What is the objective here? Is the objective to start more strikes that may kill many innocent people as has happened or is the objective to get a political solution in Syria? My whole point would be does this help to get a political solution in Syria? I think the leader of ISIS not being around would be helpful and I’m no supporter or defender in any way whatsoever of ISIS, I’m sure you would concede. But I would also argue that the bombing campaign has killed a large number of civilians, many of whom were virtually prisoners of ISIS, you have got to think about these things.’
Corbyn restated his opposition to the airstrikes in Syria, saying: ‘At the end of the day the only solution in Syria is going to be a political one. There is no other way of getting it. There has to be a reconvening quickly of the Geneva process.
‘I would say to President Trump, listen, it’s in nobody’s interest for this war to continue let’s get the Geneva process going quickly and in the meantime no more strikes, have the UN investigation into the war crime of the use of chemical weapons in Syria and take it on from there.
‘I want us to say listen, let’s get people around the table quickly and a way of achieving that, suspend the strikes possibly, that’s one way.’
