McDonnell said: “To assist comrade Osborne about dealing with his newfound comrades, I have brought him along Mao’s Little Red Book”.
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“Rarely done in this chamber, ” he continued.
The quote was such: “We must learn to do economic work from all who know how, no matter who they are. We must esteem them as teachers, we must respect them conscientiously, but we must not pretend to know what we do not know”, he read, before throwing the little red book across the table to Osborne.
“I never envisioned when it came to nationalising I would be outdone by a conservative chancellor”, McDonnell told MPs as he responded to the chancellor’s Autumn Statement.
Mr McDonnell was interrupted again as Tory MPs struggled to control their laughter, with the shadow chancellor telling one to “behave”.
The shadow chancellor pulled out a copy of the book to make a point about George Osborne’s relationship with the Chinese, read out a passage and then threw it across the dispatch box.
“The Chancellor is selling off whatever public assets he can – this is no longer the family silver up for sale – this is the furniture, the fixtures and the fittings, and we know who is the first in line to buy”, he said.
His Little Red Book is a series of quotations from selected speeches and writings that comprise the doctrine of Mao Zedong Thought, his political philosophy.
In response, Mr Osborne joked about the shadow cabinet being sent for “re-education”.
Opening the book, the chancellor said: “Oh look!”
With Diane Abbott recently given the nickname Madame Mao by her colleagues over her behaviour since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour leader, Mr S had thought that Corbyn’s team would be at pains to distance themselves from the Chinese Communist revolutionary.
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To which George Osborne opened the the gift and quipped “it’s his [McDonnell’s] personal signed copy”.
