John McDonnell was busy giving a speech this morning at the Resolution Foundation, pledging to end in-work poverty within one term if Labour get in to power. Because there won’t be any people left in work any more?

McDonnell proudly announced that he had already appointed Labour MP Lyn Brown to his Shadow Treasury team to lead on this. A strange appointment given Brown’s most relevant experience when it comes to in-work poverty appears to be when she was heavily criticised for trying to replace a paid staff member with an unpaid intern in 2011. At the time Intern Aware accused her of “double hypocrisy” and denying opportunities to people from low income backgrounds, Brown responded: “I would like to pay everyone who volunteers for me and who is ultimately seeking a wage. The reality is that I do not have the resources so to do.” Doesn’t bode well for her ability to tackle in-work poverty when the economy nosedives under Corbyn and McDonnell…

UPDATE: An ex-staff member gets in touch “She’s a slave-driver, she works her staff very hard.” Guido too is a firm believer that working hard will take you out of poverty…

UPDATE II: Another ex-staff member emails “She never seemed very bothered about overworking her staff. When an employee told her that the number of hours they were working took their average earnings below minimum wage, she told them to stop complaining.”

UPDATE III: A third ex-staff member gets in touch to say “There couldn’t be a worse person for the job; it’s a farce. Her idea of accountability when the press scrutinised her hiring of an unpaid intern was to instruct her office to unplug the phone lines and leave the office.”

“She would often have staff working evenings and weekends to accompany her, ostensibly for work reasons, to feed and clean up after her dog, visit her friends, ferry ASOS deliveries to her home, and put takeaway orders through for her. She’d ring you at 9.30 a.m. on the dot to make sure you were at your desk the next morning, and scream at you if you’d ordered the wrong curry, before telling you to get (and pay for) 4 sausages from the canteen, ready for when she arrived in Westminster.”

Sounds like a lovely person…

Corbyn has replaced Diane Abbott with Lyn Brown as a “temporary” Shadow Home Secretary. That’s the same Lyn Brown who resigned last year from the Shadow Cabinet, saying the “the situation” in the party under Corbyn “is now untenable” and that “it’s time to go to the membership”. She said:

“Following the overwhelming vote of the parliamentary Labour party, it was with a heavy heart that I concluded that we had reached a tipping point and, for the good of the party and the country, I believe that we should seek a new leader.”

Brown also once shouted “for f*cks sake, move out of my f*cking way” at a blind journalist on the Parliamentary Estate. No Corbyn loyalists left to fill even the most important roles…

UPDATE: Listen to Barry Gardiner being grilled by Julia Hartley Brewer on Talk Radio over Lyn Brown telling a blind man to f*** off: