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Labour conference - live updates: Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell clash with members over Brexit policy Labour conference - live updates: Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell clash with members over Brexit policy
(about 2 hours later)
On the eve of the conference last night, Labour accused big business leaders of “siphoning away” taxpayers’ money into their own pockets, leaving young British people without the future prospects they deserve. Jeremy Corbyn received a rapturous applause from the party faithful in Brighton as he opened the party’s conference on Saturday evening. But while the party appears remarkably more united than in previous years – in the wake of the general election result – it is clear that a debate over the party’s Brexit policy is looming behind the scenes. 
A senior figure in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet attacked corporate chiefs for “sitting on piles of cash” that should have been spent improving skills for young workers.   In an interview marking the start of Labour's conference, the Labour leader said he was also ready to “listen” to party members who want the UK to stay in the EU's single market. It came after 30 senior figures, including Labour MPs, signed an open letter calling for the party leadership to commit to full and permanent membership of the single market after Britain’s exit from the European Union. 
In an exclusive interview with The Independent Shadow International Trade Secretary Barry Gardiner warned executives they had missed a chance to show they could be trusted to meet their obligations to society and promised a Labour government would make them pay. Labour recently shifted its position on Brexit, to one where it called for the UK to remain in the single market and abide by its rules - including free movement and adherence to the European Court - during a transition period out of the bloc.
It comes after businesses returned to Labour conference this year, keen to understand what the future might hold under a Corbyn government in the light of the party’s better than expected performance in the election. However the signatories to the letter published in The Observer, including former shadow cabinet members Chuka Umunna and Heidi Alexander, as well as one of Mr Corbyn's closest allies in his early days as leader, Clive Lewis, said the party should go further to protect jobs and workers' rights.
The Independent recently polled various Labour manifesto policies, with those representing a crackdown on corporate excess proving highly popular – in particular a measure to cap the pay of top executives at a specific ratio of a firm’s lowest-paid worker won overwhelming support. Mr Corbyn went on: “I understand what they are saying. I understand the points they are making and I understand the importance of workers moving from one place to the other.
Mr Gardiner said: “The idea that somebody in the same company can say to somebody else in that company, ‘you are earning below the average wage of £28,000 a year, and yet I in this company am earning, in some cases, 50 times as much as you are’…it is just to treat your colleagues with contempt.” “But I also understand that there is an abuse of free movement by some of the employers, who have grotesquely exploited some very low paid workers.
He pre-empted the inevitable attack from critics that his words are “anti-business”, saying: “This is not anti-business in any way whatsoever. It is about saying look, let’s ensure everyone in a company has a stake in the company, they want it to do well, because they know if it does, they also do well. “That has to stop. But we have to recognise that in the future we are going to need people to work in Europe and people from Europe are going to need to work here. There is going to be a lot of movement,” the leader said on BBC's Andrew Marr programme.
“It’s common sense. It’s what people want. As The Independent’s poll found out, this isn’t a case of saying ‘this is something people should think about’.
“They already think it. They think ‘who are the bozos who think it’s right that somebody should be earning £10m a year, when somebody in that company is being paid less than £25,000. They think it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t.”