60,000 sign up to vote on Labour leadership

TENS of thousands of activists have joined Labour as the party’s MPs try to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn.

Around 60,000 have apparently signed up in the past week with the prospect of being able to vote in the party’s looming leadership election.

Hard- left group Momentum claimed it was mobilising activists to save Mr Corbyn. But other Labour sources said many of the new recruits could be moderates wanting to choose a new leader ‘true to Labour values’.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell called for a leadership election to be brought forward to the next few days. Momentum founding member James Schneider, who was privately educated and grew up in a £7million townhouse, told the Mail: ‘ Momentum has been actively encouraging people to join the Labour Party. We are delighted at what looks like the largest membership surge in a single week in the party’s history.’

Labour MPs regard Momentum – formed to capitalise on the enthu- siasm generated by Mr Corbyn’s leadership campaign last summer – as a ‘party within a party’.

But other Labour sources played down the extent to which the new members were supporters of Mr Corbyn, saying they could be moderates wanting to get rid of him. The latest poll of members showed Mr Corbyn would comfortably defeat any of his likely challengers.

The YouGov survey showed he would beat Tom Watson by 50 points to 39, Angela Eagle by 50 points to 40, and Dan Jarvis by 52 points to 35.

That raises the prospect of the party being split because 172 MPs backed a vote of no confidence in Mr Corbyn and only 40 offered support.

Speaking at a Labour event in London yesterday, Mr Corbyn’s close ally Mr McDonnell claimed people were ‘flooding’ into the party.

He said Mr Corbyn was staying and would automatically be on the ballot paper. ‘I think he will win,’ he added.

He appealed to the party’s MPs to ‘calm down’ and settle Labour’s differences through the democratic proc- ess: ‘If there is to be a leadership challenge to Jeremy Corbyn, let’s bring that forward, use the democratic process and then our party members will decide who is the leader.

‘At the moment, Jeremy is the leader of the Labour Party, elected with the largest mandate any political leader had from his political party only nine months ago.

‘If there is to be a challenge to Jeremy Corbyn, in terms of a leadership contest, that will emerge I suspect over the next few days.’

A poll taken among members of Britain’s biggest trade union, Unite, put more pressure on Mr Corbyn. Two thirds of respondents said he was doing a bad job. The survey of 775 members of the Labour-affiliated union was conducted by YouGov over the past two days.

Former shadow business secretary Miss Eagle was expected to mount a challenge, with former shadow work and pensions secretary Owen Smith also in the frame. But in a surprise move, she postponed her leadership bid indefinitely on Thursday.

Friends claimed she wanted to give Mr Corbyn more time to step aside and avoid a bloody contest.

Mr McDonnell also insisted the EU result must be respected. He said the ‘damage’ of pulling out of the single market would be ‘substantial’, yet said that ‘free movement’ would end with Brexit.

The avalanche of new party members raises Labour’s total membership to around 450,000.