Labour leader will tell regional conference that US election and Brexit vote reveal need to ‘take on corporate vested interests’

Donald Trump’s election as US president is a “global wake-up call” to rid politics of the vested interests of billionaires, Jeremy Corbyn will tell Labour’s regional conference.

The party’s leader – whose allies have drawn parallels between his own anti-establishment appeal and that of Trump, despite their clear differences – will say the anger tapped into by the Republican reveals a population that felt out of control of its own economic destiny.

“Instead of offering real solutions or the resources to make them work, he offered only someone to blame – everyone, that is, apart from those who are actually responsible for a broken economy and a failed political system,” he will say at his speech to the Labour south-east regional conference on Saturday.

Corbyn will accuse the Conservatives of playing on similar fears to Trump, rather than tackling root causes. “They have opened the door to Ukip and fanned the flames of fear,” he will say. “Nigel Farage blames immigrants, yet offers not a single proposal to put a penny more into the NHS.”

Trump’s election in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK both show people’s anger at the system, Corbyn will say. “People are right to be angry: our failed economic system is delivering falling living standards and rising inequality. We have no idea how Donald Trump proposes to ‘make America great again’, and Theresa May’s Tories offer slogans, but no solutions, for most people in Britain.”



Corbyn will argue the solution to the anger is not necessarily in the answers delivered by the people in the referendum and the US election. “We won’t tackle the damage done by elite globalisation just by leaving the EU,” he will say.

“We won’t ‘take back control’ unless we take on the corporate vested interests that control our energy, our transport and have infiltrated our public services.



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“Neither billionaire Donald Trump nor the billionaire-backed Tories have any interest in giving people back control or reining in the predatory excesses of a globalised free-for-all.”

Corbyn’s speech will come after Peter Taaffe, the driving force behind the hard-left organisation Militant Tendency, submitted an application to rejoin the Labour party, along with 74 other activists.

Taaffe, who now leads the Socialist party, the successor to Militant, said he and his allies had been expelled, but had 1,000 years of Labour membership between them. “Our position is that a new era needs a new form of organisation, which embraces different strands on the left,” Taaffe told the Guardian.

A Labour spokesperson said: “It is against Labour’s rules to be a member of another political party or organisation which has its own programme, principles and policy, or distinctive and separate propaganda, and which is therefore ineligible for affiliation to the party.”



Labour sources said: “They [the group of activists] don’t support democratic socialism.”