UK Labor unveils new leader to replace Corbyn
LONDON: Britain’s main opposition Labor party yesterday unveils a new leader who will take the helm of a defeated and divided party in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. Keir Starmer, a former director of state prosecutions and Labor’s Brexit spokesman, is the runaway favorite to win the ballot of around 500,000 party members and succeed Jeremy Corbyn.
The announcement will be a low-key affair, with a planned special conference cancelled due to restrictions on social gatherings imposed to stem the spread of COVID-19. Instead, the result will be put out in a press release mid-morning-and candidates have been asked to pre-record their victory speeches. Smart and studious, but accused of lacking charisma, Starmer has vowed to get the party back in shape after December’s general election, when it suffered its worst result since the 1930s.
Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson triumphed by winning parliamentary seats in Labor’s former industrial heartlands. It was Corbyn’s second election defeat-the fourth for Labor since it left office in 2010 and he was forced to resign. Starmer has now promised to unite the party after years of bitter arguments about Corbyn’s socialist agenda, Brexit and the leadership’s handling of claims of anti-Semitism.
“We get the chance to rebuild our party and our movement and, more importantly than that, the chance to put Labour where it needs to be back, which is back in power,” he told supporters on a video conference call on Thursday. Starmer says he is a socialist driven by the desire to reduce inequality, but his pragmatic approach has attracted support from centrists in the party-and suspicions on the left. His main rival is Rebecca Long-Bailey, Labor’s business spokeswoman and a close Corbyn ally. A third candidate, backbench MP Lisa Nandy, is viewed as a long shot.
‘Bad blood and mistrust’
Labor grew out of the trade union movement but moved to the political centre under former prime minister Tony Blair, who was in office between 1997 and 2007. Corbyn had spent a lifetime on the sidelines because of his left-wing views, and his election as leader in 2015, on the back of a huge surge in party membership, was a shock. MPs and party members have been locked in an ideological battle ever since. “There’s really a lot of bad blood and mistrust,” said Steven Fielding, a political expert at the University of Nottingham. “The first challenge (of the new leader) will be to put a team together that at least looks like it has the ability to unify the party.”