RED AND BURIED
LABOUR ROCKED: UNRIVALLED ANALYSIS
Hard Left jubilant as Corbyn is crowned
7 key figures quit, MPs plot to oust him
Poll: Labour will lose next 2 Elections
LABOUR MPs started plotting to oust Jeremy Corbyn immediately after his sensational victory yesterday.
Within hours of the Left-winger being elected party leader, moderate colleagues openly admitted they were ready to sack him before the next General Election.
Corbyn triggered a political earthquake by winning the race to succeed Ed Miliband by a massive margin. The teetotaller celebrated in the pub by singing socialist anthem The Red Flag with his Leftwing supporters.
But he faced a mutiny as Shadow Cabinet Ministers, horrified at the party’s lurch to the left, resigned
en masse. The rebellion started seconds after he was unveiled as new Labour leader at 11.42am. Labour Health spokesman Jamie Reed resigned via Twitter at 11.43am.
Another tweet posted by Andy Burnham’s shocked team at the same time said ‘f***’ – but it was quickly deleted.
Tony Blair was said to be ‘in shock’ at Corbyn’s triumph and ‘appalled’ by his ‘failure to reach out to all voters’ in his acceptance speech.
Labour grandees have queued up to warn the party was doomed under Corbyn. Writing in today’s Mail on Sunday, former Home Secretary David Blunkett says Labour could be out of power for a generation.
He claims Left wing ‘thugs’ in Corbyn’s camp could try to launch a Militant Tendency-style purge of moderate Labour MPs. Corbyn is not a thug, Blunkett writes, but Labour must ‘beware the danger of an iron fist in a velvet glove’.
And he adds that the triumph of Corbyn and his new deputy, union fixer Tom Watson, is ‘an emotional spasm’ and a victory for ‘zealots’.
Blunkett’s views were echoed by close allies of Peter Mandelson who accused Corbyn of staging a Labour ‘coup’. Another former Labour Cabinet heavyweight, Charles Clarke, dismissed Corbyn as ‘an absurd vessel for the hopes of the disaffected’ who had made ‘deeply cynical promises he knows he will never deliver’. Clarke claimed the Labour rot started when Gordon Brown was elected leader.
Two moderate Labour MPs, John Mann and Simon Danczuk, have also declared Corbyn would be thrown out as leader if he was a flop.
In today’s Mail on Sunday, Bassetlaw MP Mann says that if Corbyn boosts ratings fast he would earn the right to lead the party into the next General Election. If not, he would be fired. ‘Labour MPs – and party members – cannot sit on our hands if we have elected the wrong leader,’ Mann writes.
He is backed by Rochdale MP Danczuk who writes in this newspaper that Corbyn is ‘on probation’ as Labour could not be saddled with a ‘laughing stock’ leader. ‘There is no escaping the fact that if it does not look as though he is going to lead Labour to victory in 2020, there will be a vacancy, we will have to find someone who can,’ Danczuk says.
A jubilant Corbyn wasted no time showing his Labour colours after his thumping victory over rivals Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall.
He knocked them all out in the first round of the contest by polling a remarkable 59.5 per cent of the vote, more than three times the number of votes for second placed Burnham. Cooper, backed by Gordon Brown, came third with Blairite Kendall last with a humiliating 4.5 per cent, a stark reflection of how the party has abandoned its BlairBrown heritage.
Corbyn flaunted his Left-wing credentials in his acceptance speech as leader. He said Labour was ‘organically linked to the unions’ and pledged to fight Conservative laws to ‘shackle’ them. He added that David Cameron had ‘used the 2008 economic crisis to impose a terrible burden on the poor… with grotesque levels of inequality.’ But Corbyn was forced to concede he had little support from MPs – saying he was nominated ‘with reluctance’ by some MPs. After singing The Red Flag in celebration, the new leader joined a rally in Trafalgar Square in support of more UK help for refugees fleeing war-torn Syria.
But in a devastating counter-attack No longer the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary on the new leader and his team, Blunkett says: ‘Their determination not to compromise will bring them down. Disillusionment will follow as it becomes clear they are in a parallel universe to the electorate.’
Blunkett says he could forgive people under 40 who did not witness the damage caused to Labour by ‘political thuggery’ in the 1980s when Militant Tendency, led by rabble-rousing Derek Hatton in Merseyside, tried to oust moderate Labour MPs.
But ‘the same cannot be said for the zealots who have reemerged to capture the Labour Party and take it back to a bygone era’.
Corbyn was not a ‘thug’ but there were ‘thugs’ in his camp and he must stop them acting like Militant Tendency infiltrators.
‘The reassurances need to include: No deselection threats to Labour MPs,’ Blunkett writes. Meanwhile, Liz Kendal’s campaign manager, fellow Blairite MP John Woodcock said Corbyn’s rise was partly the result of endless BlairBrown feuding. ‘All of us who got caught up in the Blair-Brown rivalry must take our share of responsibility for Corbyn’s victory,’ said Woodcock. ‘We became obsessed with the divisions between us and took our eyes off the big picture. It is not surprising that some looked for a different brand of politics.’ Boris Johnson led the Tory onslaught against Corbyn claiming Labour was ‘deranged’ to make him leader.
‘We cannot be saddled with a laughing stock’