GE 2019: Labour takes aim at banker ‘hostility’, launching ‘radical’ manifesto with £20bn R&D fund
Jeremy Corbyn will tomorrow (Thursday) launch Labour’s manifesto claiming that he “accepts the opposition and hostility of the rich and powerful” due to his “radical and ambitious plan” to transform the United Kingdom.
Speaking in Birmingham, the Labour leader will compare himself to former US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, Corbyn says, had to take on the establishment in order to take the US out of the Great Depression.
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Corbyn will say: “This party, this movement, this manifesto is different. Labour is on your side. And there could scarcely be a clearer demonstration of that than the furious reaction of the rich and powerful.
“If the bankers, billionaires and the establishment thought we represented politics as usual, that we could be bought off, that nothing was really going to change, they wouldn’t attack us so ferociously.
“But they know we mean what we say. They know we will deliver our plans, which is why they want to stop us being elected.”
Among the policies being unveiled tomorrow will come a commitment to invest £20.5bn over five years, in research and development into technologies and industries “of the future”, Morning Wire can reveal.
The first tranche of this investment, which is expected to be funded via a mixture of Labour’s green transformation fund and its national investment bank, will go into electric vehicles and battery technology to “kick-start the electric car revolution”. It will also be used to develop alternatives to plastic and create new steel processes “to green this vital industry”.
Labour has set itself the target of spending three per cent of GDP on R&D by 2030. In 2017 it was 1.69 per cent.
Ahead of the manifesto launch, shadow business secretary Rebecca Long Bailey said: “This massive increase in investment will put us on track to be investing in R&D at the same rate as leading industrial economies and place the UK at the frontier of technological revolution, tackling global problems and creating the industries of the future.”
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